Re:Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas (2012)
by nostrademons on Saturday May 20, 2017 @05:46PM
(#14384526)
It's not that species have the ability to correctly estimate the carrying capacity of the environment. It's that when the population of a species exceeds the carrying capacity of the environment, individuals will die and/or fail to reproduce, dropping the population of the next generation.
It's very likely that humans exhibit the same behavior, but on a micro-scale, this isn't very comforting. If a politician says "Well, the earth will be fine, but 10% of you are gonna die and another 30% won't be able to have children that survive to adulthood", there would be rioting on the streets ... which has a non-negligible chance of bringing about those numbers.
Nature will be just fine, but remember that the mechanisms by which nature self-adapts are the four horsemen of the apocalypse: pestilence, war, famine, and death.
It's very likely that humans exhibit the same behavior, but on a micro-scale, this isn't very comforting. If a politician says "Well, the earth will be fine, but 10% of you are gonna die and another 30% won't be able to have children that survive to adulthood", there would be rioting on the streets ... which has a non-negligible chance of bringing about those numbers.
Nature will be just fine, but remember that the mechanisms by which nature self-adapts are the four horsemen of the apocalypse: pestilence, war, famine, and death.