A philosophy question

Several previous posters have mentioned war and politics, and of course, no individual gets to the sort of jobs that make those choices if they are kind, caring people who love humanity as a whole. If they did, they would not have been morally able to do the things 'necessary' to get to those jobs. There is no heirarchical power structure in the world, be it political or economic, that is a meritocracy. The only way to advance is to step on the people below you. That's how it works. So an interesting philosophical side-topic to this question is why do we entrust these kinds of decisions to individuals who by definition have demonstrated that they are the last people who should ever be entrusted with this sort of decision?


On a purely rational and objective level, one would look at the carrying capacity of the habitat for any organism and determine whether the population was too large; in our case, the carrying capacity is 100 million humans for the entire planet...which is somewhat shocking when you consider that were are rapidly approaching 10 billion. Through short-term technological tricks that are simple putting off starvation and water shortages into the not-too-distant future, and at a severe cost to our own system in the form of mass extinctions (humans are the first organic cause of a mass extiction in the history of life on Earth) of other species and planet-wide destabilization, we are temporarily sustaining a massive overpopulation. One would - from the outside as the aliens in sci-fi stories like "The Day The Earth Stood Still" - look at the system and see a single species destroying the habitat as an invasive parasite that should be removed.