Is VHEMT a good move?

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I recently came across this on an internet forum and became a little interested. It seems to be a group of people volunteering to take their own lives to help stop humans taking over. What do you think?

http://www.vhemt.org/aboutvhemt.htm#vhemt

is that the voluntary extinction deal?

if someone is so stupid as to do that, i say good for them. we are overpopulated and putting more harsh strains on resources.

more of a fan of project zero population growth but i guess that's too much thinking for most and if they'd rather just take their lives instead, great. one less braindead waste of oxygen, food, petrol, water, etc.

Well, considering most Western countries have a small or negative growth rate, these people should talk to the Less-Developed Countries which still have high growth rates. Voluntary extinction isn't the right way to save the planet. Maybe if we spread to other planets we could take the pressure off of our biosphere though that is hundreds if not thousands of years away possibly.

yeah thats the voluntary human extinction movement. Personally I think it is quite stupid. I wanted to see if anyone has any other opinions.

http://www.breathingearth.net/

if the stats are still correct, a person dies ever 12 seconds and a person is born every 7 seconds. this comes out to being a 1.7:1 ratio...nearly 2:1 birth to death rate.

VHEMT isn't about suicide its about choosing not to have children for the sake of everyone and the world.

2:1 is an exponential increase.. a population doubling every generation. 2 become 4 who become 8 then 16, 32, 62, 128, 256, 512, 1024. Two people become over a thousand every 9 generations. at 20 years a generation that's every 200 years.

If we keep up that rate that would be 3 trillion people by 2208 or about 14 million cubic miles of human flesh and about 19 square feet of space per person.

We can't even sustain the population we have now so we have a few choices: Discover faster than light travel today, start killing a ton of people today, make it illegal (punishable by death) to have children today, Willingly stop having children today.

Since we cant even get a human to Mars yet you tell me which of the remaining options are most pleasant.

so VHEMT is just another expression of the zero population growth movement. that's fine...and if dumbasses want to kill themselves, that's fine by me too.

i'm on your side on this one.


and yes, exponential population growth isn't good.

The theory of exponential population growth assumes that the developing, industrial world will continue to multiply its numbers at the current rate. However, if you look at post-Industrial societies such as Western Europe and North America, you can see that growth is much slower. The main incentive for LDC's to have huge populations is so that there are multiple 'bread-winners' in the household. Here in the West, have the the opportunity to have smaller nuclear families or even single parent households without this worry since one person can support themselves here. However, in an LDC, this is a self-destructive force as the more population increases in order for people to continue living at the poverty line, the less food and money is in circulation, and thus they will continue this large family trend or even increase it, unless their society makes a fluid transition into post-Industrial sectors. That being said, there's still a lot of issues with post-Industrial societies, but population growth isn't really one of them, unless you count that in general we're on the decline.

Fraya, your numbers are horribly wrong. Human population size is expected to plateau and then decline in the coming century based on various social and economic trends. Overpopulation simply is not a huge problem because it is already starting to get resolved on its own.

And to anyone who says we need to decrease human population size: you first.

A lot of things have been "expected" that never happened or happened late or instead of working out failed dramatically (resulting in huge losses of life).

Don't forget that communism was expected to work in the Soviet Union for example.

I know we could never possibly reach a population of 3 trillion (without significant breakthroughs in food and energy production) but when you start to look at what will happen when we deplete our reserves of natural resources with nothing to replace them with (based on current technology) things start getting scary.

We have wars that take care of that sort of thing yknow. Without further generations of people we have no future at all. And look at the concentration patterns of people in general. There is still a lot of empty space out there, and realistically how much space do you actually take up on your own? How big is your room, or your house?

care to address the baby boom, then? it's shown time and time again that birthrates get higher during times of war and stress...kind of a subconscious panic button to preserve your genetic material.


as far as space being taken up. it's not physical space so much as it is resources. as the technological curve evens out across the world, that will mean increased consumption from nations that previously didn't consume as much. this means that the demand from the population increases without the physical population itself increasing. hitting a 0-PG would help curb this and a reduction in the overall population would be better and allow for more efficient distribution of resources and for more opportunity for others to not starve or face as harsh of economic hardships.

Wars kill a lot but not enough and the wars that will break out when we reach critical mass are going to be epic.. I for one would rather not solve the population problem with "World War 3 the forever version".

As for "Oh noes we will die out" that's only a problem if 100% of the population can't have children again ever.

And yes we have room now but if the amount of space taken up doubles every 20 years.. how much time is left? Not to mention most of that empty space is being used to support the filled space.

i rescind my saying that i'm with you. arguing physical space is absurd and a hypothetical that won't be a problem.

We don't have really big wars any more, and we dont have an exponential birthrate like that. Births happen in concentrations (spatially and numerically.)

But more to the point.. how exactly do you enforce a limited birthrate? Only some may breed? And how do you determine who may breed exactly? By what criteria? Do you go for the Chinese option? Because that really works... dead girl babies in the street and generations of nothing but boys causing problems?

It rings of eugenics to me, and faulty science, and faulty statistics.

I seem to recall that it takes 40 years for the world population to double (given strictly historical evidence).

I am an advocate of adoption before procreation. No sense in making more extinction-prevention-units if many of the ones we have aren't even being treated well enough to serve the simple purpose of further procreation.

Government mandated population restraints gives rise to no good thing that is not over whelmed by the numbing evil of what had to be done to achieve it.

Let us not forget that in an unideal situation, it will still work its way out. Senseless aggression does that.