Too Many People

     Let's face it, there are too many of us humans.  Drive on most any freeway, at any hour, and wonder where the heck everyone is going?  Multiply that feeling if you're at an airport.  Or drive past any hospital parking lot and wonder how the heck are so many people ill or injured?  Big concerts, packed stadiums, large protests, all of them leave you scratching your head.  How do you feed and satiate all those people, much less get rid of their trash and poop?  We number in the billions, as in soon to be nearly 10 billion within 25 years, according to projections from a United Nations report.  Put another way, if you could put away $100 per day, it would take you nearly 274,000 years to reach $10 billion.  Translate that to feeding 100 people a day and, well, you can see the enormous task ahead.

     So it bears repeating of that recent poll from ReliefWeb that showed that the continuing "peace" war in Gaza: ...has laid bare the harrowing psychological toll of Israel’s ongoing military operation on Gaza’s youngest population.  The findings are harrowing: The survey found that 92% of children were “not accepting of reality,” 79% suffered from nightmares, and 73% displayed symptoms of aggression...An estimated 17,000 children in Gaza are unaccompanied, separated from their parents due to the conflict.  Back home in the US, the number of legally-owned gun silencers jumped from 285,000 in 2011 to nearly 3,500,000 in 2024 wrote The Smoking Gun.  What's up with that?  Then there was this from The New Yorker on the shortage of recruits, ships, weapons and ammo in the military (Trump has put feelers out to have private start-up companies "remake" the military).  Boggling, isn't it?  Okay, forget all that and take solace in the words of the late Will Durant, author of the massive 11-volume set, The Story of Civilization*: Civilization is a stream with banks.  The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing things historians usually record -- while, on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, have children, sing songs, write poetry, whittle statues.  The story of civilization is the story of what happens on the banks.  Back then, and despite the intimidating size of the set of books (I only managed to get through 2 1/2 volumes since each was between 600 and 800+ pages of small print) the "story" read like a novel, captivating and full of details but never boring.  For me, it was more the thought that there were so many more volumes to read, each staring back at me from the bookshelf like an angry cat waiting to pounce (Durant wrote about half of the books solo until he met his wife Ariel, and they finished the rest of the set together).  On his page he also wrote this: I do not understand my God, and I find in nature and history many instances of apparent evil, disorder, cruelty and aimlessness.  But I realize that I see these with a very limited vision and that they might appear quite otherwise from a cosmic point of view.  How can an infinitesimal part of the universe understand the whole?  We are drops of water trying to understand the sea.  As Paul McCartney sang as far back as 1971: Too many people going underground, too many reaching for a piece of cake.  Too many people pulled and pushed around, too many waiting for that lucky break.

Then there's Helm.*  In the creative new book by Sarah Hall, the Helm is an entity of sorts, the wind that swirls around us and forms and reforms and dissipates and has been there since the beginning: Fossils are the devil's trick; some benign entity sneezed to make the world.  Or.  Artisanal aliens left their play-dough behind.  Or.  Balancing act -- elephants and turtles.  Or.  Any other creation theory -- hollow Earth, flat Earth, mud collection, hanging cord, corpse reuse, dreamlike, biosphere as gemstone in the ring of a galactic giant, please insert alternative here.  Helm doesn't care which story is true...[humans] are so fun and terribly worrying.  When they cooperate,  they can learn, improve, create extremely nice things.  At worst, they're ruinous, dumb as mud, making mistakes over and over and over again.  Lives as fast as fireworks too.  Crackle, fizz, pop, extinguished.  Curious model.  Crowded together as we are, jammed on freeways and dodging people in the market and on sidewalks, are we feeling more and more pressed in, pushed by the Helm and confined to ever-smaller places, all while wondering how we can break free and just "have some space?"  But we're not alone in feeling that; consider that today's commercial egg-laying chickens have to live their 6 or so weeks of life in an area about the size of a 8.5x11 sheet of paper.  Crunch all those subjects as a whole --factory farming, depleted aquifers, air pollution, refugee crossings, tribal wars, changing militaries-- and they can all be linked to one thing...there are simply too many people.  And yet, we are lonely...      Wrote an opinion in The Hill: ...the social foundations are cracking.  Fewer young Americans are working.  Not transitioning between jobs — simply not employed at all.  Many move between credentials and gig work, lacking direction and long-term footing.  Marriage rates are collapsing.  Birth rates are falling below replacement.  These trends are linked.  When stable work is harder to find, forming relationships becomes harder, commitment harder still, and raising a family nearly impossible.  And from Statistica: Loneliness is marked by feeling alone, disconnected from others, or lacking close or meaningful relationships.  Loneliness is a state of mind and even people with many friends can feel lonely...In the United States, the number of close friends adults report having has decreased over the past few decades, which may contribute to feelings of loneliness.  One has to ask: how can we be more crowded together and yet feel so apart?  Is it social media?  Is it AI?  Is it simply generational?  More importantly, is it true?  Call us old school but my wife and I tend to feel that fewer young people seem to make eye contact or look up from their phones.  But is that simply our "older" viewpoint?  Thinking back to when I was a younger lad, I had to ask myself how often I would stop to say hello or to talk with older people?  Has anything really changed, other than viewpoints changing as we grow older?  But the reality is that we do seem to be getting more crowded.  Drive on the roads, or glance at new apartment construction, or cruise around shopping centers and restaurants...they all seem to be growing and growing in density.  Or is that also just a matter of how we are seeing things?  And have we had enough of this overcrowding and decided to simply stop having children?

