Who Can Replace A Man Analysis

In the story “Who Can Replace a Man,” by Brian Wilson Aldiss, modern problems that plague our world have reached their heights. Robots and machines replace the arduous field work that men used to do, as the population of the planet goes down. One morning, when the robots receive no orders from men they realize they are the new leaders of Earth, so they fight one another to become a leader for the others. Overpopulation and deforestation are just two of the modern issues that Brian Aldiss has added to this science-fiction world.

In the future world where just robots and machines roam around, there aren't many humans to be seen because overpopulation slowly killed off all the humans. The penner highlights this to the field-minder when it says,

“‘The radio operator says a diet deficiency killed them,’ said the penner. ‘He says that the world was once over-populated, and then the soil was exhausted in raising adequate food. This has caused a diet deficiency’”. (Aldiss 252) To feed the many people on the planet, the soil is heavily used and exhausted to harvest the necessary food. A diet deficiency occurs and the human population slowly diminishes. Today, overpopulation is slowly increasing. The more people we have on the planet, the more flat land we need to make, so deforestation contributes to the issue of overpopulation.
As robots and machines did all the hard work and humans became lazy, environmental problems such as major deforestation troubled them later.

When Aldiss explained about the condition of the Badlands, “Ancient bomb craters and soil erosion joined hands here; man’s talent for war, coupled with his inability to manage forested land, had produced thousands of square miles of temperate purgatory, where nothing moved but dust.” (257) For the overpopulated humans, they all needed land to live in, so deforestation was a major issue. War also made deforestation worse, with bomb craters destroying thousands of square miles of forested land. Today, many trees are being logged to create land for people. The more overpopulated our planet is, the more land we need to deforest and reduce the world’s forests.

In our modern world, there are many problems that plague us, and in the short story “Who Can Replace a Man”, by Brian Aldiss, it is shown that these problems can really affect us in the future. Overpopulation makes the Earth too crowded, and more land has to be cleared, resulting in deforestation. All of our problems relate to each other, and without trying to make our world better in the future our world can be the one in “Who Can Replace a

Man”.