Too many men. I mean that literally. Men are supposed to die. Hunting, in battle, in accidents while doing heavy work. But we don't have to hunt anymore, combat is now conducted by a few, rather than every, adult male, and a mass of machinery and rules have made heavy manual labour obsolete or safe. Ideally, the proportion of females to males in the population should be at least 2-1 and closer to 4-1. Men should not be engaging in work that is not physically demanding and/or dangerous. Those who can't cut it die and those who can get to reproduce.

But today! A couple of accidents, and the Space Shuttle gets cancelled! Good grief, do you think the men of the 19th Century would have cancelled such a grand project because of a few deaths? (They wouldn't have let women go up either - women are too valuable to risked in that way). Going into space is dangerous, of course it is, and that should be something the men who do it accept - it should be part of the attraction. We are sending probes to Mars when we should be sending men. Brave, reckless and expendable men. Why? In the words of George Mallory, who dies attempting to climb Mt Everest in 1924, "Because it's there!"

A risk averse society where the hard work is done by machines, where war is about politics and not self-defence, where predatory animals are driven out by industrial mass slaughter and where there are no grand and foolish adventures to be undertaken has neither a use nor a place for men. So they abuse women, become sociopathic billionaires or corrupt, power-hungry politicians, commit murders, join gangs or kill themselves. Or, worse, become drones, grey men in grey suits doing grey jobs, all potential unrealised.