The only way you get a “population bottleneck” of 500 million from our current 8 billion is genocide. Even the world population in 1980 when these were erected was 4.5 billion. Still would have required genocide.
“Guiding reproduction” is definitely a euphemism for eugenics. Don’t be naive.
Or nuclear near-annihilation, which was a definite concern when these were erected. Or a pandemic.
That’s the part everybody seems to be glossing over. These stones were supposed to be read by a burgeoning society post apocalypse, not our current world with 8 billion people. The non-existent world these stones speaks to would contain presumably less than the 500,000,000 people its author states is the maximum, and acts as a warning along the lines of ‘don’t destroy the Earth’s environment like we did, that’s what lead to our downfall, too many people’. Not to say that take is correct or not, just what I thought when reading about the stones the first time. Seems like environmentally political rhetoric to me.
Imagine believing in a world where 90% of the human population is annihilated by some calamity, and the survivors have the psychological capacity to focus on anything other than basic survival and repopulation.
Utopian fantasyland. Believing things like this requires deliberate ignorance of the nature of human beings and pretty much all of human history. It’s magical thinking
Especially since these were put up in the 1980s.
If it were 20-30 years earlier, you’d write it off as Cold War/MAD Nuclear doomerism combined with that very particular breed of American fascism that inspired the Strangelove/Fallout aesthetic. People believing they could put the “best and brightest” down in bunkers to recreate an even better world after the inevitable collapse, without all those “undesirable” cultural elements polluting things.
But this was 1980. The Cold War was clearly ending. CFCs were still little-known as a global threat. The fossil fuel companies were still VERY effectively hiding the reality of climate change from the general public. The recession wasn’t clearly visible yet. There was no reason to be a doomer. That was a great time to be an optimist.
I’ll take nature over 7.5 billion people including myself. What we’ve done to this planet is shameful and never should have gotten to this point.
We are nature.
Were the cyanobacteria responsible for the oxygen crisis guilty? Plants contributed to the first of the five major recognized extinction events: https://www.sciencealert.com/the-arrival-of-tree-roots-may-have-triggered-mass-extinctions-in-the-ocean
The first major difference with us is that we’re capable of being aware of how our presence changes the environment, and therefore of changing our behavior. So I think you think both too highly and not well enough of us.
Bacteria don’t have the capability to be aware of what they were doing. Neither do plants. People do. That’s all that matters.
