Mr Skeptic

Well, it was a bigoted statement, and while it does not promote bigotry per se, it does validate bigoted stereotypes, and as such promotes bigotry. I wouldn't have fired him though, and apology would have been better IMO.

Sure, resource availability might increase, but that won't change the total amount of resources. If we keep growing our population, eventually we will end up using all the resources in the solar system, then all the resources in nearby solar systems, and also eventually resource availability simply cannot keep up with the population growth either, even up to the point that we can't keep reaching resources faster than we use them up due to the speed of light. That's long-term, of course, but it also shows how despite the best of technology (unless we can surpass the speed of light), resources cannot keep up with exponential population growth. Short term, maybe... but we'd have to keep up the resource production for every resource we need, despite having to use lower grade sources of it. Note that one of the resources is arable land... past civilizations have imploded due to arable land issues.

Unfortunately, these are not the sort of questions people "need help" with, you have to study and figure it out; that is after all the point of homework. If you tell what you got so far, we could check for mistakes (not me though, I don't know operating systems).

Gotta watch out for abbreviations. It could be a chemical or a protein. Just searching the phrase you gave gives this: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1476-5381.2010.00996.x/abstract It would seem there it is a current of calcium.

Hm, I decided to crunch some different numbers. (Properly I'd use dry biomass, but these are just for estimating so even an order of magnitude difference won't matter much.) Lets suppose we humans can learn not to eat, and to get our energy directly from electricity from solar panels, but are limited to the current biomass. So we eat every single living thing down to the smallest bacteria and power ourselves by solar panels. Lets further assume that we have the same growth rate as the last 40 years, during which time our population increased to about 1.8 times what it was before. We humans number about 7 billion, and if we each weigh about 100 kg, that would be 700 million tons of human biomass. So we're using up about 0.044% of the biomass and would have to multiply by about 2.3 thousand times our population to use it all. So therefore given these totally ridiculous assumptions, it would take 525 years or so before we occupied the entire biomass of the earth, no bacteria, plants or animal, nothing but humans left. To keep going past that, we'd have to actually increase the total of earth's biomass just to have the biomass for the humans. The key here is of course the growth rate. It just simply doesn't matter how many resources we have, with an exponential growth rate we'll eventually not have enough. We can't maintain such a growth rate indefinitely; if we don't stop it ourselves the laws of physics will do it for us. The only, only way we could maintain exponential growth would be to have faster than light travel at an increasing speed. Then the earth would weigh a lot more and eventually become a black hole and we'd have to get rid of the law of conservation of mass-energy?

Well for what purpose is not really relevant. What we're saying is we would consider clones people too, and it is good to see you acknowledge that fact. But clones are not made via fertilization of an egg, so then fertilization is not equivalent to person. Please do realize that we're all in agreement that a fertilized egg is alive, and furthermore most of us would say the same thing of the egg and sperm before that. Not everyone agrees about when it becomes a person. Lots of things are alive and not treated as a person, so the fact that something is alive isn't really too significant. Well, I don't think parenting ability is a prerequisite to have a child, neither legally nor in practice. Definitely something to be encouraged though. I'm not sure. I just thought it up on the spot. An analogy might be pets. Some people treat their pet as a person, and some even ask that others do too. Pets can be companions, for example. And if someone kills someone's pet, people get really upset, even when they wouldn't normally get similarly upset when someone kills an animal, destroys property, or even kills a non-pet animal owned by someone. These pets are granted a privileged status due to the bond their owner has with them, but I'm not certain of the mechanism for this. In the same way, people get more upset when someone kills a primate than a lizard. We don't like people killing people, and we don't like people killing even things that are slightly similar to people. (And for good reason). But while the other examples I mentioned can't be granted "honorary person" status due to the impracticality of it, a fetus that the mother intends to carry to term certainly could. After all, quite a few people consider them people already.

What you need to find is the size of people's ecological footprint (ie, how much land area is used to maintain their lifestyle). This would include both food and other necessities as well as entertainment and work.

Divide up everyone into the four groups, and exchange all your percentages with numbers.

There's also the faith in technology group, which believe we will adapt more quickly than our population grows (at least for quite a while, obviously exponential growth can't be kept up), and there's also the view that we have no right to implement any massive population control programs so that its a moot point. I thought it was that we can solve the population problem by putting everyone on 0.027 acres of land each in Texas, where they will starve to death in squalor, solving the population problem.

Hm, maybe it has to do with iron. If you're going to precipitate it out or something, you might end up staining your glass, and also I think that the iron wouldn't stick as good to the plastic. For an example where you can't use glass is hydrofluoric acid, HF, which dissolves glass. It's also really nasty and you probably won't ever have need to use any.

To Be Good, Sometimes Leaders Need to Be a Little Bad; Study Examines 'Dark Side' Personality Traits and Leadership The study was for military officers, so it might not apply elsewhere. Yet it seems that it does; for example people characterize Bush as arrogant and inflexible, and Obama as too hesitant, yet they got to be president. Also, some of these traits are better for different situations, for example you wouldn't want a leader to be hesitant in a combat situation. What about for our politicians though? I think we might need a slightly arrogant politician to get very difficult things done, and politicians usually have plenty of time to be hesitant which would be better than a swift but wrong decision.

Sometimes, what people want might be unreasonable. Is it still a good idea to try to reach a compromise with them, or would it be better to totally ignore them?

Not even that; the Catholics are also advocating birth control via abstinence. They are messing with procreation and bonding, whereas using other forms of birth control only interferes with procreation but not with bonding.

Just to put things into context: http://www.paulchefu...Population.html It's not like we've "always had" such a high population -- it has grown drastically, and quickly. And we are using limited resources to sustain this growth. What happens if we run out of those resources before we figure out how to do without them? The link above also explains more about the problems we need to solve.

