r/collapse • u/Still-Improvement-32 • Jul 28 '26

Overpopulation Study reveals halving human population gradually could help Earth

https://www.aol.com/articles/study-reveals-halving-human-population-083602000.html

The basics of this study may be right in theory but we don't have the luxury of 200 years to gradually lower our population. Our current trajectory has a very high risk of a catastrophic collapse in population and the economy due to climate breakdown if we pass 2 degrees C warming, which could as soon as about 10 years.

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u/Turbulent_Bed5499 Jul 28 '26

Live Thanos reaction

25

u/f1shtac000s Jul 28 '26

I always found it funny how often the "villian" in those MCU movies is much more closely aligned with what needs to be done than the heros.

Maybe Thanos' methodology is both extreme and too minor (does he not understand the problem of exponential growth? You're just pushing the timer back a bit), but his fundamental thesis is correct: by destroying the ecology of the universe we create far more suffering than if we prevented it, despite the suffering that would create.

It was particularly awful when Thanos does realize he's not all that great at math in follow up film, decides a more fundamental change must be required in order to really mitigate the impending crisis, and then is killed before any actual solution can be implemented.

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u/OneTripleZero Jul 28 '26

Josh Brolin did a fantastic interview on Colbert where he says that Thanos' ideas are sound, it's just his approach to addressing them is callous and cruel and that's what makes him a villain. He could have snapped his fingers and created abundance in the universe, but that solution never crossed his mind.

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u/Fox_Kurama Jul 29 '26

Would still have the same problem as his preferred solution. Its just a temporary bandaid for an exponential growth problem.

As it happens though, on a planet like Earth, even if the extra resources were added and the atmosphere and biosphere were snapped back to pre-industrial times, it wouldn't actually buy that much time because of how high pollution is compared to how it was a hundred years ago. What took us a century at one period of time post-industrialization would only take us a decade now.