     A briefing in Bloomberg noted: By the end of this century, the global population will almost certainly start to shrink.  Then it will keep shrinking until and unless something happens that has never happened for as long as reliable records have existed: Global birth rates will have to increase and stay there.  Absent that, simple math dictates that the population eventually falls to zero.  In the interview, they noted a recent abstract for the National Bureau of Economic Research that asked why fertility rates are so low, primarily in high income countries.  Noted the paper: Across high-income countries --and increasingly in other countries as well-- birth rates are falling to historically low levels.  Total fertility rates (TFR) have dropped below replacement rate in nearly all OECD countries, with many experiencing sustained fertility rates below 1.5, including Japan, Italy, Canada, Greece, and Italy.  Some countries in East Asia, including South Korea, Singapore, and China, now have a TFR at or below one.  Fertility rates this low raise concerns about the potential economic and social impacts of population aging and declining population growth, including a shrinking labor force, declining economic dynamism, and the fiscal unsustainability of social insurance programs.  They also raise larger, more existential questions about what depopulation would mean for the climate, for living standards, and more generally for the welfare of humanity...[in the US] the general fertility rate has fallen for all five-year age groups under age 30.  There has been a dramatic, sustained decline in the US teen birth rate, which has fallen by roughly 70% since the early 1990s.

    So what's causing this?  A concerted effort not to have kids?  Couples deciding to have just one or two children instead of three or four?  The sheer cost of raising a "large" family?  Environmental factors making it more difficult to reproduce?  Or are people beginning to die at an earlier age (cancer rates in people as young as 20 are increasing, wrote the NY Times)?  Harsh, I know, but as Peter Schjeldahl wrote in an essay: Life doesn't go on.  It goes nowhere except away.  Death goes on.  Going on is what death does for a living.  The Secret to surviving in the universe is to be dead.  It was difficult to accept this quote from John Green (author of The Fault in Our Stars): As of 2025, around 117 billion modern humans have lived.  Over 100 billion were born before 1804.  Almost everything that ever happened to us, and almost everyone who ever happened, happened before 1804 [the graph provided by Wikipedia makes his statement glaringly clear].  So the question becomes, is the world we view really  increasing? -- in population, in wars, in diseases?

     Green's recent book dealt with one relatively uncommon, but increasingly prevalent disease, tuberculosis.  And what exactly IS tuberculosis?  Wrote Green: M. tuberculosis is a near-perfect human predator in part because it moves very slowly.  The bacteria has an uncommonly slow growth rate.  While E. coli can double in number about every twenty minutes in a laboratory eperiment, M. tuberculosis doubles only about once per day.  And so infection simply takes much, much longer to make an infected person sick, as the number of bacteria remains lower, allowing the immune system lots of time to mount a defense against the pathogen.  But there's a problem.  M. tuberculosis grows so slowly because it takes a long time to build its unusually fatty, thick cell wall, which is a formidable enemy to the immune system.  White blood cells struggle to penetrate the cell wall and kill the bacteria from within.  In fact, it's so hard for infection-fighting cells to penetrate the bacteria's cell wall that, instead, white blood cells usually surround it, creating a ball of calcifying tissue known as a tubercle.  The TB bacteria can survive within these tubercles, replicating very slowly, consuming dead tissue as food.  This type of infection, sometimes known as latent tuberculosis, will often last a lifetime without ever making a person sick.  Most people infected with TB will never become ill because the tubercles will continue to hold the bacteria within them, preventing active disease from devloping.  But in 5 to 10 percent of infections, the immune system can't produce enough white blood cells to surround all the bacteria with tubercles, and M. tuberculosis is able to grow and grow within the lungs or elsewhere.  The body is slowly overwhelmed by infection (and the immune system's resulting inflammation), eventually leading to death.  Most active tuberculosis illnesses occur within two years of initial infection, but sometimes the infection can be dormant for decades before suddenly exploding into active disease.  At times, it can seem as if we, too, have insulated outselves, surviving and withdrawing in our own "tubercles" both as people and as a country as if guarding against something, not realizing that we have become the infection...

