Population Rap

Recently I had the opportunity to interview several ... um ... entities concerning the Earth's single biggest environmental problem: overpopulation. It brought to mind a cartoon I saw awhile ago. Planet Earth sits in a doctor's office, a stick figure with a blue and green head with latitude and longitude lines. Planet Earth is trying to read a chart on the wall to test its vision. The chart has all the world's problems listed. Globe-head looks miserable.

Globe-head: I can read everything but the top line.

The top line is the one with the largest print, and it says:

TOO MANY PEOPLE

Doctor: (Silence)

How many people is too many? It's over five billion now. How big a number is that? A big-league baseball stadium holds about fifty thousand people ... calculator ... divide ... later.

* * * * * * *

Sitting on the floor in my cubicle around UTM (Universal Thought Machine) are interactive holograms of Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Thomas Malthus, Gaia (Goddess of the Living Earth), and Captain Tari of the Tau Cetian Explorer Team.

Fran: Okay, y'all. Nice of you to ... um ... pop in. Please tell our readers who you are.

Einstein: They know me best for my theories of relativity. Do people think that stuff is complicated?

Fran: Yeah. (To next guest) And you are ...

Darwin: They know me best for my theory of the evolution of species.

Fran: (To next guest) And you are ...

Malthus: Thomas Malthus. English economist. I predict that people multiply, but food supplies only add, with time.

Fran: That's what this interview is about. Overpopulation.

Malthus: Ahhh!

Fran: (To next guest) And you are ...

Gaia: The Living Earth.

Fran: Or dying, as the case may be.

Gaia: You humans may be on the way out, but I intend to stick around for a long time.

Fran: Well said! (To next guest) And you are Tari ...

Tari: Yes. I'm on my seventh visit from Tau Ceti B. That's the second planet in orbit around the star Tau in what you call the constellation Cetus, also known as The Whale.

Fran: What constellation is Earth's sun in, as seen from your planet?

Tari: My people don't give names to groups of stars in the sky. But your sun we call Sol. Very similar star to Tau. Your planet ... similar to ours, well, it would be if not for ... well, now, I don't want you to accuse me of having attitude.

Fran: Our readers would like to know what y'all think about the overpopulation of the world. It is the end of the 20th century, just so we're all clear about the time frame into which UTM and I have popped you.

Malthus: Ah, how we love to be popped.

Fran: Yes. Whatever. Anyhow, there there are more than five billion people in the world today.

Malthus: You've already had a couple of catastrophes, I'll wager.

Fran: Two major world wars. Famines ... a new plague ...

Malthus: Famines? No surprise. Population increases as to 1, 2, 4, 8, 16. Food can only increase as to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. People took that and said, "More food means more people," which is literally the case. Then they twisted it all round and said I had no heart, quite a complete falsehood -- and irrelevant, anyhow.

UTM: Irreverent, too.

Darwin: Heart has no place in it. The world cannot cry for the plight of a species out of kilter.

Gaia: Oh my dear sir, what do you call that theory?

Darwin: Not a fit species any longer. Doomed on that basis.

Einstein: There should be some reasonable, compassionate common ground here.

Tari: Aren't you the one who developed atomic weapons?

Einstein: Oh, for the love of God, no.

Tari: You advocated that America rush to develop an atomic bomb --

Einstein: --so the devil didn't get it first!

Malthus: What is an atomic bomb?

Einstein: One of them can incinerate a city. It is horrible. They used two of them in 1945, and the revulsion was ...

Tari: You ought to do as we did, and use atomic power to explore outer space.

Einstein: I thought about that. But I wasn't sure about advocating anything after 1945.

Fran: I'm wondering, now, what you all think about the so-called population explosion on our planet. What do you think needs to be done? What can we do? What's within human ability?

Malthus: I suggest that you read about me in any encyclopedia. My opinions are well-stated enough. Not hard to understand at all, really. There will be crises. That is all.

Fran: You mean to say, we'll never learn.

Malthus: May it be bashed into our collective noggin!

Darwin: I say, let evolution take care of it. The fittest survive. Always have, always will. In this case the fittest are the ones who do not reproduce.

Tari: That is a paradox! I love paradoxes.

UTM: So do I.

Tari: A machine can't know anything.

Einstein: But this is a Universal Truth Machine.

Fran: He's right. Hold that thought.

Gaia: I like what Charles said. The fittest are the ones who don't reproduce, up to a point. I think human sex is becoming more of an art form, and less of a means of propagating the species.

Malthus: Listen to the hedonist.

Tari: She's right. In some civilizations here, that's being learned. Like in Europe. But in some places it just ... there's this collective stupidity. In America, well, if pornography is art, then ...

Gaia: But Charles is right all around. Evolution will take care of it. The ones who can mold their instincts will survive. That's what evolution is all about, anyway, the orderly progress to higher modes of existence.

Darwin: No-no-no! A thousand times no.

Gaia (distractedly): What?

Darwin: You're implying that evolution has some cosmic purpose.

Gaia: Of course it does.

Darwin: No. It just happens. That's just the way things are. The universe is made that way ... period.

Gaia: So evolution happens simply because it happens.

Malthus: That sounds reasonable to me.

Gaia: There is no reason.

Malthus: Must everything have a reason?

