Joohan wrote:Trumptonium1 wrote:
This is irrelevant because European politics have proven that this event will get curtailed due to extreme political opposition in receiver countries, and even more extreme opposition in non-receiver conservative countries. A future migrant crisis will get stopped before people are able to reach the shores.
And yet none of this comes remotely close to the civilisation disaster from a shrinking population when either the lives of adults are made hell to cater for pensioners, or when governments announce people have to say bye to their grandparents because there's no choice but to kill them. Or war.
Yeah good luck having that on an election leaflet. Work till 85. I'm sure that'll go down well. Whether you're elected or not, hell, I don't imagine that working well in China either. Tiananmen will probably look like a tea party.
An ecological collapse in Asia would be quite different the current scenario playing out in Africa. Instead of a continent of 800 million people fleeing violence, this would be a region of nearly 4 billion fleeing a destroyed and poisonous habitat. In addition to there being potentially five times as many refugees, there's also the fact that there is no going home for these people ( seeing as how, home is unlivable now ). Opposition parties would be hard pressed to stop that many people who are that desperate. They have difficulty stopping them now - you think they will some how manage to stop a crisis with tens of millions more people, even more desperate because they don't have homes to go back to?
There's your war right there.
Ecological destruction is not a civlizational disaster, it's death. When the ground is sand scorched of all it's nutrients, the ocean empty and filled with acid, when the sky has filled with smog, when the forests are gone or too weak to survive, when the only animals which are left are the pets we keep and the live stock we cultivate, then we die. We can't exist without nature, and endless exponential reproduction is choking the natural world death!
And that's the crux of the matter. We all know that our shortsightedness and consumerism is killing the Earth, but trying to fix the situation would be hard. You might not get to retire at 55, you might be forced to take the bus more often, you might have to eat veggies more, you might have to actual recycle your waste. We can actually do these things though, they are not going to kill us. An older populace, so long as they are healthier and more responsible than the current one, can absolutely maintain society. There is nothing far fetched about a 65 year old, or even a 75 year old, doing exactly what I just said. What is far fetched, is expecting, is expecting 50 grandchildren to survive world with poisoned air, poisoned water, and not enough food ( which is likely filled with toxins anyway ).
Why would I want to retire at 55? My moral obligation is to be a productive member of the workforce from the time I graduate from University in the middle part of the 2020s (It depends on how long it takes to get my master's in engineering, perhaps 2024?) to the moment I become unable to contribute to civilization any longer, whether that be due to death or obsolescence. In fact, why would I want to retire in general? I have a duty to be productive, one that I hold to be nigh-sacred, right now in my capacity as a student and in the future as a member of the workforce.
