Population Studies http://frontiersman.org.uk/Population/Curve.html

Caveat Lector
Sam Aurelius Milam III
I’ve been publishing this newsletter for more than 32 years.  The newsletter isn’t even my first attempt to present what I believe to be the truth.  Originally, I wrote letters to politicians, corporate executives, and various institutions.  I learned some things, but I didn’t accomplish any changes or improvements.  Later, I wrote essays.  They went largely unnoticed.  This newsletter has also been largely ineffective.  In the October 2019 issue, in reply to a reader who suggested that I should get a radio talk show, and reach millions, I replied that the Nazarene had already reached millions, and look at the sorry results.  For centuries, his so-called followers have been indistinguishable from all of the other evangelistic thugs and zealots, engaging in brutal and inhumane behavior in the name of one allegedly worthy cause or another.  Reaching millions has been done before and, the more that I learn, the more it seems like a bad idea..
I’ve often been troubled by the negative tenor of my writing, but that’s the nature of the beast.  A bridge that’s in good condition isn’t a problem.  A rotted or defective bridge is a problem.  I’ve tried to reveal problems.  Maybe I should have been more judicious in the claims that I’ve made because I’ve painted myself into a corner.  I’ve been claiming to face the truth, however great the cost, but now my own claims compel me to actually do so.  There are truths that I’d prefer to not face.  Here are some unpleasant truths to consider.
• In the documentary 8 Billion Angels, Jane Goodall quoted Mahatma Gandhi as saying, “This planet can provide for human need, but not for human greed.”  Now, we’ve allowed the size of our population to exceed the capacity of our planet to sustain us.  Even human need has become excessive.  I believe that we’ve initiated an extinction event from which we’re not necessarily exempt.  I fear that we’re facing extinction, a truth that I’d prefer to not face.
• We’ve created a non-biological life form, corporations, that I call overcreatures.  They don’t have any interest whatsoever in our well-being, beyond our ability to serve their needs.  If they find better servants than us, then we’ll become expendable.  With that in mind, consider that they’re developing a technology of automation that will serve them far better than we can, and a cadre of autonomous robots that will surely be weaponized, which they will control, and against which we will be defenseless.  It’s the Terminator nightmare, another truth that I’d prefer to not face.
•    We’re developing an AI technology that we don’t understand and that we might not be able to control.  It’s potentially a single, worldwide, intelligent, life form.  Will it be benevolent?  Malevolent?  Indifferent?  Can we coexist with it?  Will it coexist with us?  I don’t have any idea what it might become, or what it might do.  It’s yet another truth that I’m loath to face.
Those truths are difficult to face but next comes the really difficult part.  We might have been able to survive one or another of the situations that I summarized above, but probably not all of them at the same time.  They’re a triple whammy that, most likely, we can’t survive.  It seems likely that, instead, our population will all crash.  If that happens, then I expect that our condition will fall right past that of hunter-gatherer, without even slowing down, all the way to the status of scavengers.  We’ve so degraded our planetary environment, and so squandered and depleted our resources that, even if there are any survivors who are competent to subsist as hunter-gatherers, then they probably won’t be able to find enough to hunt or to gather.  Instead, they’ll have to subsist on bugs, debris, and dead things.  If they live long enough to have descendants, then it will take those descendents thousands of years to reconstruct organized societies.  It seems more likely to me that, having dropped into their situation from above, rather than having evolved into it from below, they won’t make any progress at all.  It seems more likely that they’ll slowly devolve into some sort of neo-chimpanzees.
There’s an alternative to the slide back into sub-sapience.  That alternative is extinction.  I don’t know how many times, throughout the decades, I’ve found that scenario presented in fiction, and elsewhere.  In my opinion, the best portrayal of it was given by Nevil Shute in his 1957 novel On the Beach.  The novel is powerful but I believe that the movie is more powerful.  In the movie, they got it exactly right, all the way to the thinly veiled real world warning, disguised in the movie as a spiritual appeal, that was displayed on the banner in the final scene, “There is Still Time .. Brother”.  In the movie, there was still time to repent.  In the real world, in 1959, there might have still been time to prevent.  Now, probably, there’s only time to lament.  If so then, when the time comes, some people might decide to shuffle off this mortal coil, like the Australians did in the movie.  Maybe that’s even a good idea.
In the meantime, life goes on and, while