This video is sponsored by HelloFresh. HelloFresh makes cooking at home fun, easy, AND affordable!
Get mouthwatering seasonal recipes and fresh, pre-measured ingredients delivered right to your
door with HelloFresh, America’s #1 meal kit. I couldn’t be happier that HelloFresh is
sponsoring this video because it really is my favorite meal kit service, and believe me,
I’ve tried them all. And why are they my favorite? For one simple reason,
because their recipes are so delicious! I recently chose the Creamy Dreamy Mushroom
Cavatappi as part of my delivery, and not only is it insanely good, but it truly was a dream to
cook! The step-by-step recipe and pre-portioned ingredients made everything come together in no
time, and when I finally tasted it I could hardly believe how good it was. It was honestly better
than most restaurant pasta dishes I’ve had, and it was cheaper than one too! HelloFresh
meals are on average 72% cheaper than dining at a restaurant according to a Zagat Dining Survey.
And not only are you saving money with HelloFresh, but you’re saving the environment too! HelloFresh
is the first carbon neutral meal kit company and nearly all the packaging is recyclable!
So what are you waiting for? Use my link or go to hellofresh.com and use code POGINFOGRAPH16
for up to 16 FREE MEALS + 3 SURPRISE GIFTS across 6 HelloFresh boxes plus free shipping.
From working in your sleep to living in giant technological prisons;
to the elites swanning off to another planet to you slogging it out like a slave down here,
the future is fantastically frightening. Hold on tight, and get ready for a population explosion
like the world has never seen. 10 billion
When a well-known demographer was asked about population growth recently, he came up with
quite a frightening answer. That was “Every billion more people makes life more difficult
for everybody — it’s as simple as that.” Hmm, that really doesn’t bode well for
the people that are going to star in our trip to the future. Still, he said at 10 billion,
we’ll do just fine, we’ll get by adding that it is literally, not the end of the world.
In the 1960s, some experts were expecting a growth bomb which would result in mass starvation in
places like India. They said we need to prepare for poverty like we’ve never seen before.
Still, go back to the year 1866 and some so-called experts in the UK
said England’s growth was totally unsustainable because of the country’s dwindling coal reserves.
So, with that in mind, when it comes to getting it right, people who we look up to often get it
wrong. It’s so hard to call, when in 1960 Time magazine wrote about “That Population Explosion”,
the population was three billion. It had taken just thirty-three years to go from two to three
billion, but it had taken 125 years to go from one to two billion. In 1968, people were getting
pretty scared, with a book called “The Population Bomb” saying we will have to resort to either
“population control” or a “race to oblivion.” That’s why some scientists say when making
such predictions that we should do so with caution because things can change.
We’ve seen the growth rate decline in recent history, but for the sake of today’s show,
for reasons we’ll talk about, we’re just going to pretend that this isn’t a factor.
We are forecast to hit 10 billion in 2050, so we predict the world won’t look all that different
at this milestone. It won’t mean we’re suddenly thrust into some kind of dystopian sci-fi movie.
That’s what the experts say anyway. Nonetheless, Stephen Emmitt, hailed as
“one of London's most influential scientists” and author of the book “10 billion” once said “Every
which way you look at it, a planet of 10 billion looks like a nightmare.” Still, for his nightmare
to come to fruition, we think that we should look at what happens at 20 billion because some people
think this guy is way too pessimistic. 20 billion
When it comes to a big rise in the number of humans on the planet,
Emmitt summed it up in a not very scientific way, simply stating, “I think we are BLEEPED.”
He’s right, because in our world when we hit 20 billion we hadn’t changed our ways much and didn’t
yet have any super technology to drastically change how we lived.
We are facing what someone had once predicted, “an unprecedented planetary emergency.”
Nonetheless, at this point, we were still stuffing our faces with little regard to
what it is we are eating or how it was made. We were happily consuming energy without considering
how energy sources were being depleted and how making that energy is creating a warmer world.
Half the world is turning into one giant dustbin and the other half has turned into a polluted
wasteland. However, the rich that controlled the technology that we are totally immersed in,
have separated from us. They are beginning to move into the least polluted parts of the world. This
great separation will soon become the standard. We will get to a point where we just accept that
some people have to suffer and other lives have to be sustained in comfort for what
they say is the greater good of mankind. Obviously, there were riots and all kinds
of anti-government feeling, but since every waking movement we made was tracked and traced
and our lives depended on how we fared in a global points system, it was hard to rebel.
