I apologize. I didn't realize this messageboard is so full of STar Trek fans and dreamers. Of course humans will selfdestruct before even reaching Mars (by humans not robots)
Mars? You don't even think we'll get to Mars? Such pessimism. I'd be happy to take that bet, but of course I couldn't lose since the self destruction of humanity would relieve me of the obligation to pay! I would venture to say that your natural pessimism colors your views on subjects such as the limits to growth, and carrying capacity. I say screw limits. Keep pushing technology, and population, forward until we can finally get off this rock. What would our fate be if we decided to ignore space and concentrate on internal matters? Look to history: The result? China, who once had the greatest navy in the world, became isolated and backwards. Instead of conquering the world, china soon found western gunships on its shores dictating terms. We must move forward, or perhaps, this time, it will be China who boldly goes where no man has gone before. And we will find ourselves isolated and backwards with Chinese gunships on our shores.
Don't mistake realism for pessimism. Would the world have been better off if the Chinese had conquered it 600 years ago? I think by losing the technology to gunpowder they actually did a favour to humankind... I think we should get things in order here on Earth first before we try to reach for the stars.. By the way what's the point of getting to Mars? Wait, I will make a new thread about this...
Oh there's no doubt that the world is already overpopulated and anyone who thinks different is either a sheltered recluse or a myopic idiot who has no perspective on world history and the previous populations on earth that never had to deal with the problems that we now have and that we now have to face for the very short-term future. I say to myself right now: "Where can I go to get away from all these people." Where does the term "rat race" came from? The ideal population? Me and the girl that I love. Just like Adam and Eve starting the entire shibang over again. Just like going to see a new movie at the theater that you don't know how it's going to turn out. Might it be the best one you ever saw? And I'd have that chance to find out in my own new world with the Mrs.
Probably not infinite, but rather, nearly so. Probably not infinite, but rather, nearly so. Why is it that seemingly nobody knows the correct answer to the question? It can be stated, almost mathmatically. First of all, It's God's creation, so it's up to God. But then, I imagine a more specific answer may be desired? Well consider the Utilitarian Principle thingee. Often the best thing to do, is that which most benefits the most people. Whether meaning to or not, it implies that world population should be or becoming "nearly as large as possible." But is that infinite? Presumably not, as people might need a bit of room to move, in order to survive? But people stacked into vertical city population arcologies would seem doable. So not quite infinite, but otherwise, nearly so. At least conveniently huge enough to allow people to go on having their precious darling babies, well into the forseeable future. Then there's the concepts of naturalism and elegance. What's the easiest way to "control" world population size or growth? Don't bother. There's no practical nor moral ways to do so anyhow, and who could be trusted to do the "controlling," other than God? We more respect nature and nature's creator God, by letting our babies push out naturally, without resorting to awkward, anti-life "birth control." Let the flow of human life flow naturally, unhindered. Without unnatural "birth control," human populations still expand at a gradual enough rate, to allow ample time for supposedly intelligent humans to adapt and prepare for our natural increase—our very own children! Malthusian population phobics like to claim that if we don't control our numbers, nature will. Wrong. They can't prove that. Nature won't. Why do you think we are getting so numerous now? Humans are accused of adapting "too well" to their environment. Which we seem to be doing, all the time. Our ancestors seemed to almost understand this, but with all our modern "education," how did we so conveniently seem to forget? So if humans can ever supposedly define an "optimum" or "ideal" population size, it would be on the order of being or becoming "nearly as large as possible," or of expanding exponentially at a natural "unchecked" rate. That's part of the reason why I advocate large families worldwide, so that far more people may live. And don't you suppose that humans may just have to "outgrow" the earth, if ever there might be any chance of spreading to more worlds? Why colonize any other planets, hard to reach and make habitable, when we haven't even finished colonizing this one yet?
Actually, they can and they did, forty years ago. I don't know where I filed it anymore but it was an article in "Science" magazine in 1967 or 1968. The science involved in the proof is elementary and uncontroversial. The calculations--both the originals and my own dim memories of them--may be in error, perhaps by several orders of magnitude, but as will be seen that won't affect the outcome itself, just the date when it occurs. The limiting factor is waste heat: from our own metabolic processes and our (by then quite limited) personal activities, as well as our food production and infrastructural technology. All other obstacles could be conquered by foreseeable technology using unremarkable science. The biggest problem would be an energy supply, and that can be provided by gigantic solar panels in orbit, thus with a much larger total area than the planet itself, transmitting the energy back to earth in narrow microwave beams. Housing can be accommodated by giving everyone a personal space about the size of a manager's office cubicle, arranged for couple or group living as desired, with a roughly equal amount of space per person dedicated to infrastructure and limited travel. These can be stacked about 500 deep and they can be tiled to cover the entire earth's surface as it is slowly leveled and the oceans are diverted into massive plumbing. Food production would of course be hydroponic and eating would be a far more utilitarian task than we now enjoy. I'm not going to do the math, but someone can calculate how many human beings the planet will hold when it is completely rebuilt to those specifications and ecodiversity no longer exists, with only the most privileged having gardens or pets, much less a zoo. IIRC the number was in the quadrillions (15-17 zeroes). In the 1960s the pessimists assumed that the earth's population would continue to double every thirty years as it was doing then, so it would reach this limit in about 1,000 years, around the start of the next millennium. Nonetheless that was judged to be enough time to keep up with the enormous construction projects. Why is this the limiting factor? Quadrillions of people and their supporting technology consume solar energy, which is very high-frequency electromagnetic radiation, and by extracting energy from it they convert it into lower-frequency radiation which by definition carries less energy. We colloquially refer to this as "waste heat" but it is