I no longer have time to read the whole thread. I'm curious if Dr Doom--Dr Eric Pianka and his desire to spray the world with Ebola has been discussed on this thread?
Nope it has not, care to elaborate?
I can't by any means say that I've heard and read everything he's said and written, but I have read a couple of his articles on this subject and I think he's been misrepresented in much of the press. As far as I can tell, he's not advocating the use of Ebola or other diseases in order to control world population, but rather warning that this is a very real danger. Granted that his presentation is rather dramatic and unorthodox, but he doesn't seem to be the monster that's been depicted.
Additionally he points out that we are not immune from considerations of the "carrying capacity" of our environment - that just like a colony of bacteria or ants or buffalo, if our population grows beyond what our environment can support then something will happen that will limit our population. Unlike the bacteria, we are able to some extent to modify our environment to increase its carrying capacity, but we aren't gods; we can't increase it without limit. His opinion is that we are very close to the edge right now and will need to do something drastic - limiting population or increasing capacity - very soon or face disaster. In fact he believes that it is most likely too late already, and that we will soon be overtaken by events caused by our population's size and dynamics.
He has some very good points - human society is now very integrated worldwide, so that if a disease originates in some obscure tribe somewhere, it can quickly spread throughout the world. Not only that, but humans now interact with many other species (and with each other) in ways that expose them to more and different pathogens, and which allow for the genetic recombination of a wider variety of microbes. It's probably only a matter of time before something really dangerous and lethal emerges, and when it does, it will spread very quickly. That was his point about Ebola - it appears to be only one or two steps away from becoming an airborne pathogen (like the common cold) rather than its present mode of blood-borne infection (requiring direct contact with an infected person). There are other candidates as well; he uses the example of AIDS, but at the moment it's farther away from such a transformation because it is not only not very infectious (requiring direct contact of either blood products or sexual intercourse), but its disease course is not particularly fast - requiring years or even decades between infection and death.
Predictions like this are of course nothing new, and so far we've been able to avoid disaster. But it's also true that we've continued to push the envelope, and barring major technological and social breakthroughs, sooner or later it's likely to come back to bite us.