Blogocentric Formulations

Day 23: "Today, we're canceling the Apocalypse!"

*Written as part of the "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS" 

Day 23 Prompt: If a cataclysmic event wiped out 90% of the world population (equal proportions of all races are wiped out and all races have some surviving representatives), would humans be better off in the long run (having the opportunity for a fresh start) or would the state of the world remain much the same as it is today?

When I first started contemplating this situation, I thought my answer was a no-brainer. But after thinking about it for the better part of the day, I realized not only that there are a lot of factors this go into this decision, but also that I pretty much did a complete one-eighty and reversed my opinion on the issue entirely!

My gut reaction to this prompt was, yes, with only 10% of the population remaining, that means we wouldn't have to worry about problems like overpopulation and all the horrors that come with it (consumption of natural resources, waste accumulation, the destruction of natural habitats, etc.), and the Earth might have a chance to rebound a little bit rather than racing toward some kind of disaster. We really would have a fresh start and the opportunity to do things differently (hopefully better) this time around.

But then I really started thinking about what a near-extinction event would mean. With 90% of the population gone, I don't particularly like my odds of survival, let alone the odds of survival of my friends and family. Statistically speaking, almost everyone, even if they lived, would lose almost everyone they cared about. And I'm not sure I can say I'd be better off - even if I did survive - given the possibility that everyone I know and love would likely be among the 90% casualty rate.

I also thought about where humanity's at right now in terms of their mindset and priorities, and unless the 10% who were "saved" are all environmentalists, recyclers, green living enthusiasts, etc. I don't have a lot of hope that merely reducing the population would solve our problems or lead to a true fresh start so much as a setback that would only result in a stay of execution while we built our numbers back up and kept living they way we've been living. With the aforementioned odds being so slim, I can't imagine that many forward-thinking, Earth-conscious individuals would make it, so what are the chances the survivors would just spontaneously decide to switch to an environmentally friendly lifestyle? 10% of the current world's population is roughly 715 million people. Do you know how long it took us to go from a worldwide population of 715 million to today's worldwide population of 7.15 billion? Only 200 years

What's even scarier is that the time it took to go from 1 billion to 2 billion people was roughly 127 years, while the time it took to go from 6 billion to 7 billion was only 12 years. But that's a topic for a whole different blog post.

. It doesn't seem worth it, at least to me, that we go through the trauma and heartache of losing 90% of the human race, only to risk buying ourselves maybe another 200 years of planetary sustainability before we're back in the same place we started.

Most importantly, though, I put an enormous amount of thought into what "in the long run" meant in terms of humanity's betterment. For me, a mass-casualty event like the one described in the prompt isn't a "fresh start;" it's a setback. Without any indication that modern opinions, lifestyles, and practices are changed, wiping out any percentage of the population isn't going to give us the fresh start we might think. Not unless people really take the time to analyze what went wrong the first time around and learn from the mistakes in our past. I'm not entirely confident the human race has mastered that skill yet.

What I think about most when it comes to humans is their potential to create. Whether that's creating stories or music or immunizations or rocket ships, as our population has exploded, so have our advances in science, technology, and art. A near-extinction event would silence 90% of those unique voices. Someone in that 90% might have been on the cusp of figuring out how to get into space and colonize Mars. Someone in that 90% might have developed a truly clean and sustainable source of energy. Someone in that 90% might have figured out how to repurpose garbage into reusable materials.

If we were truly equitably reduced along all fronts, we'd only have 10% of the scientists we currently have. 10% of the doctors. 10% of the researchers. 10% of the entertainers. 10% of the philosophers. 10% of the artists. In my humble opinion, that would not only be a terrible loss of untold amounts of creativity and ingenuity, but might also cost us the possibility of fixing our planet or even expanding beyond it... all for the sake of hitting the snooze button for a few hundred more years.

As far as I'm concerned, a cataclysmic event that takes out 90% of the population would be a short-term fix for our current terrestrial problems of overpopulation, consumption habits, etc. The real long-term benefit for the human race would be to have as many people as possible devote themselves to making the world better today.