TED Talks

I have been plowing through a backlog of Podcasts in the past few days.  It can go in spurts, a podcast here another there, but if I don't regularly listen all the time I can get quite behind.  As I have with my TED Talk podcasts.  They are only five minutes to fifteen minutes long so when I start listening to them I can plow through a lot of them, but then the longer ones that I listen to suffer.  

The TED Talks make me think, sometimes I am familiar with the material, but sometimes I am not.  I hear the things that humans are doing in a variety of different pursuits all over the world, by the people who are doing them.  They talk about how they have learned to save lives, how they have failed, how we need to think about the common things in our life differently to discover its value.  They are talks that show that people can learn from their mistakes and that eventually we reach a point where we are helping people more than we are harming them.  

The problem is that when I hear about how a doctor learned to prevent 40% of all infant mortality in a poor country I am left wondering if they are also implementing a strategy to give women control of their bodies, to earn an income and go to school too.  What I mean is I wonder if well meaning people are increasing the population of the planet by an extra million people a year but not giving them a better life and a more survivable future.  

I mean do these people talk to each other, are the discoveries being shared meaningfully?  Are increasing the population of poor countries and making their lives worse because of the growth or are they increasing the happiness of the family and the wealth of the family and decreasing the effect on the environment too?  

I ask, if we make food oils from bacteria, saving the forests of Borneo from Plam Oil plantations are the people of Indonesia going to suffer more or are we going to pay them for preserving the rainforests?

As the population of the world nears ten billion and the goal of 1.5°C temperature rise grows to appear more like 2° instead, can we afford to save babies?

But we are humans.  Humans tackle a million different problems a hundred different ways and solve many of them.  We have millions of scientist working on all the problems and hopefully making the problems disappear one at a time, or all at the same time.  If we can do that then we should.

If we can't, perhaps, increasing the population faster and bring the world to a faster end, is the way to go.