What a silly thread
Being a father is the best feeling ever.
I love my boys (one grown up now, one 5yrs old).
I provide for them (or provided in the case of the elder one) and never took anything from anyone or deprived anyone else of anything.
I fail to see how I did any harm to anyone ?
You didn't
really harm anyone, but on a presumably insignificant level, you've increased the population, which will contribute to the overpopulation problems discussed in length in this thread.
Imagine if your parents had thought like you - you wouldn't be here to complain.
That's a silly argument to make when it's unreasonable to combine every sperm with every egg. There are lots of things that could have gotten in the way of any given person being born. That doesn't mean we should alter our actions to maximize the population.
PS. In my experience the most vociferous members of the "anti-child"brigade have also been the ones with the least opportunity to reproduce, if you catch my drift
Personally making the choice not to reproduce for moral reasons isn't the same as being
anti-child. If I were to have children, I feel morally compelled to adopt. I'm also a junior high teacher, so for these reasons, I'm demonstrably not anti-child. As a side note, it wouldn't be very difficult for me to genetically reproduce if you catch
my drift. I'm not sure why you would say that.
People are quick to panic when in reality our species has proven to persevere through great hardships. There's always a big scare on the horizon, it's like we're programmed to be vigilant to the point of mania. If it's not the red scare, it's war. When the war blows over, it's a nuclear missile crisis. When that's resolved, it's climate change. When that's old news, it's ebola or some other disease. We invent fears whenever we're not facing direct threats.
Humans have only been around for about 200,000 years. Compared to the age of the Earth and the age of the universe, that's not long enough to be able to say anything about the future of humanity. In fact,
catastrophic events decreased the human population to between 3,000-10,000 people about 70,000 years ago, and that's without the level of technology we have to destroy the world today (either incrementally or suddenly). There's also the idea that, statistically, we've either beaten incredible odds that we would be born so early in human history or the human species doesn't last very long.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument
Note that I'm not saying we're doomed. I'm just saying that you shouldn't argue that we're resilient enough to not need to alter our actions as a species. That's like a teenager thinking he or she is immortal just because he or she doesn't get sick and/or hurt much, if at all.
Who's to say that we're not already at that comfortable level?
It doesn't really matter if we're currently at a comfortable level if the population is increasing drastically.
Our knowledge of how many resources we have vs. how many resources we need? It's mostly just bookkeeping, which isn't too difficult.
I'm sorry, I'm not one for tree hugging.
Perhaps you should be.
As for humans driving animals to extinction, that's indeed sad, but not preventable. Animals also drive other species into extinction, they've been doing that since the dawn of time - survival of the fitness.
The difference between humans and other non-human animals is we don't give animals a chance, and we wipe them out at an extraordinary rate. Non-human species don't get the chance to adapt in some cases. For example, due to humans, a fungus called chytrid was introduced to frog populations in the Americas. The chytrid evolved side-by-side in Africa would other species of frogs, but when introduced to frogs in the Americas, there was literally no way frogs could adapt since relocation of that magnitude is unnatural, which is causing mass extinctions.
The Halocene extinction is a name being proposed for the mass extinction humans are causing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
Evolution doesn't create benevolent beings, it creates efficient ones.
Not only does evolution indeed create benevolent beings (e.g. humans), but it's not mutually exclusive with creating efficient beings. The biological predispositions to things like morality and altruism are well documented, as well as their evolutionary origins/benefits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism#Evolutionary_explanations
Ah, because we have the greatest gift of all, a creative brain (which we suddenly grew as we moved from a raw diet to meat, especially cooked meats, as evolutionary scientists and paleontologists agree on that). How's about we use that gift creatively rather than squander it on waiting for mother nature to do our job, hmm?
I don't recall anyone asking for
mother nature to do the work, but I could have missed it. Speaking for myself, I said humans need to alter their behavior for any of my previously mentioned problems to be solved.
As previously discussed a lack of resources is not necessarily the issue but a lack of resource distribution.
With a high enough population, it's both.
Forced how? The introduction of an invasive species has annihilated plenty of species, or at least forced speciation, all throughout history.
The non-human species can hardly be blamed if humans are at fault here. Natural is usually a more gradual process, and what your describing usually occurs in the modern world when humans introduced a species where it wasn't before. I'm not saying animals haven't caused other animals to go extinct in the wild; it has happened a lot. However, no animal other than humans has caused mass extinctions like we have.
I see amazing technology, eradication of various diseases (give or take troubles like antibiotic resistance and the anti vaccination cretins), an increasing understanding of basic concepts of the universe, less crime/violence than most other points in human history, social progress at at pace basically never seen before and lots more besides. There does not quite look to be a downward slope coming either.
Human inginutity has been responsible for both very good things and very bad things. Let's talk about how to stop or minimize the bad.