I was thinking about selecting all the bad drivers to feed the pythons to, that way you cut down on population and car exaust.

Perhaps if we just started a bigger war.

But China is really the only worthy opponent. The present wars just represent a slow bleed. We need abrupt population control if the earth is to be saved.

Maybe we need a new system of eugenics, environmental eugenics to cleanse the earth of the most consumptive.

Or maybe we need a lottery like the one in Stephen King's short story The Long Walk wherein, on a future overpopulated earth (presumably now), all the teens of a certain age in the local community were required to participate in a government organized annual long walk where you had to walk til you dropped. Whoever walked the farthest won hundreds of millions of dollars. But, if you stopped walking, the National Guard would shoot you on the spot.

The planet will be so appreciative.

Good idea, as long as it is the 13-19 age group we're talking about and not any other age groups.

"Seriously, please tell us how your solution will go about achieving a total worldwide population of just 650,000 people."


First I want to emphasize that I never promoted this solution as a plan, and I make no attempt to promote it as a plan at all. In fact I specifically wrote “I’m not going to run for office with it”. That does not change the fact that I believe the world would be better off with negative growth in business, and in population.

Second, there is nothing special about the specific quantity. I simply picked a round number that would be far less than what we now have. Actually I’d be interested on learning what a good number might be!

I simply believe that the earth and its living matter are analogous to a very large Petri dish with bacteria growing in it. Eventually they starve or die in their own waste. It occurs much faster if their population growth is very fast. The world’s modern human population is very, very destructive to our environment, and it is growing very fast. I don’t see that we are all that different from the Petri-dish.

So eventually, I think my solution will be implemented. I can not predict how painful it will be, but I can’t help but think that what we might do by our own choice would be less painful than what nature will do (though nature might be far more fair)in the long term if we do nothing. I believe that to change the outcome from what I see as inevitable, we must treat the earth far differently than we do now.

I think the question of how painful it would be would very much depend on whether you got the "long walk" option, the "eaten-alive-by-a-python" option or the "minced-up-and-fed-to-the-masses" option.

I have to believe that being in the belly of a python, while its gastric fluids slowly degrade you, would be a good deal more painful than being minced and eaten.

Me too.

I'd take the long walk any day.

Glad I'm not 13-19 though.

We could invent some tale of global catastrophe. Build three immense space ships to evacuate the planet, "Arks" of humanity to save the race. On the "A" Ark would go the great minds; Thinkers, Inventors. On the "C" Ark would go the Workers and Doers. On the "B" Ark would go the middle-men; managers, salesmen, phone sanitizers. Of course we would send the "B" ark first to ensure the planet we arrive on is well organized and sanitized...