This should really come as a surprise to no one: the world is running out of stuff. We’re running out of fossil fuels, of wildlife, of trees, of fresh water, of eligible bachelors who don’t turn out to be gay, you name it. We’re running out of everything. Except babies. We have lots and lots of babies.

This article, originally published in the Observer of London, tells of a report which suggests the Earth’s supply of natural resources will be stripped by the year 2050, and that by then we will have been forced to colonize at least two other Earth-sized planets to adequately provide for this continued growth.

In 2050 I will be seventy-five years old, and I plan to not only still be alive but also be a distinguished elder statesman, an important thinker, a noted man of books, oft-quoted in term papers for college history and philosophy courses and in original oratories in high school speech and debate tournaments. In this capacity I will fight tooth and nail any law that would require the execution of anyone over the age of sixty-five in an effort to reduce population growth. Surely, the only viable and just option is space exploration with an eye towards exploiting the resources of other worlds, and never mind that a comic book I am writing deals with this very subject.

As Edwin Hubble discovered almost a century ago, the universe is expanding. The two simplest cosmological models thought of today show that either the universe will eventually collapse back upon itself, destroying everything in a cataclysmic implosion, or the universe will keep on expanding forever, until finally everything is spread so far apart that the temperature of the universe will grow much colder and stars and galaxies will flicker and die, leaving large-scale matter as nothing but invisible hunks of rock floating through the empty blackness of space.

So the universe really has a sunny future either way you look at it. Of course, humans will be long gone by then – or at least, we will be, if we don’t watch ourselves. In his book The Universe in a Nutshell, Stephen Hawking wonders if science/technology and population will ever reach a final steady state. If not, he points out:

By the year 2600 the world’s population would be standing shoulder to shoulder, and the electricity consumption would make the Earth glow red-hot.

So life as a human would be pretty intolerable under those circumstances. Of course, over time, as the growth continued, being human would gradually take on a different meaning. What would the philosophy of such an overcrowded civilization be? Would life be worth less than it is now, a return to the nineteenth century and vigilante justice? Or would it be worth more, with humans not allowed to die under any circumstances, even natural causes? Either way, strife is the only possible outcome.

And strife has been the Earths raison d’ê´²e for the better part of its lifetime, so this will just be business as usual.

The bottom line is that Earth as a planetary mass will probably be around until the sun dies, millions of years from now. Humanity may not be so lucky. So let’s settle Mars. Let’s go set up camps on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

‘Cause dammit, I’ll be an old man and I won’t want you kids running around on my lawn.