All covered right here, two years ago.




The Freedom to Breed

Germ theory started the growth and fossil fuels caused it to grow exponentially resulting in overshoot at 6.7 billion.

Growth is caused by an infusion of energy.

Your posts have indicated oil was a factor in the cause of population growth, which is not necessarily so. I'm glad I've helped re-clarify this for you.

I ask anyone:

If not fossil fuels, what energy source caused an overshoot of the human population?

Or what energy source, besides fossil fuels, could have maintained the birth rate?

Wood?

What ever happened to critical thinking?

I didn't touch the title, nor create it or this thread.

Wouldn't your heart give out from the effort of redirecting your blood to *down there*?

Again, fossil fuels are not used nearly as much in countries with the highest birth rates.

What fuelled the birth rate was testosterone. There I managed to dovetail the competing dialogues on this forums

Testosterone is an energy source?

Burn the penises!

We are saved!

Hillary Clinton just found a new soundbyte...

And what exactly does this thread have to do with penis envy or human egos?

The old title, "Exploring the Human Ego & Pseudo-sexual Penis Envy" is simply inaccurate. I'm changing it.

(I changed the title back to its original title, I didn't realize Aaron had created it. I'm sorry I messed around with it in the first place.)

Hahahah.

There is no more testosterone in countries in high birth rates then in those with low birth rates.

Underdeveloped countries with high birth rates have always had high birth rates.

Their populations are rapidly increasing now not because birth rates have increased but because their infant mortality rates have dropped with the introduction of western medicine and basic concepts of hygiene (clean water, etc.). High birth rates combined with low infant mortality produces rapid population growth.

The introduction of modern western medicine to these underdeveloped countries is only possible because western medicine was developed in the rich, energy-using countries of North American and Europe. The direct link between intensive energy use and the modern medical knowledge developed by our rich, western societies also has, as a side effect, produced rapid population growth in poor, underdeveloped countries.

fossil fuel= transportation of people and goods, lot of housing, large scale farming and all sorts of industries, better life expectancy and so on.
All this make population growth possible.
Birth rate isn't the main factor, it's mortality. Not so long ago, a simple infection was a death sentence, but now we can cure most diseases over and over. So all the people carried on with life had more children and so on.

Just imagine if we found a way to immortality?



shudders

I call bullshit on this line of reasoning for a simple reason. Sanitation alone accounts for 90% of the reduction in infant mortality rates. Modern Medicine claims a huge amount of totally undesrved credit for what the humble sewer worker and water treatment plant worker and garbage collector accomplished for us. If you drink clean water all the time the chances of you dieing even when you fall ill are substantially reduced. What few people seem to realize is drinking bad water while ill overwhelms your immune system, your body can usually deal with one or the other but not both at the same time.

Do you know what the miracle modern medicine cure is that saves more lives in Africa today than any other? Boil the water to sterilize it, then add one tablespoon of sugur or honey and one teaspoon of salt per litre. It rehydrates and rebalances the electrolytes of the children who have dysentary, cholera or other water bourne diseases and lets their own immune systems fight off the infection.

The anti-biotics that take care of the remaining 10% of mortality are mostly an afterthought, and are grossly over perscribed in the Western World. Quite often they are mearly life extending treatments for the elderly and bedridden. For example Tuberculosis and Bacterial Pnuemonia are both easy to catch and usually fatal without treatment if you are bedridden because they love the environment in lung tissue that is not working hard. Lieng in bed lets them settle in and spread, and without anti-biotics they will both kill you within a few months or at most years. The weaker you are when you catch them the quicker you succumb. At one time Pneumonia was called the 'old man's friend' because if you were old and sickly you would catch pneumonia and die in your sleep soon afterwords. Now we give these people anti-biotics and keep them on the edge of death for up to a decade.

Sorry back to the main issue, the population explosion came almost entirely from clean water, adequite sewers and garbage collection. Cities up until the 1900's were massive population sinks because farm kids who were in excess of needs on the farm would move to the city and most of them would get sick and die inside of a few years. The only really big city in the west in the ancient world was Rome, which oddly enough had an efficient system of aquaducts bringing clean water into the city. In the 1800's Paris was bigger, but the life expectency for migrants was horrible.

When the African farm kids move to the new big cities of Africa there is already in place clean water/sewer/garbage collection and they do not suffer the massive die-off their ancestors would have faced.

You want a massive dies off? Blow up every water treatment plant on earth at once and 60% of the human population will get sick and die within 5 years.

Tanada, This was my original point, if you read through the thread. I was rebutting the idea that oil was largely responsible for the last century of explosive growth in world populations.

Africa's population has doubled in the last 35 years, without use of oil based fertilizers, or access to oil based or reliant tech.(excluding Egypt) Their present problems are largely due to desertification and it's political ramifications.

If someone were to make the point that oil based fertilizers could turn this problem around, it would be a solid argument for oil being needed to sustain large populations. I'm not convinced that oil or it's derivatives could help with Africa's ongoing drought and agricultural problems.