Wednesday, October 05, 2005

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement

http://www.vhemt.org/
Q: Will new viruses, wars, famine, and toxic waste help the cause of human extinction?
No. Epidemics actually strengthen a species if enough of them are living to have an adequate survival rate. With over six billion of us, there is no virus that could get us all. A 99.99% die off would still leave 610,000 naturally-immune survivors to replicate, and in less than 50,000 years we would be right back where we are now. For any disease to simply hold the human population where it is, more than 210,000 of us would have to succumb to it each day. Suffering and death cannot help but hurt.
Millions have died in wars and yet the human family continues to increase. Most of the time, wars encourage both the winners and losers to re-populate. When troops were called up for the Gulf Massacre, sperm banks were taking deposits hand over fist. The net result of war is usually an increase rather than a decrease in total population size.
Resource shortages are dealt with by resorting to mass murder and calling it war, but the results are only temporary. Besides being impractical, killing people is immoral. It should never be considered as a way to improve life on Earth.
The massive die-off of humanity, predicted by so many as a result of our over-shoot of Earth's carrying capacity, is what the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement hopes to avoid.
It's possible that VHEMT will not succeed in staving off ecological collapse. So, couples contemplating procreation may want to consider the possibility that they will be sentencing their off-spring to a rapidly-deteriorating quality of life and unimaginably horrible death.
Something to think about, anyway.

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