As it turns out though he may have been prescient. While he may have been off by a few years, it nevertheless appears he got most everything else right.
Gee, what a cheerful way to start your week.
There is one other thing to consider in Fleischer’s dystopian fantasy, in the movie garbage trucks are retrofitted to scoop up random people off the street and kill them. When they’re scooped up, they’re crushed. Just like a nice pie filling. And, as we already know, everyone likes pie.
That was considered to be the logical solution to over crowding.
YAHOO! News is citing a report from an AFP story which details how the world’s food supply could so denigrated by 2050 (that’s 6 apocalypses from now for those keeping score at home), we will finally be forced to eat each other.
And not in a good way.
A growing, more affluent population competing for ever scarcer resources could make for an “unrecognizable” world by 2050, researchers warned at a major US science conference Sunday.
The United Nations has predicted the global population will reach seven billion this year, and climb to nine billion by 2050, “with almost all of the growth occurring in poor countries, particularly Africa and South Asia,” said John Bongaarts of the non-profit Population Council.
To feed all those mouths, “we will need to produce as much food in the next 40 years as we have in the last 8,000,” said Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
“By 2050 we will not have a planet left that is recognizable” if current trends continue, Clay said.
The swelling population will exacerbate problems, such as resource depletion, said John Casterline, director of the Initiative in Population Research at Ohio State University.
But incomes are also expected to rise over the next 40 years — tripling globally and quintupling in developing nations — and add more strain to global food supplies.
People tend to move up the food chain as their incomes rise, consuming more meat than they might have when they made less money, the experts said.
It takes around seven pounds (3.4 kilograms) of grain to produce a pound of meat, and around three to four pounds of grain to produce a pound of cheese or eggs, experts told AFP.
“More people, more money, more consumption, but the same planet,” Clay told AFP, urging scientists and governments to start making changes now to how food is produced.
Population experts, meanwhile, called for more funding for family planning programs to help control the growth in the number of humans, especially in developing nations.
“For 20 years, there’s been very little investment in family planning, but there’s a return of interest now, partly because of the environmental factors like global warming and food prices,” said Bongaarts.
“We want to minimize population growth, and the only viable way to do that is through more effective family planning,” said Casterline.
While that bit of apocalyptic news may seem depressing, it’s certainly avoidable. We can still have all the sex we want, perhaps even more, we just have to wrap that sucker before we … try our lucker.
More importantly, if we’re having lots of sex we’re getting lots of exercise. And a healthier populace is always a good thing. Plus, since we all know that the rich tend to live idle lives, they’ll be slow and easy to hunt if worst does actually come to worse.
In other words, don’t worry. All you have to do is go out and have lots of well protected sex, enjoy a tasty meat pie from time to time and make sure to keep your ammo cool and dry.