Gaia: So evolution is an effect without a cause.

UTM: She's trying to trap you, guys.

Einstein: We know. She is a woman. What else should we expect?

Tari: Oh nonsense.

Gaia: Effects without causes. And you call yourselves scientists?

Tari: I've ... our whole society has wrestled with that problem. Maybe I can shed some ... can illuminate this.

Gaia: Please.

Tari: The Living Earth ... How did you come to exist, Gaia?

Gaia: I am the daughter of my mother and my father.

Tari: Who is your mother?

Gaia: The life force that revolves in the spiral arms of the Galaxy.

Einstein: You mean what we call the Milky Way?

Gaia: Yes, yes.

Tari: Who is your father?

Gaia: The power at the core of the Galaxy, brighter than a trillion suns, hotter than anything you can imagine.

Einstein: Sounds like yin/yang. The hot bright center, the ethereal outer reaches ...

Gaia: Precisely! That is where the whole Oriental yin/yang concept comes from.

Einstein: The Orientals fascinate me. They have the most wonderful, all-encompassing notion of God.

Darwin: Let's keep God out of this, shall we?

Malthus: Hear, hear.

Gaia: But how can we? God is in it. God is it. I was begotten from my mother and my father. They desired me, and they begat me.

Einstein: Fascinating.

Gaia: Charles. Thomas. Where is your sense of wonder? How did you come to your theories? You must have used some reasoning, did you not?

Darwin (a bit indignant): Of course.

Malthus: Yes.

Gaia: You didn't just sit down and say, "Now, this is the way things are," and then figuratively throw paint at the wall, as it were, and watch the figurative slop run down, and then say, "There you have it." Did you?

Malthus: It was a process thought out with mathematical precision.

Gaia: In mathematics you have axioms, and you have rules of deduction, and you derive conclusions from the axioms, by means of the rules.

Einstein: Yes. My axiom was that the speed of light is invariant. That's all relativity is. Why does it confuse people so? Well, anyhow, I have some ideas about the population problem.

Gaia: To answer Charles and Thomas here, you ought to know that science never, never ends. It is an ongoing process. Why do you study science? Albert, tell them.

Einstein: I wanted to know the truth. I wanted to see the universe for what it is.

Gaia: And if you happened to come up with a final theory --

Einstein: -- which, although I strove, I did not--

Gaia: -- but if you had, you would have wanted it put to the test.

Einstein: I would not settle for a wrong theory.

Gaia: But there is always some doubt.

Einstein: There has to be. Otherwise everything would stop dead in its tracks. We'd find ourselves mind-dead.

Tari: Or maybe soul-dead.

Gaia: What if you had said, "The speed of light is invariant, and that's just the way things are," and then not done anything with it?

Darwin: Now, you know we do not operate like that.

Malthus: Of course not.

Gaia: But you deny that evolution has any cosmic purpose.

Darwin: That's because the idea of a cosmic purpose is unscientific.

Tari: This barrier between science and art ... it must come down! Pure science has not brought Earth happiness. It has only made trouble. From my planet we can travel to the stars, but we go to market on a vehicle that resembles one of your donkeys.

Einstein: Beautiful. I used to love to sail on the wind ... ski a mountain slope using only gravitation as a propellant ...

Darwin: I did want to mention to you, Francisco, that your town is the noisiest place I've ever been in.

Malthus: And incredibly crowded.

Einstein: But you can get out on the water and sail.

Gaia: Tari has a point. But even the hardest scientists work with cause-and-effect. They never satisfy themselves to say that cause is effect.

Malthus: Back to St. Thomas Aquinas' prime-mover argument for the existence of God, is that it?

Gaia: Back to the fundamental problem here ... there are too many people in the world.

Fran: In one sentence or less, each of you ... What to do?

Tari: Live life as an art form.

Einstein: Seek truth.

Malthus: Bear your cross.

Darwin: Use contraception.

Gaia: All of these.

* * * * * * *

Fran: Well, UTM, they're gone.

UTM: They're cool. Let's do it again.

Fran: Now, Universal Truth Machine ...

UTM: You know there's no such thing.

Fran: Mathematically speaking.

UTM: It's universally true that there is no set of universal truths.

Fran: Yeah, yeah.

UTM: If Kang cuts the hair of everyone who doesn't cut their own hair, then who cuts Kang's hair?

Fran: Cut it out. About the population explosion thing, Universal Time/Thought/Translation/Truth Machine, can you surmise anything from our little gathering?

UTM: That we ought to trust in a Higher Power.

Fran: To solve the population crisis?

UTM: Do you have a better idea?

Fran: Well ... no. But to just sit back, to say, "Okay, we'll turn it over," and then expect things to just happen ...

UTM: Oh, it'll take work.

Fran: How will we know what to do?

UTM: Trust. Work and trust. Change attitudes.

Fran: You mean like Tari said, to tear down the barrier between science and art?

UTM: It will fall by itself.

Fran: How's that?

UTM: Because it was never there in the first place.

Fran: You mean ...

UTM: Envision a picture of the world as you want it, and then paint the picture.

Fran: Is it that simple?

UTM: It is simple and elegant.

Fran: Like Einstein's theory of relativity.

UTM. Exactly, dear boy.

Copyright 1998, 1999, 2000 by Francisco Carrera.