I find it interesting (and somewhat unsettling) that the ability of weapons to kill people in quantity has nicely kept up with the rapidly increasing population of this planet. IOW, as the population has begun to increase exponentially (over the last several hundred years or so), our ability to kill each other in mass quantities has also kept pace.
Swords, clubs and knives kill individuals; cannons kill small groups; bombs kill dozens or hundreds. A nuke can kill millions.
Now the human race is in a situation where the planet has questionable ability to support all of us, and we also have the ability to, within minutes, wipe most of the population that the earth cannot support.
An economist friend of mine always said that the Earth cannot support more than 2 billion humans. Do we now have tha capacity to eliminate 4-5 billion humans with weaponry? Properly targeted, with NBC weapons, I suspect so.
With the proliferation of WMD's, the probability rises exponentially, along with the population.
Will Charles Darwin, or Thomas Malthus (or Gaia, or whoever) win this one again?
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1 comment:
thats crazy.
I currently live in a city that is finally having a boom and of course this has brought a new level of crime to the city. Not just in amount, but in degree as well. The news is full of "we've never had this one here before!!!".
With a 1% vacancy rate its interesting to see how negative happenings work to scare away those who don't want to live in danger. Survival of those who want to fight for it :S
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