It is tautologically uncontroversial that closed systems have limits. It is also relatively well understood that from a practical perspective the biosphere is and will be for the foreseeable future, a closed system.
Self awareness is the phenomenon which has punctured the limits of this closed system - and is now disrupting the system itself with the side effects of non-biological chemical synthesis and energetics.
At the same time the primary agents of that change - humans - remain firmly a part of their greater biological context. They proceed with the same motivation and desire for resources and procreation that is manifested by the less conscious elements of the bioshpere.
In short, they love their children.
How to solve the problem that lies therein? By successfully subverting the biosphere to our own advantages we have willed into being many billions of us - the vast majority of whom wish to will into being their own children to love. But the closed system has limits and those limits are finite.
We are now at the critical point where our own self-awareness tells us that to create children is to not love them. However our biological impulses are incapable of accepting this anti-biological reality, and instinct holds the trump card.
Bearing these 2 points in mind I have a modest proposal;- understanding that humanity is more numerous than is feasible, and understanding that humans will continue to desire to procreate, is not the logical solution to reduce the size of those offspring?
Island or Insular dwarfism is a somewhat uncontroversial theory which explains evolutionary reduction in body size of species in constrained ecological environments.
With our unprecedented capabilities of biological manipulation, and our urgent ecological issues, I believe it is now the time to investigate making humans smaller.
There will be many many issues associated with this proposal - technological, social, ethical, political, and biological (parents want their kids to grow up big and strong after all).
But from a philosophical perspective I can see nothing wrong with the idea. Can you?
