Is the Earth Overpopulated? What Do You Think?
Revisiting Flat Earth Theory
On Easter Sunday of 2023 an auspicious event occurred. I am not referring to the celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ that is honored by Christians on the Sunday on or following the full moon after the Spring Equinox. In this case it was an event inside our family.
My brother Chris got to meet his biological mother for the first time since shortly after his birth. Mom said she was surprised that him and his girlfriend stayed for Easter dinner in the Las Vegas house even though it was served extremely late at around 9 PM. Mom is always extremely late with her meals and without me there to hurry the cooking along even later than usual. From what I can tell all involved had a good time. I hope it begins a longer relationship.
My mother has always been very devoutly Catholic and she choose life in giving up my two brothers for adoption. None of us would be here without our mother.
I wrote about this in my Collage of Compliance series some time ago.
Italy has declared a national emergency over the lowest birth rate ever recorded in 2022 on records dating back to 1861. Excess deaths remain elevated and declining fertility in developed heavily jabbed countries seems persistent. For people who think that there are too many people on Earth already I guess this is winning.
But is the world really finite in this manner or has the ideology simply been driven by some moneygod elite? I loved this thought provoking piece from John Carter where he is taking on the flat Earth belief.
He manages to put together arguments for or against in an intelligent concise way:
On one side are the Flat Earthers, who insist that all of the evidence for a spheroidal Earth is simply a Freemasonic conspiracy theory. It is immediately apparent to our eyes, they say, that the Earth is flat, with a dome of heaven arcing over it. This is, they go on, further attested to in the Bible, for otherwise how could Satan have taken Christ up to the mountaintop and shown him all the lands of men? That would obviously be impossible on a ball Earth. The Bible is the inerrant word of G-d, while ‘science’ is just the flawed work of man, so who you gonna believe? QED.
On the other side are, well, pretty much anyone who has even a rudimentary education in the natural sciences, as well as the rest of the population who still, despite everything – and this is actually quite remarkable when you think about it – still basically trust scientists. This side will point to the pictures taken of the Earth from orbit, from the Moon, and from distant spacecraft; they will point to the way distant objects disappear below the horizon
; they’ll point to the flight routes used by aircraft; they’ll point to the fact that the seasons, and the varying length of the day as the seasons change, and the amount the day length varies by depending on latitude, and the parallax of the stars, and the retrograde motions of the planets, are all perfectly explained by a spherical Earth orbiting the Sun whose axis of rotation is tilted with respect to the axis of its orbit; and they’ll mention the Greek philosopher Eratosthenes, who used a couple of sticks, the lengths of the shadows they cast, and basic geometry not just to infer the overall shape of the Earth, but to make a damn good measurement of its radius, over two thousand years ago.
The Flat Earth community has answers to every single one of those empirical observations, of greater and lesser degrees of contrivance and plausibility. To the pictures of the Earth they say ‘space is fake’. The flight paths of aircraft are part of the same elaborate conspiracy that hoaxes space exploration by hanging the ISS from balloons. To Eratosthenes’ measurements, they point out that in principle the same effect can be achieved if the Sun is much smaller and closer (which is true). To the changing length of day through the seasons, they say well, God just put the Sun on that weird looping path for His own reasons, and they give the same answer to the retrograde motion of the planets. Why the Sun should take such a path, and why such effort and expense should be taken to deceive us as to the true shape of the Earth, I’ve not yet heard the answer, although I’m sure there are speculations as numerous as Flat Earthers.
The interesting thing with Flat Earthers is that they’re actually strangely scientific in their practice, continuously coming up with various experiments with which they hope to distinguish, with their own eyes and to their own satisfaction, between the hypotheses that the Earth is flat or spherical. One of them even went so far as to launch himself in a home-built rocket (which killed him). The sad thing is that their experiments frequently return results consistent with the Earth’s surface possessing large-scale curvature. Whenever this happens they immediately start trying to identify flaws in the experiment, in order to convince themselves that the result wasn’t what it clearly was, but merely some sort of illusion produced, for example, by the uncorrected spherical aberration of a camera lens. The reason they do this is that their identities have become wrapped up with the Flat Earth community. They are the brave, intrepid, strong-minded resistance, alone possessed of the truth, alone possessing the courage to speak it in the face of the mockery and vilification of a deluded and corrupted world. Should their experiments prove that they’ve been wrong all along, their social network, indeed their very identities would evaporate like hoarfrost in the first light of dawn.
There’s a very obvious cautionary example there, for both regime-aligned mainstream narrative enjoyers and conspiracy-theorizing dissidents intoxicated on woo alike.
The presence of Flat Earthers being their goofy and occasionally obnoxious selves merely leads everyone else to roll their eyes and say, well of course the world is a sphere.
Everyone knows the Earth is basically just a spherical ball of rock.
Right?
Well. Let’s think about that.
What is the surface area of the Earth?
