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I mean, I've always said that the population is a real problem with no good solutions. People are uncomfortable talking about it because there are no good solutions, but that's no reason to pretend it doesn't exist. But people act like even mentioning it is the same as proposing or supporting an unethical solution.

Too many people are too brainwashed into that "do everything right now and fix everything right now because problems cannot be accepted" mentality which I blame on capitalism and the fast-paced modern lifestyle it imposes.

People treat me like I'm the one who's wrong for being okay with a slower pace of life, for being okay for acknowledging problems without insisting on an urgent need to solve them all right now. Sometimes we need to just accept that there are problems, sometimes we need to stew in those problems because nothing can be done about them. But that's so taboo these days that people won't even consider it a possibility, they can't comprehend someone who thinks like that, so they assume that I mean "no, we must solve these problems even though the only solutions would be evil." That's not what I mean at all.

In effect, it becomes taboo to even mention uncomfortable problems with no good solutions. Everyone wants to pretend they just don't exist. That's precisely what allows fascism to sneak in. People want to pretend everything is okay, and they'll crucify the messenger who says "everything is not okay," every time, until it's too late and there are no messengers left, but the things they were trying to warn about have already become the new reality.

Some people get upset when you mention climate change. Some people get upset when you mention overpopulation. But these aren't separate or mutually exclusive problems. They feed on each other, compound on each other in a feedback loop. They crash into each other violently.

Just as the world is struggling to maintain the balance of its delicate ecosystems, we're increasing the load we're placing upon it. That in turn accelerates the demise of those ecosystems.

Land becomes uninhabitable, glaciers melt and rivers dry up, sea levels rise, storms become more violent, coastal areas flood, rains become sporadic and erratic, arable land decreases, swaths of the globe bake. These things destabilize populations, give momentum to dictators, create resource wars, ethnic cleansings, displacements of people, mass migrations. People then coalesce in the most habitable regions, whose infrastructure and resources aren't ready to handle the influx. This creates local pushback and empowers more dictators. All while powerful people accelerate global warming to try and mitigate the symptoms it's causing, instead of addressing the underlying causes.

It's all predictable. Scholars have been writing about this for decades. I remember reading about it in the early tens, long before we crossed the event horizon. People were warning about this every bit as much as they were warning about global warming.

It's something that needs to be discussed. That doesn't mean we need to enforce birth limits, or kill masses of people, or let them die by famine, plague, and war. But throughout history you can see that whenever the population began to strain the resources of the land that contained it, these things happened and the earth found ways to restore some balance.

People don't like to think about that either, because they think we've conquered nature. We haven't. We depend on nature, and we always will. Only now, there's nowhere left to run. No new lands to expand to. No more new frontiers.

And the destruction is unprecedented, existential even. This is the first time we've strained the planet to the point where it itself might collapse.

And yet we still keep carrying on, pretending that's not an issue.

Unless we find a way to colonize an earthlike planet, or a moon that contains water (maybe borrowing some oxygen from a gas giant like Jupiter), then I don't see any ethical solutions to the population issue until the planet takes it into its own hands and we bring about our own extinction.

But even if we move to another planet or moon, isn't that just a new place to exploit? Wouldn't the population just keep growing, until it eventually strains those resources as well? Or would we be bringing life to an otherwise barren wasteland? Is that a moral quandary, or our inescapable destiny? Is that the purpose of life, to expand into new realms, just as the earliest microbes came to earth from far, far away?

Should we harvest iron from mars and use it to build space colonies at various lagrange points? Would that be exploiting the resources of mars, or is it just a dead planet with no claim to what it holds? Regolith from asteroids, hydrogen and oxygen from Jupiter. Are these resources there waiting for us to take hold of, or do they belong to something else? Can an inanimate object like a planet truly have a claim to those things?

Cutting to the core of the question, is it worth it to take advantage of those resources if it means saving the jewel of our solar system, the earth where life abounds (at least for now)?