Civil Discourse
Congrats to all the participants to this discussion. One of the best threads I have read on SmartPlanet since its start. Civil and with a great deal of thought regarding the impact of a multitude of factors affecting "growth."
Years ago I was fascinated by Hammurabi, the classic game of strategy and resource allocation. It has a simplistic view of how resources and population are intertwined and the challenges that lead to a sustainable balance. Playing the game made me appreciate the difficulty of taking an uncontrollable world population and fitting it into a world with finite resources. What sets us apart as humans from the rest of the animals on the planet is our determination to populate ourselves out of existence. Lacking the natural balancing of predator-prey in the human species, nature itself will probably be the deciding factor that determines our ultimate fate.
