Mankind into Ecological debt today

Its obvious if you think about it that the world is a limited place. Yet mankind seems to have unlimited demands. Increasing population combined with increasing living standards are obviously destined to one day "use up" the world and then we are doomed.

It was obvious to me as a child, it must be obvious. Yet for some reason it isn't really thought about much. Today a UK think tank places October the 9th 2006 as the day that we started to go into the ecological red. But there is nowhere that can bail us out!

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article1822171.ece

It's an arbitrary date. I figured we were already long into the red years ago. The endless removal of vast swaithes of forest, pollution, endless urban development and economic growth signalled a hundred years ago that this was a road to unsustainable destruction.

Mankind will destroy itself, but only because we are stupid. An irony for the organism that considers itself in its mental dream world the best organism, the best often only because it has this mental dream world.

Smith, Keynes and the great philanthropist economists did great works and reinvented the systems of prosperity and wealth, but they gave us a bomb with which to explode ourselves. A bomb much more dangerous than Oppenheimers.

I do not have the skills to change the minds of great men. It is the shoulders of great men that must carry the responsibility and burden of their thoughts and actions. Pity all those who rise to positions of such responsibility! for the future has their name upon it, and their name will be on the tomb stone of mankind.

In a petri dish in a laboratory we see the rise and fall of nations of bacteria. Composed from replicating units barely a 1000th of a millimeter across, growing exponentially until all resources are hoarded in their walls and they are starved, dying and spilling their contents out for the scavengers. And each cycle the energy is lost until only a barren wasteland is left.

On the Earth we see the rise and fall of nations of huamns. Composed from replicating units 2 meters across, growing exponentially until all resources are hoarded in their walls and they are starved, dying and spilling their contents out for the scavengers. And each cycle the energy is lost until only a barren wasteland is left.

Remarkable how the large and most arrogant organisms bear so striking a similarity to the smallest and most important.