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Originally Posted by AVGWarhawk
I have to agree with Duci. Fossil fuels made us what we are today. Petroleum is in every facet of our lives.
Farming with science to get everything out of one acre! That includes farm equipment that runs on fossil fuels.
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I'm not understanding why Duc thinks this is a bad thing, or why you presumably agree. The mechanization and modernization of agriculture has done a lot more to reduce population levels than it has to increase them. The wealthy, westernized nations of the world that use such practices or trade as freely as possible as those that do don't have to devote nearly as much to surviving as they do to thriving. As prosperity increases, so does the expense of having children and the populace is more educated as well. In pretty much every wealthy nation, birth rates are falling, sometimes into the negatives. They can be crowded, on occasion, but they are not overpopulated.
Compare that to the nations that do not have modern agriculture and don't trade freely with those that do. Many are overpopulated in every sense of the word. They are both crowded and can't sustain their populations, resulting in the deaths of millions through starvation, malnutrition, and disease. But that doesn't stop their populations from increasing. They live in a world where life is cheap and survival depends upon having enough viable offspring to provide the reliable labor source needed to provide income or bring in the harvest or tend the cattle.
Call me crazy but I think I'd rather live in the world that embraced petroleum and modern agriculture to the point where it can actually spare time to care about developing other energy sources than the one that lives a brutish hand-to-mouth existence.
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Before we were heavily dependent on fossil fuels people were hunter gatherers. Was the family really as big as say the Brady bunch? 
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Well, the successful ones were, until the children died from disease or were killed. Many more just plain died. For the population to increase at all there must be at least one child born that survives to sexual maturity for each adult just to keep the population stable, so there must have been at least a few. But why am I explaining this? You should know this already from the examples of primitive tribal societies that exist today. They all have high birth rates and high death rates. The only thing that separates the size of their families from the Brady Bunch is that not all of their children are alive at the same time and Marsha Brady has a tendency to be recast after the original actor dies from childbirth complications.
I think I'll stick with the bra as my favorite invention to undo.
