The Population Problem: A Humanistic Approach

As any of you who read Dave McClung's Xanga know, the topic of population growth has been hot (well, between him and me, at least) for the past three or four months. I'm not going to rehash anything that's already been said about whether or not the world's going pot, whether or not we need to do something about it, etc. That's already been said.

Instead, I'm going to take a different perspective on the idea of population control. While staring out my window today, daydreaming, a thought came to my mind. 'What's more important, the quantity of lives lived, or the quality of lives lived?' This wasn't a new thought, but the context of the thought had shifted. Before I get to that, let me examine this thought in more depth.

This isn't a question we (and by we, I mean Dave and I) have really asked, but in truth, it's just a reframing of the age old question, "What's more important, quantity or quality?" This question has been on mankind's mind since science really began to stick out it's prebuscent kneck and start making observations. I'm not going to get into that now, however, because that would be an entire series of posts unto itself (and we all know how well I do with series).

So, which is more important? Because if it's quantity, than by God, we do have a duty to make as many people as there are stars in the Heavens. If, though, it's quality, then we must control ourselves and refrain from reproducing like bacteria in a petri dish and instead focus on the quality of the lives we can maintain, to a certain fixed quantity.

I honestly don't have an answer to this question. I've thought about it on and off while daydreaming. It's a sort of paradox, to me at least. The more people there are, the more lives lived, but who's to say that 100 lives lived poorly are worth just one life lived well. And who is to be the judge as to what a life lived well is? It's the reframing of the question, "If you could kill one person and save a million, would you do it?" I don't know.

This topic especially disturbs me because one of my beliefs about human rights is that every person has at least the right to live. With that one assertion, though, nearly all my beliefs about human rights, freedom, etc., begin to fall like a house of cards. Contradictions crop up like weeds in what I thought was an elegant garden. Suddenly, all my best laid plans go to waste.

As I said, I don't have an answer to this question. However, I do have an interesting solution. And here's the shift in my thinking that I was talking about. While thinking about rebirth, I wondered, "Could it be possible that every possible to lived would be lived after a given amount of time?" First we must assume that the majority of physicists are wrong and that the universe won't continue spiralling out into oblivion, moving further and further from order to disorder. Then we must assume that, on the contrary, the universe is cyclical and goes from expansion to contraction to expansion and back again, for an eternity. In such a case we could assume during one of those expansions, after an infinite number of times, all the people that ever could have existed would eventually exist. Every life that could be lived would be lived. An infinite number of possibilities, an infinite number of lifes.

And a resolution to my paradox, if a far-fetched one.

But isn't the universe far-fetched?

Namaste.