Even buying food depended on how many points we had and what “good citizen” score we had.
Just as the writer George Orwell feared when he wrote the book 1984,
Big Brother watched over us all. As the world was going to hell in a handbasket,
there wasn’t much we could do about it. And as natural resources dwindled and places
became more polluted, the powers that be were compelled to design a new kind of infrastructure
for us plebs. 30 billion
Many years before when the population was just under eight billion, lots of people
talked about a Green Revolution. That never happened. As poorer countries got richer,
most people in those countries wanted to see what living as a conspicuous consumer felt like.
That hardly melded very well with the green movement, and you can be sure that those
rich Europeans and Americans didn’t want to sacrifice anything in their three-car families.
30 billion people meant a lot more three-car families and that meant more growth,
but it wasn’t sustainable. These people in the former developing
world had watched many people in the West living without a care in the world for years. Watching
them physically fight each other in stores over video games, their massive backsides and
protruding bellies crashing into each other like slow-moving icebergs made out of lard.
Now, most of the world’s poor, which was around 85 percent of the global population, had what
they wanted, but something drastic had to happen to keep these people from devouring the planet.
A long time ago a man had introduced the world to the “Metaverse”, which he said would transform
people’s lives, stating that it would increase happiness and well-being, but in his Brave New
World the technology only ended up as a kind of drug that offered a new form of slave labor
and a distraction from all the wrongs in society. These sleepwalkers in the Metaverse lived in tiny
rooms in newly constructed apartment complexes that spanned for miles and
miles. Tens of thousands of people lived in each complex, buildings that were given the
name “Panopticons” because everything people did in there was recorded.
It prevented much crime from happening, but these buildings were real horror shows to live in.
Experts in the past had talked about the “Sixth Mass Extinction”, but because that
had never happened, the people didn’t believe in other scary predictions. They’d lost all trust
in so-called experts, and anyway, once in the Metaverse, they’d forgotten all about extinction.
The food problem, though, was very real as the extinction of many species of insects
had occurred, leading to massive loss of ecosystems with their life-sustaining
plants and animals. This didn’t matter, because food had been taken care of.
Now as people ran around their Metaverse scoring points, they were delivered nutrients through
intravenous drips connected to huge containers in every Panopticon. The lab-made liquid nutrients
were enough to sustain life, barely. Ironically, this great invention was called “Fast-Food”,
a type of cuisine back in the day that was said to be bad for your health.
Now the only people who ate food from animals and real plants were the very rich. The vast majority
of people had only ever seen something like a cow or a blueberry in virtual form. They fished,
but only in the Metaverse when they were farming and fishing for the elite in the depleted oceans.
But even with all this misery, the population kept on growing at an astonishing rate.
40 billion It took several years
for the population to increase from 30 billion to 40 billion. Inside those panopticons, there was
one other thing to do outside of the Metaverse. People humped like rabbits and the government,
now a world government speaking in only one language, actually endorsed this. By the way,
the world government knew that getting everyone to speak one language was important.
Control the language and you control the people. Gradually, everyone spoke only English.
In the Metaverse just like in the old real world, the main focus in a global sense was economic
growth. Now that the world, the virtual world, was endless, there could be infinite growth.
Humans were like hamsters on wheels, and the more they virtually ran, the more virtual
profits they created for the owners of the technology – now unironically called “Titans”.
Such a word came from ancient Greek mythology, although no worker would
have known that because books hadn’t been read for years. Books weren’t banned, but the human
mind had slowly evolved to not be able to tolerate any kind of composed concentration
outside of hitting the correct buttons. They could even do that in their sleep,
since new hibernation pods had made it possible to perform simple tasks while part of the mind
was getting some winks. This meant they could work around the clock, which was required to
keep the virtual and real infrastructure running. When they weren’t working, they were playing and
conversing in the Metaverse, again, for more points. The more virtual friendships you had,
the more points you got, so not many people wasted time trying to meet folks in real life. That was
time-consuming and didn’t always work out. In terms of hand-eye coordination, humans
became at least 50 times faster compared to humans back when the Metaverse began,
but hardly anyone could finish a sentence without feeling confused and nauseous.
It didn’t matter. People put up with their tepid distractions because they didn’t know
any other reality. Happiness could only really be understood through points. People were told
when they were happy and they believed it, and at least they had sex, unemotional sex,
which is why the population kept increasing at an astonishing rate of around a billion a year.
50 billion Artificial intelligence
had never become conscious, despite what people said years ago, but when the population hit 50
billion it was advanced enough to know what people needed before they knew it.
