A debate on a provocative topic.

"You say that the world's population is going to be huge in fifty years, conservatively. My first point here is that even if it is huge, you have yet to prove that this is going to be large enough to cause over population. I'm from wyoming. The fifth largest state in america, yet the lowest amount of population in america. Wyoming has only 500,000 people in the entire state. So right there is land to live on. Also, taking into account the fact that much of the arctic and tundra regions are also quite uninhabited for the most part, overpopulation is hardly a worry to most people. In fact, if you google overpopulation, you will find that most people believe that overpopulation has already occurred. If this were the case, then people would be dying off by the hundreds of thousands all over the world. This simply isn't the case. When we look to the example of fruit flies, we see that overpopulation happens when an organisms number has overstretched the ability to live off it's environment. When that happens, the organism dies off until it reaches a sustainable number. This means that even if overpopulation happens like you are saying, it's not the end of the world. People are going to die no matter what. Overpopulation solves itself. " The amount of pain and suffering involved in the process of "overpopulation solving itself" will be horrendous. Although we may not be kidnapped by ghosts; starvation, malnutrition, land conflicts, and other nasty consequences would occur. Even though you allow for the fact that much of the world is unpopulated, you neglect that we would nonetheless need more farmland. Even with a almost total switch to rice we would still require massive use of farmland. We would need ALL of the arable land on earth to do it. If there is just one flood, one drought, we starve. Also, rice requires rather wet land, and a mild climate. I don't believe Wyoming or the Arctic tundra are conducive to that. All are dry and fairly cool. In order to prevent starvation and overpopulation we need to do something. Cannibalism, while very imperfect does something. Burial and cremation do not. "And your wikipedia article says that WILD yaks are vulnerable to extinction. If we were to begin eating yaks, it would be similair to how 'harvesting' cattle works. There would be places that raise yaks and then kill them and process them etc. .. " Yaks do not help prevent overpopulation, eating people does help this. Yaks are irrelevant. ' "And if you can show me how many modern vikings there are then please be my guest. And you don't tell me which cultures burn slaves, so I can't really believe that until it is proven. " Cremation is not going to prevent overpopulation. It just won't. Burning the dead does not help prevent overpopulation. "Cannibalism does not address overpopulation. You don't know how many people would eat other people. You don't know who would be chosen for eating. All of the semantics are gone out of your contentions. " You have to kill someone to eat them, right? Killing them also prevents them from making more children. If just one person ate one other person each month for two years, at an average world birth rate of about 3 children per mother (UNESCO) he would have caused a net reduction of 48 over one generation. If we include the next generation, as 2050 is about two generations away, it would be 144 people. So if only 1% of the current population did this, we would reduce this by close to 900 million. That's with only 1%, with more, which is very possible if not probable, it would be even more. If everyone did this, we would get a net reduction of almost 90 billion. That is very significant. At current rates over two generations we get 21 billion more people. With cannibalism this number is significantly less. You must remember that if we all did this for the next 42 years we would actually have a net loss in population, which would improve the quality of life. Cannibalism would lead to the benefit of the many, although at the expense of the few. Cannibalism is probably immoral, but it is better than simply not doing anything about overpopulation. Burial and cremation do nothing.