Dateline Honolulu. I didn't plan to do any blogging on our trip to Hawaii to welcome the Tiki J to port, but a chance encounter from much earlier today cries out to be reported.
At the San Francisco International Airport this morning, we paused to relax before our connecting flight, and I struck up a conversation with Jon Swift, a man in his mid-forties who said he was on his way to New York to work as a consultant for the United Nations.
I of course asked him what he was going to do for the U.N. I am not able to report his answer verbatim, but this is approximately what he said to the best of my recollection:
Well, as you know, the planet is significantly overpopulated, and the United Nations has formed a task force to identify ways to halt population growth by reducing the growth rate to zero...or even less.
I'm going to be on staff to evaluate some of the alternatives the group comes up with. They've been told to consider absolutely anything, the problem is so serious. They'll be looking at all sorts of ways to reduce the birthrate, for example.
They'll also investigate ways to reverse the tendency toward longer and longer average life expectancies. Old people tend to be unproductive, of course, and after a certain point old people are more of a drain on resources than anything else.
They've been asked to look into ways to soften public opinion on assisted suicide. I mean, if someone wants to kill himself, why not let him? There'd be one less person for an overpopulated planet to support.
And I can't quite believe it myself, but they've even been charged to think about ways to devise a human meat program to supplement the world's food supply....
I didn't have a chance to ask about the "human meat program." My wife, who couldn't help eavesdropping, was becoming visibly upset at what she was hearing from Jon Swift, and she suddenly remembered that our connecting flight was only twenty minutes from then, not an hour and twenty minutes. We said good-bye and left Jon to ponder what proposals he might find himself evaluating in New York.
