I am curious to hear your guys viewpoints concerning the experiments done by John Calhoun concerning overpopulation with mice.

Read about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun

Basically he put a bunch of mice in a contained area, and provided them unlimited supply of water and food. The population grew so fast and so intensely, that mice began to become anti-social, highly aggressive, turning on each other. A complete breakdown in social structure and this resulted in the population heading to extinction.

Do you all think this is an accurate reflection of humanity? Do you think this accurately predicts what will happen to us?

Do you think this experiment accurately mimics the conditions we live in now?

Yeah, but only partly. I mean, street people getting killed by other street people for a bowl of soup it's pretty much close to the behavior you're describing. Wars being fought in the name of ideas, people getting killed because of some ideology or another (you're a nazi/you're a communist/you're not a patriot/you're atheist or muslim or what ever/etc), are other examples.

But we as humans have introspection, a quality which animals apparently lack, and because of this, it's hard to say (for me at least) what the future's going to be like. We're at a "null point", if you will, the point of zero thrust and we've always been like this. We have the potential both for destruction as well as creation, and throughout humanity those 2 opposites have met again and again, which pushed, ironically, our species further and further. So yeah, the experiment shows what one could easily deduce from looking into history, but it's only the one side, it's not the entire story.

It's quite doubtable whether Calhoun's artificial mice world can be translated to humans. Yes we live in the times of overpopulation. And some of it might be applicable to us but not all. We don't have a divine hand that feeds us and cleans our cages for us. We don't live in Paradise where you don't have to fight for food and scarce resources with your neighbors. Also we are not an isolated species in a box, we interact with our habitat and other species. And there is no situation with unlimited supply where THE ONLY limit to our growth is the physical boundaries of "the box". Quite the contrary, the planetary resources and our food supplies are limited. The environment shrinks if we expand too much but then it strikes back and cuts the overpopulated species down to size. If we devour the planet and consume too much we undermine the future of the next generations that will have resource shortage and face the problem of cleaning our shit. The nature regulates itself.

Nice, i was thinking something along the same lines. My faith in humanity has partly been restored.

There are currently being systems developed which could produce large amounts of food, for cheap, anywhere. This could solve issues of hunger world over, and solve issues of malnutrition due to low income even in developed countries.

Some people I see as potentially citing Calhoun's research as a reason why we should not provide free food to everyone.

So our current state of existence may not be at the level of 'free abundant resources', but the technology does exist to do so, and we could go there in the future if we so decided.

Do you think we should go there, or do you think Calhoun's research is a sign that we should avoid removing limiting factors to mans growth.

This does exist in humanity. The dominant 5% or the right man theory if i remember correctly. I will need to try and dig up some links but i read something about this in a book last year. It was a psychological look at serial killers and their behaviours. Over population definitely has something to do with it.

It is incorrect to think of global problems in terms of a single wallet. Cheap/expensive does not apply here. Think of the world as of a global farm. There's no monetary price that this global farm pays for resources. We take them from the nature for free. We just take what there is, add to it our labor and produce what we consume. Then we throw waste back to nature. So it's all about two questions.

1. Is there still enough of what we can take from the nature? It is clear that there is a limit to it. As population grows the planetary resources do not.
2. Can nature recycle our waste fast enough and reproduce the renewable resources for our further consumption?

Technology can certainly improve this formula of our relationship with mother nature. It can make us a little more headroom for growth. But it cannot remove the ceiling completely. As long as we live on this very planet and don't colonize the others. So as we grow we'll eventually hit the limit. Sooner with current technology or later with some more advanced one.

BTW that had already happened in the history. Read about the civilization of Easter Island and what occurred to them as they depleted the resources of their island.

The exact technology I was referring to was aquaponics.

Systems are being developed that can grow mass amounts of food, all in an internal sustainable system, with very little need for external energy and water.

This will basically remove a significant amount of waste from food production, make us not dependent on soil, not dependent on earth itself recycling waste. These systems once perfected could be entirely self-contained, placed on a spaceship. Or atleast I see, begun to grow vertically in multi-level buildings at first. The constraints of food production will be removed by these systems.

I don't see the earth itself as keeping us in check with food production. Our food production may become completely independent of any earthly processes.

Rjb gives some nice argumentation there.

And there is another thing at hand: everywhere in the world to population growth has declined whenever wealth in a specific region increased. Humans have children for two reasons: to continue their lineage, most people are probably unaware of this natural drive to reproduce. The second reason is insurance as pension, and in countries less developed than the western world this is most likely the biggest drive. No kids = no pension = screwed when you're old. Unless your country has arrangements for these.

When humans are placed inside a box with unlimited amounts of food and water I think humanity will eventually balance itself out. At first there will probably fighting over the limited space, people will get hurt but as time progresses the population will balance itself around an equilibrium point and all of humanity-in-a-box(TM) will live in a place without hunger.