Resistance Was Futile

This is an intriguing post from Eleutheros over at How Many Miles From Babylon.

Was?? Yes, was. You were assimilated long ago. In fact, likely as not, you are third or fourth generation Borg by now.

You are an artificial organism, although you mightn’t think it. You were made by machines.

You see, 100 years ago the world’s population was about 1.6 billion and unlikely to get much higher left to its own devices. Any number of things might limit human population, available water, arable land, amount of carbon available, amount of phosphorous available, etc. The thing that we ran up against about 100 years ago was available nitrogen. Although nitrogen is the most abundant gas in the atmosphere, it is doggedly reluctant to combine to form compounds. A little of it is fixed (combines with other elements, notably hydrogen to form ammonia) by lightening but for the past several hundred millions of years most nitrogen was fixed by bacteria.

[snip]

It might do well to note here that the idea behind mining fossil nitrates was not to make more human beings but rather to make hungry human beings into well fed ones. It didn’t work out that way, instead it made still more hungry human beings. This is a sad dance that has been going on for a century now. Every “advance” in agriculture intended to feed the hungry has resulted only in making a greater number of hungry.

We'd recommend reading all of his unconventional argument here.