This month I'm writing about a topic that is science, but also political. In one word it is overpopulation. This particular writing was inspired by two things: 1) articles in this month's National Geographic and 2) the resurgence of hate throughout the world.

As a NASA scientist, now retired, I had the opportunity to see many pictures of the Earth from space. Some rather close up, 200 miles away, others from the moon, about 250,000 miles away, and others from distant planets, on the order of 100 million miles away. From 200 miles up you can see cities, jungles, deserts, and forest fires, a rather close up view, but far enough away that you get a "global" perspective. From the moon, you can see oceans and continents, but no indications of human existence. From other planets, you see either a blue ball or just a white spec, depending on the distance. From other stars, we're not visible.

As a high school student said when I was describing this to his class, "We're nothing".

From a time perspective, the Earth is about 5 billion years old. If theoretical calculations are correct, the Earth should be habitable for about another 5 billion years. Dinosaurs existed from about 250 million to about 65 million years ago. Human beings arrived on the scene about 5 million years ago. From the planet's viewpoint, we haven't been here very long. As you read this, keep in mind that we have developed the technology that may be capable of making us go extinct now, after a very short run.

The first National Geographic article that struck me was about species extinction. Specifically, a bird that is likely to go extinct because of our "need" for oil. Each month seems to have an article about a different species. The argument, from a simple viewpoint, is do we save a species or do we satisfy our "need" for oil? Depending upon who is in political power we either save the species, or we get more oil. If we let the species go extinct, it is irreversible. I do need to say that sometimes we find a reasonable compromise, but that word seems to have fallen out of favor lately.

The other article dealt with food. How do we feed the expected population growth? It discussed the pollution consequences of more beef and more plants of the type we are used to eating. It stated that we could eat insects. As an aside, I did eat roasted beetles in Korea and they were very rich and tasty. However, eating insects raises two questions: 1) will we run out of them too, and 2) do we continually degrade the quality of life for more people?

The issue of rising hate was covered in some experiments done with laboratory rats in the 1960s. It found that if you kept increasing the rat density in a population, they started killing each other. It was called the crowded rat syndrome. Is the rise in hate that we are seeing the result of overpopulation?

My wife and I discussed this problem back in the 1960s and decided that we did not need to add to the world's overpopulation problem. So, we have no children. But, we do care about the future of humanity. When I discuss this with politicians, they do not want to touch the subject because it is what one might call a "hot potato". From my perspective, most of the world's problems could be solved by an intelligent reduction in population. I am particularly perplexed by the human reaction in that God gave us a brain to think our way out.