Oh, but my argument is from the Bible... The Bible mentions both the bonding and pleasure aspects of sex (becoming one flesh, for example). I'm using the Bible to argue against the Pope, who is just a fallible human and not God.

Sure, more expensive means fewer people can afford them. Also, solar and wind are not unlimited; they are limited both by what we invest into harvesting them and by suitable area. True that for now they would be enough for our current population. But the other resources, they are already limited and as there are more people they will have to use less of it. This will result in comparative poverty, if compared to the same resources with less population. It's just a question of how far we should go; we could all use slightly less resources if we wanted to. Sure, we'll have water. But it will cost us. Desalination costs both equipment and energy. And remember, you use a lot more water than is on your electric bill; you just pay for it separately as for example part of the price of food.

Quite, words mean but what we say they mean. I think my definition is better, because it does not grant full personhood rights to individual cells in the body and grants rights to identical twins as two separate people. Also my definition is better because it acknowledges the continuum that exists, which even your definition has (at what point during the fertilization process does life start?) Yes, you're right that it is a more nebulous concept than yours. However, a month-old (born) baby does have a brain and consciousness. And while people can be temporarily unconscious this can be verified by checking for damage to their brain. A brain-dead person cannot revive since they are no longer a person, the information and the intelligence is gone. Certainly mistakes can happen, like they have in the past. I'd consider a clone as much a person as anyone else, as would the rest of us that use the brain-based definition. Yet it seems you wouldn't, for some reason. Do you not like to challenge your own ideas, to check them for consistency?

Not quite, though in practice that is how it is done. There's no reason it can't be done by cloning (though there are some problems with that), in the near future it will also be possible to create egg cells from adult cells (we can already make sperm from stem cells). This is an interesting question, probably worthy of its own thread. There's two points to address: 1) When do we consider an entity a person? By 8 months, the child is already conscious, it can suck its thumb and enjoy music. You'll note that this is entirely consistent with what myself and many others were saying, that personhood depends on the mind, and that there is no specific point at which you can say something becomes a person. If by the time your situation happens, the child is developed enough that we consider it a person, then clearly it would be murder in both cases. 2) But what about the case where the fetus is not developed to the point where we consider it a person? In this case, the abortion would not be murder since it does not kill a person. But somehow it seems very wrong for someone to forcefully kill the fetus against the woman's consent. It would clearly be assault&battery, but would it also be murder? It would seem like it should be about as serious, yet it cannot be called murder without also making the abortion murder. Perhaps it is granted "honorary personhood" by virtue of the mother intending to carry it to term? After all, she might already have named it, bought clothes for it, even made long-term plans for it's education, etc., as well as would probably have given it a funeral if it died.

No one is saying there's not enough room for a few billion more people, but there is not enough resources. For example if you measure by people's ecological footprint, rather than the size of their house. After all, people don't just want a house, the also want to eat, have a job, and have fun, all of which require resources. By some estimates, our ecological footprint is already at 1.4 earths, or 40% more than the earth can sustain. We can do that because we're coasting off the earth's historical reserves of resources, eg coal which we use both for energy but also to produce the fertilizer we need to sustain our huge population. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_footprint

I find that a poor argument though, since there are other purposes for sex, such as pleasure and bonding. There is no need for the financial/personal burdens of procreation to interfere with bonding. The argument also suffers because it tries to make an "ought" out of an "is". A similar argument would be that they should not see doctors, as disease is used by God to punish people and people shouldn't interfere with that purpose. The Bible is silent on that issue, since in those days children were highly valued; a status symbol for the mother and a worker for the father. Enough so that two prostitutes could take the issue of which was the real mother of an (illegitimate) child, all the way to the highest court of the land (that of King Solomon).

It's not a toughie, it's simply web searching skills and simple arithmatic. 148,940,000 km2 land area ~7,000,000,000 population at 1.5 ft2 each, that would be 975 km2, or 0.00065% It would be horribly and probably fatally crammed though.

Evolution can be seen as both ingeniously clever but simultaneously unimaginably stupid. There's plenty of examples of both.

The Song of Solomon is a rather unique book of the Bible. It starts out And gets more interesting from there. I think most Christians would consider that book too prudish for their tastes. It's also really funny to look at the sort of metaphors used; use some of those today and you probably will get slapped or stared at.

(This is where I loose interest, but I will reply once more before quitting) Perfectly understandable, but if people can't see how something is deduced they have to treat it as a separate premise. It looks like this is yet another premise. Standard physics explains the motion of matter without some universal medium, and also bringing in a universal medium could cause your theory to be in conflict with the Michelson-Morley experiment. Usually when people say "inertial" they mean the opposite of what you do; that there is no change in motion. And inertia as the tendency for a body's motion to remain unchanged. You can use your own meanings for words if you define them, but don't be surprised if people get confused or upset about it. Not strictly true, for example when dealing with potential energy. OK. However, you seem to have missed the part about the forces being "push" forces.

Two things: 1) This is not true, since you do not weigh about a milligram, but rather several million times more. Most of your ingredients were added after you were born. 2) He was addressing your (also false) claim that it was the information to make a human that matters, by pointing out that the information to make something is not the same thing as actually making it. Being pro-choice also means not killing human beings (persons), but as a bonus it also allows people to improve their personal lives, and even has other beneficial side-effects like reducing crime (lots of criticism for that study but it makes sense from a logical point of view if you consider people ending up with unwanted children, with a side of extra financial burdens). Other things like for example each of the cells in your body, which have the genetic information to make a human (but not the mechanics to do so, at least not without human fiddling).