....how large of an area would it require to gather every living being in the world in?  Yea,yea, yea, assuming you could stop the clock for such an exercise and snap your fingers and have scotty beam them to a certain geographical area where they would each have two square feet of ground to stand on.

Give me a geographical area of where you are located so I can provide you with a general area you would be familiar with.  You can be vague to protect your anonymity (southern cal, vegas, boston etc..)

this is a self correcting system. When the population becomes too high by either lack of resources or bad sanitary conditions, it will lead to a large death rate through starvation or plague.

Yeah, pretty blunt, but true...

In a remarkably prescient science fiction novel written in 1968, author John Brunner predicted that by 2010 the world population would reach 7 billion- enough people that if they stood shoulder to shoulder they would cover the entire island of Zanzibar. He was off on some other predictions in the book but hey let’s give him credit – he was a lot closer than  George Orwell in his now laughable 1984.

      The Washington Post covered this story this weekend. Most incredible to me was to learn that India is projected to overtake China as the world’s most populous country. I certainly did not see that one coming. Figure out now how to play that one in the stock market and you can make some big bucks.

     China's "one child" policy introduced in 1978 reduced births by 400 million according to the Chinese. Apparently, fines are imposed if a couple has more than one child.

    And what about that "dangerous and barbaric country" Iran? Well, they are the only country to require mandatory contraception courses before you can get a marriage license.
     
     Quite different form the US where the tax code actually encourages having more children.

We really are fucked. There's far too many assholes around just in the USA, and we have one of the lowest population densities on the planet.

Before the development of agriculture, it took a full 10 square miles to sustain a single human life. With agriculture, it takes about 2 acres. If every acre is used to sustain human beings, then we still all die, because of the total destruction of other ecosystems.

"Unproductive" people aren't the problem. It's the "productive" that are causing all the problems.

Consider what production is. It's ripping shit out of the earth, turning it into something, and selling it. This is, in essense modern manufacturing. It stands to reason, that as our host planet is finite, so are the number of things you can rip out of it. An economic system that is dependent upon growth year after year just to fuction normally is going to exacerbate this. Capitalism is the deadliest thing man has ever invented, and I'm including the atom bomb in that list.

America, with our spacious skies, amber waves of grain, and purple mountain majesties have been turned into a coast to coast shopping mall. Mile after mile of mall after mall. Litering this country like absesses, outlets for Americans to buy cheap plastic crap that a year later they will throw into a giant hole in the ground. We call this America the Beautiful. And just like our massive malls with our massive fat asses, and our massive mounds of trash, we've given the ocean it's own mount of trash. A giant, Texas sized mound of trash floating in the middle of the ocean.

If the world was America, we'd all be dead. We'd need 5 earths to sustain the entire human race at the American rate of consumption. The capitalist answer to this, is free trade, and to create expanding markets. Expanding like a nuclear fallout zone. And so now the focus is on ripping more shit out of the earth and creating more massive mounds of shit in the far east and calling that progress. When we're done turning China and India into a giant fucking shopping mall, we'll move on to Africa and the Middle East. The world is flat, don'tcha know?

And so as I sit here, with my priviledged life, on this fucking bus, that's pumping poisons to the sky, I get to bitch and moan about the destruction of the planet while people in Ethopia dig for bugs to eat out of the ground. That is the success of capitalism and free markets. Billions of miserable people so that 400 assholes can live a life of luxury that not even Andrew Carnegie could dream of.

Strangely, none of this seems to make people any happier. You find higher suicide rates in the United States than in Zimbabwe. Yes, as it turns out, cheap plastic shit doesn't create happiness.

I see folks like GaG and Saint here, working very hard, I'm sure, to get for themselves as much as they can as quick as they can. Does GaG run his oil business, or does it run him? What's the fucking point? To accumulate as much shit as possible while the seconds tick away at your finite lives, none of which you can take with you after you leave this mortal coil? Just to create more mounds of plastic shit that someone else will throw away?

It's all madness.