     We are an interesting species, as capable of love as we are of hate, as capable of doing great things as we are of doing horrible things, as capable of creating something amazingly beautiful and beneficial to life as we are of destroying it.  Perhaps we'll be lucky and live as long as the dinosaurs, perhaps not (us humans as a civilization = 200 thousand years; dinosaurs = 165 million years, although even that gigantic number represents less than 2% of Earth's history).  But that is the long view, the view of humanity as seen from distant space and through the realm of time.  So I take solace in the individual view as expressed in a recent piece in New Scientist: Perhaps when the time comes we will have some understanding; perhaps not.  Perhaps we will simply look back at our incomprehension and realize that it was and is enough to just appreciate the "ride" of life, to have had our spouse and children and relatives and animals, to have had our joys and our pains, to have had our God or gods and science, to have had our ah-ha moments and our moments of utter puzzlement.  Perhaps in our effort to explain everything, whether by religion or by science, we explain nothing.  Perhaps we are no further along than Greek and Roman mythological answers.  Perhaps we will get there, or perhaps we won't.  Perhaps we'll discover that the search outwards was all wrong, that we should have been looking right in front of us the entire time, that life itself is not understandable, but that it is truly a miracle.  And one we just need to acknowledge and accept with gratitude rather than try to take it apart.  After all, we are only human...and but a small part of what we call "life."  So why worry?  As David Bowie once wrote: Let's dance!  Put on your red shoes and dance the blues to the song they're playing on the radio, while color lights up your face sway through the crowd to an empty space.  And what better place to dance (if you're wealthy) than in Trump's new corporate ballroom, which will actually be larger than the White House itself (here's the proposed architectural rendering as posted in the Washington Post). 

    From space, our larger cities appear crammed together, an organized maze as if we were little more than mice or rats navigating our way out to grab a reward of food.  The cities viewed in the pictures above are those (in order) of Amsterdam, Melrose Park (Florida), Nezahualcóyotl City (outside Mexico City), and Paris.  Each was from the book Overview, a series of satellite images, several of which have been featured in earlier posts.  From that distant perspective, we appear crowded, concentrated, pressed together.  But such images can't show what actually is happening "down there," all the cars and bikes, the people walking and talking and rushing and having dinner, the smiles and tears and arguments and car horns adding to the din of that life, the waters and sewage and fountains, the paintings and murals, the music.  Even all the cats and rats and ants and microbes furiously moving about in their quest to stay alive.  Little of that comes through in such views, a mirror of what we don't see when we look out over a vast (at least what seems to us) unpopulated landscape: a desert, an ocean, a mountain, a deep canyon.  And perhaps that distant satellite view we carry within us is also the lesson, that we should look deeper, to not view what we see as crowded cities or refugee camps or waste ponds or battlefields, but as areas where humans are still trying to scatter, areas open to being made into a home, areas that tell another possible hope that we're not done, that life still exists in so many forms and that even we have yet to figure out most of that.  Perhaps this is why we are slowing our birthrates, that we are trying to step back and make sense of where we are and what we have and to acknowledge within ourselves that life does go on...but perhaps not with us if we don't take care of things.  Perhaps we need that satellite view just to look at things from afar in order to understand that other life is teeming everywhere, even in the desolate places, and that our planet is only so large and that we will need to try and accommodate all life, even bugs and diseases.  They were all here before us, WAY before us.  Perhaps we should quit fighting them all --and ourselves-- and simply try to learn what they have learned over the millennia, that even in as crowded a space as our bodies, we can make room for more...we can share what we have and coexist.     

*I must admit that despite all of the author's awards, her taking 20 years to write this book and the praise this book has received, as well as her research on Cumbria & meteorology & Victorian history,, I found Helm a difficult read.  Just as with those television series that constantly flash a "10 years earlier" segment over and over, imagine one that does this with many time periods as if a swirling wind in its own right.  Far better to dive into House of Leaves if you want to read a semi-random tale of events (in that book, the footnotes are nearly as prolific as the printed page, and tell an almost completely different narrative).  Still, that is my opinion and yours may be the total opposite...just saying.  And along those lines of randomness, there's Venezuela.  Just what we needed, another dividing line.  And right off the bat, I'll be straight and tell you that I know zip about the country or the situation; but boy are there a LOT of opinions out there, from its "garbage" oil (too heavy, too full of sulfur, even as 12 Chevron ships head there to pick some up) to our Conquistador-like reenactment of the Monroe Doctrine.  And with more than a bit of bias, I dash off my nephew's son's opinion from his own blog post, one which I felt was a good start in trying to boil down a summary of the situation (he's ex-military and conservative)...that said, my even more conservative, almost-colonial-days friends, felt that Venezuela was little more of an issue than was storming the Capitol on January 6th where more than 140 Capitol police either died or were injured (a plaque honoring those who bravely defended the building was placed there).  1040 of those who broke into and damaged the building or injured the police pled guilty and were sentenced in federal court.  Nonetheless, Trump later declared the attack on the building a peaceful protest, pardoned all those involved, and ordered that the plaque honoring the police who defended the building removed.  On the recent 6th anniversary of the destruction of our Capitol, my hat goes off to all those federal officers who valiantly did their jobs and tried to protect what that building represented...