In 1968, an influential new book blew society’s collective mind. The Population Bomb, by husband and wife team Paul and Anne Ehrlich, predicted a world in which hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s, despite anything we may do to stop it. If you’re reading this in the far future of 2023, you may have noticed that this did not happen. The Ehrlichs’ wildly inaccurate doomsday prophesy failed to consider advancements in technology, or more specifically, how technological improvements in farming and food production would vastly increase our ability to feed everyone on the planet.
There we have it, technology will always progress just in time to save us from any catastrophe. Well, only to a point. The advancements which enabled us to more completely maximize the agricultural potential of our arable land were enough to evade the starvation facing us at the time. However, there is a limit to how much the Earth can physically produce, as well as what is scientifically possible. Eventually, we will reach the maximum number of humans that Earth is willing to tolerate. This could be billions more than we have right now, or we could be fast approaching the apocalyptic ceiling. Factors affecting population growth are complex, and they go beyond the simple abundance of food, or lack thereof. Even if we had an unlimited food supply, we would still be trampled by the other three horses of disease, war, and death. Yet, if we eradicated disease and lived forever, we would detonate a veritable population bomb indeed. As Captain Kirk found during his visit to the planet Gideon, nature demands a balance.
When the Enterprise arrives at Gideon on a diplomatic errand, only Kirk is allowed to beam down. Something goes wrong with the transporter, leaving the Captain stranded on an empty starship. On this strange Enterprise, he meets a beautiful Gideon woman named Odona. She describes her planet as being massively overcrowded, with no space to move. Meanwhile, the Gideons claim to not know where Kirk is, and Spock wants to transport down to search. He determines that there is nothing wrong with the transporters, but the Gideons still forbid anyone else from entering their planet, as they have no natural immunity to foreign disease. It turns out that Kirk and Odona were put on the isolated ship as part of an experiment. Kirk was beamed down to a special holding cell made to look like the Enterprise, and Odona was put with him to test the spread of disease for a planet which has no death. Gideon was once a paradise after they eradicated disease and overcame death, but the population has since grown out of control. Everyone shuffles around with no space or privacy, unable to die. The Gideons value life to the point at which they are morally opposed to birth control, which is admirable, but they chose quantity over quality. In a secret ploy to relieve his planet’s population crisis, the ambassador uses Kirk to infect his daughter, Odona, with a deadly strain of meningitis for which Kirk is a carrier.
This eventual surrender to disease may have been inevitable for the Gideons, but it is strange how the population got that bad in the first place. As mentioned earlier, the factors which influence population growth and decline are complex, but one of them is overcrowding. When population is dense and resources are scarce, organisms tend to reproduce less. For humans, the psychology of environment often affects choice, with parents wanting the best for their kids and thereby delaying reproduction until conditions change. Not to mention the biological difficulties of successful reproduction when food is scarce. In addition to this, education and social development have been shown to affect how many children parents choose to have, with more highly developed populations naturally declining as the quality of life increases. If Gideon really was a paradise with abundant resources and education, would the citizens prioritize the best life for fewer children?
When the ambassador spoke with Kirk, we didn’t learn much about his culture, aside from a zealous love of life for its own sake. It would have been interesting to know what else this population values, as this would also factor into their birthrate. For example, since they value existence as an end in itself, with no mention of lofty goals or higher purpose, the most successful reproductive strategy would be to have as many kids as possible. On the other hand, a culture which values knowledge, science, and academic achievement would have fewer offspring, because more resources can be concentrated into fewer people, and these highly educated individuals will have more space and supplies to peruse their lofty ideals. In short, when you are competing in the battle of ideas or accomplishment, you want to be the most capable, not just the most numerous.
The Gideons believed that freedom from disease created a sort of paradise for them, but this paradise has clearly turned into hell. Embracing death, and the suffering and sickness that comes with it, would restore the balance that the Gideons need. Their aversion to contraception highlights some interesting points about the philosophy behind controlling reproduction. Do they believe that every potential person that could exist must exist, or that the people that do exist deserve the best quality of life? If the Gideons are so intent on having as many kids as possible, it is all the more reason to leave the planet and embrace the death and sickness they fear. The natural cycles of birth and death would enable millions of people to live, even in comparably idyllic conditions, because they are spread out through time instead of all existing at once for all eternity.
In the end, Kirk’s irresistible penchant for beautiful alien women has resulted in Odona catching space meningitis, spreading the gift of death to the miserable masses. Life is beautiful and precious, but the value of it emerges from the risk. If existence without disease is worse than it had been before, then embracing death is necessary to diffuse the population bomb.
Hopeless Trekkie 