No one ever felt hungry because the receptors in the brain that sent messages to the stomach
were intercepted before any real cognition happened. Fast-Food was delivered without
any interruption of thought, which gave folks much more time to work.
Oil never ran out, there was an endless amount of it, enough to keep the technology going and
the Panopticon full of life, or “half-life” as the Titans called it. The refineries, factories
and plants were run using AI along with the human workers who never had to leave their tiny rooms.
Working from home many, many years earlier had been sold as something progressive, but as
things turned out, it only meant less physical interactions with others and much more work.
It wasn’t illegal to be unemployed of course, but fewer points meant fewer doors could be opened in
the Metaverse. Essentially, that also meant less sex. The unemployed were like the lepers of the
middle ages, wandering around the rundown parts of Metaverse with their virtual faces hidden.
But for the elites, who only ever entered the Metaverse to have a laugh or contemplate the
creation of new worlds, something was changing. 60 billion
After pollution became so bad that much of the world’s flora and fauna was disappearing,
the elites moved into city-like containments of their own. These were vast sections of the
world that had once been countryside. They got the name Moroviers, after Thomas Moore, the man
who’d written a 15th-century book called Utopia. These highly regulated environments were safe,
un-polluted, and contained just about all of the valuable artifacts that had existed in
the old world. Thanks to gene manipulation, most rich people could expect to live a healthy life.
Life expectancy for the elites was now around 150 years, a maximum that had been predicted
many years ago. Humans could prevent disease, but there was nothing they could do about blood
pressure, blood cell counts, and other bodily things related to natural aging.
Cancer and many viruses were a thing of the past for the elites, but for the workers of
the Metaverse, they very much existed. In fact, for them, life expectancy was only around 60,
even though medicine was greatly improved by this point. According to Doctor Mustapha Marx,
who’d made breakthroughs in human psychology, the worker's decreased will to live in such a virtual
world resulted in fewer years lived on average. “The mind is the master of longevity,” Marx once
said at a conference for Metaverse engineers. Marx had invented neural implants which were
supposed to stop this from happening, but happiness and sadness were tough nuts to crack.
No amount of technology could make humans happier. Humans had never
managed to decode the brain because the brain and more importantly, consciousness,
had remained for the most part a mystery. This is why the super-elites, who now all lived
in one single containment city high on a hill they named Olympus, had over the years a reinvigorated
interest when it came to what had once been scorned by science. That was a belief in the
soul. The soul was back in fashion for the supers, and it didn’t matter how many bionic prosthetics
they had to improve their natural bodies, their souls could still be plagued by unwanted feelings.
They had bigger concerns anyway. That sixth extinction was looking more and more likely.
70 billion Even though the
containment cities were safe from most of the vagaries of the environment, and even though
the people in the panopticons were mostly safe from rising temperatures and toxic pollution,
some more pessimistic scientists believed that things were going to go from bad to worse.
They said that humans had to live off Earth. The end of the world was nigh.
Real money had not existed in the world for some time. The workers had only need for points
and the elites lived in collective luxury. As the proud designers of the Metaverse and
the containments, they lived in utter comfort, but that didn’t mean everyone got to leave the planet.
Getting to Mars in numbers had ceased being a problem in the late 21st century, a bit later than
expected. It wasn’t just because the technologists had exaggerated their engineering capacity, but
the will wasn’t there to leave Earth back then. It turned out that when people were finally
able to live up there, despite the problems on Earth, they didn’t want to go. At the start,
colonising Mars was also very dangerous due to the radiation exposure people faced.
It took years to fill the first permanent settlement there, which only became possible
after a water source had been found during years of underground exploration. Even when
people could stay on Mars, the microgravity and toxicity of the place seriously affected their
health after a few years. It turned out that even with spacesuits and containment, you got
sick. In short, living on Mars was like living in prison, especially when dust storms shrouded the
settlement in darkness for long periods of time. But as Earth’s population kept on expanding and
the conditions for life on Earth were worsening, Mars was looking like a suitable alternative
for the super-elites. As for the vast majority of others down on Earth, it was out of the question
that they would ever even see a take-off. When the elites went, they would do so in secret.