The surface area of a sphere
is 4πR^2, whereRis the radius. In the case of the Earth, the mean radius is 6371 km, so the surface area should be about 510 million km^2, which indeed is the answer Google will give you.
This is much, much less than the correct answer.
What is the correct answer? I have no idea, and neither does anyone else. It is unknowable.
To see what I mean, consider the island of Great Britain. What is the length of its coastline? This question was asked by the great mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot in a seminal 1967 paper. In this case there’s no simple analytical formula, as there is for a simple geometrical shape like a sphere. Still, you might think that the length of the British coast is easily determined in principle. Just send a team of surveyors around, have them measure the perimeters of the various bays, inlets, beaches, cliffs, and so on, and you’ll have your answer.
Mandelbrot showed that that this doesn’t work, because the answer you get depends on the length of your measuring stick. The finer the measure, the greater the length of the coastline that you’ll find. This is because a shorter ruler will enable more detailed features to be resolved, and since the British coastline is made of atoms, that level of detail extends all the way to the atomic level.
This, it turns out, is a general property of fractals – self-similar shapes that repeat the same pattern at every scale. A very simple example of a fractal is the Koch curve, which is constructed by taking a line, cutting out the middle third, replacing it with two lines of equal length to the two remaining segments of the original line, both at 60 degrees angles such that they form two sides of an equilateral triangle, and then repeating the operation an infinite number of times on each of the line segments. If the length of the initial line is unity, the length of the curve after the first step is 4/3, after the second step (4/3)^2, after the third step (4/3)^3, and so on. As is immediately obvious, if you iterate for an infinite number of steps, the length of the curve diverges to infinity.
I bring this up in discussion about overpopulation because what flat Earth types and those who believe as I do that the Earth is a sphere have fallen for is the trap of believing that there is a finite amount of space. And being that there is a finite amount of space, it follows on that a certain number of humans is thus too many. But is it really?
Marian Tupy argues that the space is finite, but the combination of resources is infinite.
Elites, of course have been concerned about overpopulation at least since the time of King Herod killing all of the male babies in Bethlehem in the Massacre of the Innocents. Herod was worried about the baby Jesus being a threat to his rule. People in power always and every time will do anything to consolidate and keep that power.
As Matt Ehret writes:
From where did the dystopic world order of the Davos Crowd emerge?
H.G. Wells’ Open Conspiracy
It might surprise you, but to answer that question, we will need to jump back nearly one century into the past and meet an ageing misanthropic social engineer named Herbert George Wells who wrote a 1928 opus called The Open Conspiracy: Blueprint for a World Revolution calling for world government, and depopulation saying:
“The Open Conspiracy rests upon a disrespect for nationality, and there is no reason why it should tolerate noxious or obstructive governments because they hold their own in this or that patch of human territory.”
Wells was a member of an organization called The Fabian Society which itself was established in 1884 by a coterie of British eugenicists and Malthusians in order to promote a new social order designed to mold society into a new mechanized order run by a managerial elite of “social scientists” from above.
Throughout the 20th century, the Fabian Society would penetrate all branches of government, military, academia, media and even private corporate boards around the world creating global systems of fifth columns operating within cells, hierarchically unified by a central command within the highest echelons of British Intelligence.
From below, plebs and laborers would be attracted by “words” promoted by Fabians like equality, social justice, and re-distribution of wealth utilizing Marxist terms while never realizing that those words were just a sweet illusion with no claim to reality.
Like Jesuitical and Masonic orders, many Fabians would never have a clue what the machine truly was that they were merely parts of. This is why the British Labor Party (aka: The Fabian Party of Britain) was so often occupied by well-intended members who never had a clue what the game was truly about. The official Fabian School that became an ideological control hub and recruiting grounds for next generation talent (paralleling the Rhodes/Milner Round Table’s Oxford University) was the London School of Economics.
In fact, over the 20th century, these two oligarchical operations often interfaced closely, with the Fabian Lord Mackinder working with the Round Table’s Lord Milner to craft a strategy for North America in 1908 or the Canadian Fabian Society’s founding by five Rhodes Scholars in 1932.
HG Wells was explicit in his many works of non-fiction writing in 1904: “The way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born. It is in the sterilization of failure, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies.” (3)
What if it is all just an idea to keep the people in power in power? For the time being they seem to be winning…
Overpopulated with liberals.
The "earth overpopulation" is, in my view, kind of a paradox (philosophers and the like can build this better than a humble chemist, so fix this if needed.): If the Earth's resources are finite and human ingenuity is able to stretch them, we are fine; If the Earth's resources are "infinite" (i.e., well beyond what humans could reasonably explore) and human ingenuity is not able to use them, we are finished. I'm of the opinion that measured, well applied engineering solutions would solve a lot of our problems, but, like in big pharma, THERE IS NO $$$ IN SENSIBLE SOLUTIONS.