Viable Alternatives to Overpopulation

Biodiversity is the only problem on your list that could not be solved propitiously by a wise and benevolent race of aliens taking over the administration of our planet.

There is more than enough land to provide both living space and food production for all six billion of us and even the three or four billion more who are predicted to be born before our population finally reaches its maximum and starts to fall back, in around eighty years. Cheap technology has already been developed that can provide everyone with plenty of fresh water. The wealthy countries have ample excess production capacity to provide the people in the poor countries with food, water, housing, clothing, medical care, education, and even recreation and jobs. This can be done without any alien technology, just someone to do the much more difficult job of reforming the governments in the Third World so they actually respond to the needs of their people rather than making war on each other or dissipating their capital on champagne and hookers. Quality of life? I think it's a combination of all these things. Solve the other problems, reduce the disparity of standard of living between the rich and poor countries to an acceptable level, and most people will be satisfied with their QOL. The measure of this will be that people stop trying to tear down the fence between their country and the next one.

Energy is a different issue but it is tied closely to transportation. To use the United States as a model, fully one fourth of our petroleum consumption goes directly into commuting. Another sizeable chunk fuels its second-order effects such as nannies scurrying around to raise the children of the two-commuter families and energy-intensive fast food being consumed by commuters in a hurry. The technology already exists for the majority of the U.S. workforce to do their jobs satisfactorily from home. There are voices right here on SciForums who dismiss this assertion, saying that teleconferencing, e-mail and even videoconferencing don't have enough of a "human touch" to get the work done. Balderdash, my grandfather said that people would never trust "impersonal" telephones for conducting business. Lead, follow, or just get out of the way, but we simply have to stop "going to work" and there is no alternative.

Still we have to allow the Chinese and the Indians to build up their civilization to a modern level, even if our alien overlords can stop them all from buying cars. Petroleum cannot continue to power the planet. I do not see "green" energy sources like solar and wind being able to do it either, not when another five billion people (much less the three or four billion who haven't been born yet) come online and quite reasonably demand their MTV if not their SUV. I think nuclear is the only option. I think safety is not an issue, particularly if the benevolent occupiers solve our terrorism and QA problems. That leaves waste disposal, and perhaps they can help us with that. If not, we're stuck with the risk of nuclear waste as one problem we can't solve and will have to live with until we develop other energy technologies that can save us, or until the population drops back to a level that can be sustained without nuclear power.

Long-distance travel is simply something that needs to become expensive enough to reflect the cost of energy. Virtual communication works just as well for pleasure as for business. The only reason people need to travel is to be physically near their friends and families, and to personally experience the beauty of foreign lands. Most travel is for business, so I suspect if we can get the businessfolk to learn how to make better use of their arsenal of electronic equipment and leave the airlines for the rest of us, personal travel may not be a big drain on the world's energy resources.

But biodiversity is a problem. It hasn't quite reached crisis level yet but we can see it coming. The shrinking rainforest and the depopulation of marine ecosystems aren't precisely biodiversity issues but I think they fit the spirit of your inquiry so I'm going to speak to those types of problems. Not to mention the Big White Elephant In The Room That We're Politely Ignoring: global warming. The forces that have created these problems can probably be reversed by the alien colonial administrators. We can probably repopulate the seas and restore the rainforests, especially since we're already doing a great job of increasing forest land and saving endangered species from extinction in our own countries. All we need is for the A.C.A.'s to run the Third World countries the way we run ours, which isn't even that great a system. But global warming, that needs a quick fix or else we'll need the aliens to violate the Prime Directive and bring their planet-changing technology here to fix it after it becomes hopeless.

The only real problem here (besides learning to live with nuclear waste dumps) is: How do we do all this by ourselves, since relativity tells us it's very unlikely that any aliens are going to come visiting? Population isn't the problem, since it's going to peak at just under ten billion and then drop. We just have to keep things going for a few centuries until it drops back to something like two billion, which won't put a strain on the ecosystem. (Prosperity is the most effective contraceptive, so this WILL happen.) The problem is the people, not the number of people.

