This thread should keep you up at night!
Humanity has 2 choices. Both of them are bad for a majority of people living on Earth today.
No.1 - Ecocide, the continued rape of the environment and exponential growth of human numbers until every available resource has been consumed and a population die-off ensues. Global warming destroys what is left and rising seas floods vast areas of once fertile and habitable land. Think Easter Island times a billion.
No.2 - Genocide, the power Elite will kill off a large proportion of the “useless eaters” (ironic) in a way that would be the least painful for those privileged few. This would allow the ecosystems to be retained and restored, decrease the pressure on non-renewable resources to enable them to be used for an extra few hundred years (e.g. oil).
We are too far from home to return to a sustainable, symbiotic relationship with our planet or the ecosystems we once inhabited. Nearly 7 billion by 2010 and 8.5 billion by 2025 = not sustainable.
Humanity has no track record of being able to control its population fairly and humanely. Think of the ruckus surrounding Chinas 1 child policy. Without it we would be at Armageddon already, so what hope do we have of implementing this globally?
Thus, the question is this: Given that the power elite has access to a vast arsenal of WMD (nukes, chemicals and bacteriological) and control over the supply of fossil fuels (essential for food production), how do you think they are going to kill off the masses whilst retaining their own privileges?
Remember, to set off more than 1% of the nuke stockpile would cause a nuclear winter that would also render the planet useless for conquest.
Biological agents would have to have a cure or vaccine for the power elite, at a suitably astronomical price.
Chemical agents would have to guarantee to kill only the poor people (think poisoning of water supply) and not every living thing – otherwise its ecocide.
My guess is that they would choke off the oil/gas supply causing widespread starvation, power loss and water supply failure. The surviving populations in them pesky poor countries would then get a good dose of plague (or derivatives) to sort them out. The Elites then lord it for a while in a nice warm place with lots of oil, water and food until the corpses rot away…. sounds a bit like the Middle East to me…hmmm.
LOL
PS
Just thought I'd add that conventional warfare does not reduce the population of the world as dramatically or permanantly as the other nasty ways described. Just look at WW1 where 19 million folk died or were wounded in 6 years of conflict and then , in 1919, Spanish flu (influenza) killed that number worldwide in a year.
Or, the baby boom after WW2. 52 million died in WW2 but every year this century (in each and every single one) 82 million are born in peacetime.
So how are you going to invest your time now, huh?
Just a thought.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AlasBabylon/message/32238