80 billion Improved drilling methods on
Mars led to more water sources being discovered. The drilling teams were now run from Earth in
the Metaverse, with thousands of specially chosen workers digging, building, farming,
and generally keeping Mars livable for the supers. The virtual awards for this work were awesome,
but of course, didn't include a ticket to Mars. It was estimated that with the now 1500 Mars
habitats around 20,000 people could go and live there for a period of at least 25 years. Something
that looked promising was that once-trapped carbon dioxide beneath the planet’s surface had been used
to create a kind of blanket around the habitats. These places were also now more livable thanks
to workers down on Earth using state-of-the-art machinery along with AI to release other trapped
gases and raise the atmospheric temperature around the places where the habitats were.
Meanwhile, the regular elites, the many scientists, creatives, academics,
and general wealthy folks, stayed behind to focus on trying to avoid the impending destruction. What
they didn’t know was that things on Earth were about to change in ways none of those so-called
experts ever expected. 90 billion
The Earth started getting cooler, faster than anyone could have known. At first, the scientists
put it down to a mini-ice age, something that had been expected to happen in the past but never did.
Those same experts started talking about the possibility of a “rapid” ice-age,
and when they said rapid they meant a cooling down over maybe 100 to 200 years.
Human emissions had always been thought to have deterred the next ice age,
but things started changing when the earth hit 90 billion in population.
After the supers all went to Mars a huge decision had been made to allow the workers in
the Metaverse to work on virtual renewable energy solutions. Remember, the workers were only button
pushers. The rule was, their actions should be inconsequential in the larger scheme of things.
As the great Austrian philosopher, Odfal Thiler once said, “The herd is beautiful
only when the death of its parts go unnoticed.” In short, they followed orders and never worked
on the important tasks. To open up this other part of the Metaverse was a last grasp at saving the
Earth, although no one ever thought the workers had the brain capacity to be that inventive.
Never underestimate a person who wants more points and more sex, is the apt saying here.
After around a decade, next-generation nuclear fusion was invented by a woman from a lowly
panopticon, first in virtual form but later put into practice by the elite scientists.
In short, those atomic reactions that happen at the center of our glorious sun,
were harnessed and manipulated to create safe energy that left no toxic waste behind. This
had been tried before and it had failed many times over, leading some to call it a pipedream.
It was now real, and it happened at a time when the Earth was naturally entering a cooler period.
Then when the technology in the Metaverse was opened up to even more workers, soon a brilliant
innovation led to the creation of endless solar fuel, whereby the sun’s energy was used to
create an endless supply of chemical fuel, FREE chemical fuel. No one owned the sun, after all.
And then came the elite and worker rebellion that kicked off what someone called in a
groundbreaking research paper “Humanity and Civilization: Phase 2, The Beginning.”
100 billion Against the wishes of the super-elites
now living the hard life on Mars, the entire Metaverse was opened to the billions of workers.
Along with the world’s natural cooling and fantastic energy innovations, the Earth
was already looking like a better place to live. It was now safer to leave the containments and for
the first time in many years, the masses started to leave the panopticons in search of a new life,
in search of love, in search of adventure. New societies were built using the same advanced
machinery that had been used on Mars. AI worked in tandem with human intellect.
These societies were based not on constant economic growth, but on ongoing sustainability.
The Metaverse was turned from a form of slavery and distraction
into a place of creativity and invention. Consumption, it was agreed, was not the
meaning of life. Curiosity was, as well as the quest for peace and happiness,
which was a life’s work that kept people trying to be the best version of themselves.
They even started reading again, sometimes philosophy of all things,
with this line from Bertrand Russell used as a slogan for the Metaverse, “A happy life must be
to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.”
And they took heed of another thing Russell said, “Collective fear stimulates herd instinct,
and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.”
As the Earth cooled, and there was abundant and safe fuel, people lived in these smaller
self-governing societies with these wise words in mind. They knew they had to work together
to survive and never allow their most base animal instincts to be the driver of their
societies as they had in the past. Each person lived and worked for the good of the community.
As had once been predicted in the past, these “pop-up” societies appeared all over the world.
And that is why they put up a virtual No Entry sign to the super-elite Mars dwellers,
now sick from toxins and depressed in their cosmic squalor. The shuttles on Mars were purposefully
made unusable and so those supers who’d kept the workers in bondage for so long were left to
their own devices. Cannibalism became a way of life up there. It turned out 80 percent of the
supers were psychopathic and their isolation had made their cruelty even more extreme.
100 billion was doable, with the right amount of will and clever thinking.
100 billion was workable when at the forefront of all mankind’s laws was
love. The big question was, as humans developed new languages and cultures, were they going
to make some of the same mistakes again? Now you need to watch a similar fiction,
“Why It Would Suck To Live Through The End Of The Universe.”