How do we get the citizens of the Third World to reform their own governments? How do we get the Indians and Chinese to forgo automobiles and barbecue grills, even though every one of us has them? How do we get our own governments to adopt better policies toward the Third World and the developing nations like China and India, so we can become part of the solution instead of part of the problem?

It's not about science or technology, it's all about politics.

 

No, that is not true of humans. It has been consistently observed that as living standards rise, human fertility decreases. Throughout the Western nations, fertility is dropping or has dropped below replacement level. The viability of our social security Ponzi Schemes is now supported entirely by immigration, an irony with which some of our outspoken members will have to come to terms as they approach retirement age.

Even in developing nations, where families once had twelve children they now have eight. As childhood diseases abate and leave more children to survive, as family life becomes less labor-intensive and more knowledge-intensive, and as pensions and public social services reduce the burden of elder care on aging children, the instinct of the caveman inside us to have as many children as possible to ensure survival of the tribe is being overridden by reasoned and learned behavior, and families are becoming smaller. The proliferation of leisure, educational, professional and civic activities that take time away from the family also drive this trend.

As noted, the last figures I saw predicted that the world population will peak at or slightly below ten billion before the end of this century, and then it will start to drop.

Obviously that would be to support policies that promote increased prosperity in the nations with the highest birth rates. However, care should be taken at both the national and global level as fertility drops below 1.0. The impact of this never-before experienced phenomenon on the economy and social institutions is not well understood.

 

That's one of the many reasons we need to be vigilant as we approach 1.0. Nonetheless technology will certainly change that. Fewer workers are needed for virtually every type of endeavor today. Surely that will also apply to elder care as automation continues to advance.

Also as the Baby Boomers approach senility--the economic and voting bloc that has defined American culture since the dawn of rock and roll and the invention of the hula hoop--the perverse American habit of keeping people alive just to watch them suffer and degrade will (hopefully!!!) be replaced by something more compassionate and there won't be as many elders to care for.

Yes, but how much of that exhaustion of natural resources is due to obsolescent practices, such as forcing people to waste petroleum by traveling to a place outside their homes to do work that requires only a computer and a telephone?

 

This is wrong. Most of the resources we use are renewable. There is plenty of soil for growing food. Following the principles of crop rotation the farms of the relatively underpopulated Western Hemisphere can feed the entire world even when it has ten billion people, without stressing the soil. There is plenty of fresh water since we're not in an Ice Age, and watercones can cheaply distribute it to everybody everywhere. Using wood as a building material has been shrinking the rainforest but we now have renewable forestry practices so it's just a matter of using northern wood instead of rainforest wood.

The only resource that we are in danger of using up is energy. If we can get people to stop driving to work, there is probably more than enough petroleum left to last 200 years. Long before then we will have built giant solar energy collectors in orbit, and will beam the energy to earth via microwaves. That will put an end to the energy shortage.

Your doomsday predictions distract people from the one real problem, which is that we don't have 200 years to accomplish this. There may be some controversy over global warming but on the balance the predictions seem to have a high probability of being true. We only have a couple of decades to cut our fossil fuel use by an order of magnitude. Not only are we not working toward that, but China and India are resolutely increasing their consumption of fossil fuel.

We simply have to build more nuclear reactors and we have to build them as quickly as possible. As bad an option as that is, it's the only one that does not lead us into a global warming disaster with at least about a 75% probability--within the lifetimes of you younger members.

But why should I care? I'll be dead by then. It's your planet, make of it what you want. Build your nuclear reactors like good little boys and girls, or watch the temperature rise irreversibly and destroy the entire global ecosystem. Or just cross your fingers and hope the predictions are wrong, based on the shaky premise that Al Gore isn't a scientist.

