214: Are we smarter than bugs?

Bugs will infest a plant until they kill it, then when it dies, they die. It's happening to the fig tree and cherry tomato plants in my windowsill garden. If they could keep their population low enough to avoid killing the plant, they could live longer.

We seem to be doing the same with Earth's non-renewable resources. From a species perspective, what benefit do we get from fast cars and cell phones if we can't stop ourselves from overshooting the planet's resources and causing our population to collapse. As a species we would not likely go extinct from a collapse, but our global society might not recover.

Plenty of human civilizations have collapsed, their ruins covered by sand and jungle, with barely a sign they existed. Do we want such an outcome on a global scale?

Avoiding that outcome means controlling our population differently than bugs---seeing non-renewable parts of nature like oil and choosing not to use them, or renewable resources and choosing not to use them to where they become non-renewable, like fish and clean air.

Are we smarter than bugs?

The math behind how finding extra resource, even other planets, don't help, by Tom Murphy.

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• Tom Murphy on this podcast

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