Man kind will ravage the earth before it can colonize or begin to colonize a new planet.

Opening statement: Obviously the world as we know it today faces many challenges including and certainly not limited to the ones listed by Pro. Pro said: 'The future holds nothing better.' ...is your real name Galadriel? Pro"s whole position rests on the hypothesis that something won't happen; however they do not (nor does anyone or anything else as far as I know) have the capability to tell of what has not yet come to pass. Regardless of how difficult or improbable many of the proposed solutions are (and there are many) to such macro problems, some are still theoretically possible therefore negating Pro"s concrete stance that the Earth's human population won't/can't find some way to make it work. I will elucidate this position in juxtaposition to Pro"s specific points. A. Resource consumption. To say that there is no solution to our energy consumption is astoundingly narrow sighted. Pro says that Spain uses clean renewable energy for half its daily consumption needs. But then says that the U.S. could not do so "in mass" due to the resources needed to build the giant panels. The U.S. has 10 times the nominal GDP of Spain [4] and obviously our natural resources (if nothing else the amount of land we control) is vastly greater than Spain, so why exactly couldn"t we do what they are doing? Pro also says windmills have a tendency to burn out. This is extremely vague. There are multitudes of different designs and companies producing windmills and it"s ridiculous to say that they are all going to be unreliable because they have a tendency to burn out. That is like saying we shouldn"t use any automobiles because some of them sometimes break down, even though they are outrageously convenient and productive. If they break down, we fix them. Also Pro doesn"t even mention hydroelectric power which has the potential to produce over 40 times more energy than it"s currently producing. [1] In addition, new progress in finding earth abundant photovoltaic materials [5] as well as the fact that the sun blasts Earth with twice as much energy annually as the entirety of the available non-renewable resources of Earth could produce "including fossil fuels and nuclear uranium" [2] means that renewable energy has not even remotely tapped its full potential. Pro states that the finite resources of this planet will be depleted regardless of advances in technology. This is ridiculous, as above mentioned it is completely possible that advances in technology are what will render our current finite materials (i.e. fossil fuels) obsolete and thus not worth depleting. And even if they are someday completely tapped, it is very likely that with technological advances that day could be postponed much farther down the road than 50 years. Not to mention the potential energy derived from nuclear fusion which according to a recent Guardian article is happening now and is likely not far from being commercially viable. [6] The same article also states how utterly massive the amount of energy from fusion reactors could be, with very little proportional input as far as fuel. - [1] http://www.intpow.com... [2] http://energyinformative.org... [4] http://en.wikipedia.org... [5]http://ieeexplore.ieee.org... [6]http://www.guardian.co.uk... B. Population growth in relation to resources. First of all unless I'm very much mistaken, the year is 2013 not 2014. Second while the population may reach 10 billion, it also might not. There could be a massive plague or war which takes out half the population leaving us with a much more manageable 3.5 billion to work with. Is this a favorable solution for most people? Obviously it isn't as half the population will die, but it is a solution and is a very real possibility. Or perhaps the world will take a leaf out of China's book and institute a one-baby policy. Some estimates put China at a zero population growth rate (ZPG) by 2030. [1] How is this not possible for the entire globe? [1] http://news.xinhuanet.com... C. The colonization of other planets is absolutely possible. SpaceX, a company which is only 11 years old as of March 2013, has already achieved rocket launches that are massively cheaper [1] than anything that's happened before and company founder Elon Musk states that it is his personal goal to see Mars colonized with an 80,000 person city. [2] Their new Falcon Heavy, which is classified as a heavy lift launch vehicle will be able to carry a payload that is more than twice what the Space Shuttle could. [3] They've managed to come up with that in a mere decade. With the acceleration of the progress curve of the new space race we can expect other companies to build off of SpaceX's ideas and to produce their own unique innovations as the global fervor for spaceflight is only likely to increase. There is no way Pro can say with certainty that in 50 years we won't have colonized Mars or the Moon or who knows what else in light of the very rapid and recent progress made by private companies such as SpaceX. [1] http://articles.washingtonpost.com... [2] http://www.wired.com... [3] http://www.spacex.com... D. Pro states that the only way to save us is to develop a 'globalize' government. Which I believe should have a "d" on the end there. Either way, that is obviously not the case. The world is already an extraordinarily globalized place. Most developed countries are allies and trading partners with eachother at least to an extent. Look at NATO. We obviously have notable troublemakers such as North Korea but the world has seen what happens to its peoples and lands when it becomes one big battlefield and it doesn"t really work out well for anyone in the end. While it's not that farfetched to imagine WWIII, it's also not so farfetched to imagine it not happening. If a massive immediate global threat emerged (an ELE), and we had the time to face it, then it's absolutely possible that the world's governments and peoples will begin to work in concert to find a solution without necessarily establishing some supreme global power seat, unlikely and unprecedented though it would be. If a globalized government does manifest: you say that 'population control = massacres, starvation, death by poverty and disease resulting in smaller population.' as stated in section B population control is possible through a number of different avenues, not necessarily through massacres and death by poverty. 'control/resources = Sets forth to develop means to transport a growing population to another planet if one is found and finds out that this is not possible for several reasons.' Pro has not provided these reasons for the debate. Con has provided a few points in response to section C. which illustrate that transport to other worlds is indeed possible. Pro then goes on to say how resources will be wrongly spent on certain projects, that revolution begins to stir etc. This section of Pro's argument was prefaced with a sentence that ended in: 'multiple things can happen:' Pro then proceeds to name a few of those things, some of which I've specifically addressed. However, by merely writing 'multiple things can happen' Pro has validated Con's entire argument--any number of things can happen, including mankind finding a solution to all or enough of our problems to effect a change great enough to ensure the continuation of the species either on Earth or somewhere else. It could happen. Pro listed a few possible scenarios, which, even if they are the most plausible outcomes for the future of mankind, they are not, cannot be, the only outcomes possible.