 

As I said, energy is the big problem so I'm not arguing with you over the fuels. Gold and iron are recyclable, not exhaustible. Besides, once population stops growing and everyone catches up to a more-or-less First World lifestyle, the need for building materials will drop drastically. There won't be any shortage of iron and aluminum in the recycle yards. As for gold, has the industrial demand even come close to the quantity that is stored conveniently as money, jewelry and art?

We already have invested in water. Nonetheless watercone technology will prevent water shortage from becoming a disaster. Bill Gates could deliver a watercone to every human being on the planet in something like five years by just spending his normal annual charity budget. The technology is perfected and they can start stamping them out in Vietnam or Bangladesh or any place that could use a little bit of Bill Gates's money.

That is an energy issue, dude. Try to follow along with the sequence of agenda items here.

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We are not entering an Ice Age. There will be no shortage of fresh water. The only problem is getting it to the consumer, without contamination, and that's precisely what personal watercones do.

BTW, even if I were wrong they have discovered deep underground reservoirs of water. A single one a mile under Iraq holds a hundred-year supply for the entire planet at today's consumption level. Good thing we already "pacified" Iraq.

In 200 years we'll have solved the solar energy problem. Probably with orbital collectors and microwave transmitters. And by then the population will have dropped back to today's level.

Not every expert agrees with your pessimistic estimate. Still, as America is dragged kicking and screaming into the telecommuting era and Europe converts to diesel cars, the Chinese and the Indians are determined to put a house around every citizen, attach a garage to every house, and stuff a car in every garage. That will obviously be a problem. Nothing we decide over here is going to make much of a difference if the society that built the Three Gorges Dam, has a dozen coal mine fires that it can't extinguish, and watches stoically as the Gobi Desert approaches the suburbs of Beijing continues along its merry way.

You seem to discount the effectiveness of recycling. As resources become more expensive, recycling becomes more profitable. That is also common sense.

What's fantasy about huge solar collectors in orbit transmitting energy by microwave? It's been foreseen for at least forty years and today it's practically off-the-shelf technology. We could probably put enough in orbit to make a significant reduction in the need for nuclear reactors within twenty years, spending only the money we save by ending the war in Iraq.

I'm not a nuclear engineer. Does one plant supply ten million people? Obviously we should build them in the countries with the most irresponsible energy policies. Fair is fair.

We've got enough underemployed engineers, we can probably build the orbiting solar collectors at the same time. The two technologies together will probably stave off disaster.

Forty years ago when issues like these dominated academia, Science magazine published the results of research into the earth's "carrying capacity." It turns out that we can dig warrens, build algae farms, reconfigure the entire earth's surface, and launch those orbital collectors, and keep up with population growth--which was then presumed to be a twofold increase every thirty years forever! The limiting factor turned out to be thermodynamics: dissipating the waste heat into space. They calculated that the population could double every thirty years for several centuries, resulting in a population in the trillions, before the average temperature got up into the 120s (50C) and people started dying of heatstroke as fast as they were born. Reasonable advances in technology would easily provide the living space, food production and infrastructure, even with room for movement, exercise, socializing, etc.

Now it's predicted that we'll barely reach ten billion, which we can take care of with today's technology... all except the energy. Nuclear can probably handle that population, but we should still start putting up those solar collectors.

A complete relapse into the Mesolithic would probably support about ten million. But temporarily a good deal less than that while a Mesolithic ecosystem synthesizes itself from the detritus. Domesticated livestock won't do well in the wild.

It was health care that got us to the doubling-every-thirty-years level in the 20th century. Primarily the antibiotics that caused a precipitous drop in infant mortality among people who believed that having as many children as possible was vital to the survival of their tribe.

Better get started on those solar collectors then. Oh wait sorry. You'll have to do that. My government is still letting people go grocery shopping in trucks disguised as station wagons for Klingons, and with gasoline approaching $4 a gallon the Krazy Klingons are still driving the damn things.