nonetheless radiation like any other form of radiation, following the same laws of physics. It increases the temperature of the air around the emitting bodies. In what we call a "natural" environment this energy is so slight that it is borne away by convection, yet everyone notices that an auditorium full of people is much warmer than an empty one. Cover the planet with auditoriums packed side by side so the air can't ventilate, and whose roofs are covered with more auditoriums so they can't radiate their heat into the air, and you'll have a waste heat problem. Of course you'll have forced air circulating through the warrens, but eventually all that heat ends up on the planet's surface. From there it has to radiate into space, a process which is governed by some very straightforward laws of physics. As the rate of waste heat production increases, the rate of dissipation by radiation will also increase, but nonetheless the earth's surface will keep getting hotter. This will make it increasingly difficult to perform the heat-exchange process needed to cool the warrens below. If, for example, you pump 100-degree (37C) air into cooling fins on the surface that are already at 100 degrees, the air is not going to be cooled. In other words, the waste heat from the habitations below the surface cannot go anywhere and is trapped. This will cause the temperature below to rise, so the air being pumped to the surface will now be 101 degrees and the cooling fins will cool it back to 100. But eventually they will also heat up to 101 degrees and a vicious cycle ensues. We're not sure what the maximum ambient temperature is in which humans can survive. Clearly some will be better adapted to it than others, and over the decades as the temperature keeps rising, obviously the less heat-tolerant ones will die before reaching reproductive age. The authors of the essay assumed that 125 degrees (51C) is the temperature at which the most gruesome equilibrium would be reached: Half the population (more or less) would die of heatstroke before they reach reproductive age, the surviving half (less or more) would reproduce themselves before they also die of heatstroke, and the population would stop growing. This is where those 15 to 18 zeroes come from. The earth's population would be in the quadrillions, crammed into nicely decorated prison cells, with limited mobility but lots of electronic communication and entertainment, buried up to a mile underground with never a view of the surface, enduring an ambient temperature so high that they're always on the verge of heatstroke. The planet will be able to radiate their waste heat into space precisely as fast as their metabolic and technological processes create it. They'll live into their early teens, have a child or two, and die. A network of elite adults will live in heavily guarded air-conditioned cubicles with dogs, strawberries, ferns and tennis courts, keeping the whole operation running, Such a wonderful life. Note that this is a hard limit. There is no way to concentrate and "beam" waste heat because it would violate the laws of physics. Low-frequency electromagnetic radiation is long-wave radiation, which by definition cannot be shaped into a beam. This is entropy at work and entropy is the one overriding characteristic of the universe that cannot be beaten. Surely advances in technology will give us more efficiency and evolution will make us more heat resistant, and the response to that is: so what? A one-degree improvement in heat transfer or heat tolerance might allow another doubling of the population so we're right back where we started in just thirty years. This issue was also addressed in the essay. If the population doubles every thirty years, then once it reaches the limit mandated by waste heat radiation, we will need to colonize another entire planet the size of this one in just thirty years. The difficulty is obvious. With the technology we will have already developed we can probably convert any giant rock into a warren just like this one--but it will probably take far more than thirty years. Building interplanetary spacecraft is also a huge project requiring massive investments in material and energy. Building enough spacecraft to transport quadrillions of people across billions of miles??? And of course what do we do thirty years later, when we have two planetloads of people who need new homes? This solar system only has a few planets, even if we can figure out how to build human habitations on the gas giants, and those humans can adapt to the enormous gravity. We'll outgrow the solar system in a few generations. Then what? Interstellar travel can be foreseen without breaking the laws of physics, but the voyage to the next planetary system will take at least sixty years--during which the populations being transported by the gigantic ships will have quadrupled. As explained, once we "colonize" this one by unrestricted reproduction, other planets won't offer an escape for more than a tiny fraction of the suffocating quadrillions on earth. Space travel will be an escape from the insanely reproducing hordes on an unenlightened planet.
IMP, this is a nut problem, the ideal number is not possible infinite, but that is also not certain number, and the number maybe dynamic according to the ecological resource, Quote[Ecological resource can be enhanced under a new economic system of dual currency model] from greency dot org. when the ecological resource become more and more enough for humans, and the number will up, otherwise, down.
What if the human race, only but doubles once more? What relevance would any of these "hard" limits have? They proved nothing. Those colorful scare tactics, have little or nothing to do with the present-day population reality. Most all demographers, don't predict populations so enormous, ever, and especially not within the forseeable future. Author Julian Simon I think may have claimed that human population growth can continue for "forever." Obviously, that runs into some absurd projections. So I simply qualify it with the added phrase, "for the forseeablue future." Intentionally vague, to correspond better with rather limited possible human ability to know such things. Actually, to present that argument fairly, in accordance to what the population pessimist claim, "waste heat" would probably be about the most upper limit, assuming most every other problem to be solved. Which that assumes quite a lot of "ifs." But if all that stuff is solved, quite a lot of the technology may be able to cut quite a lot of it's waste heat. Consider during the 20th century, how transistors, and then even battery-powered computer laptops, replaced the old hot vacuum tubes. Even TVs are finally shedding the last picture tubes, and switching over to plasma, LCD, DLP, or something else. But since TVs require a big bright picture, there's still often some sort of hot projection lamp or something inside. And a plasma TV might still have a "picture tube" of sorts, at least in terms of waste heat. But no longer do tabletop radios have glowing hot "heater" tubes in them. And TV "waste heat" may drop down to LED TVs in the future. LEDs are about the most efficient light we know of, directly converting electricity into light, that is cool usually and not hot. So maybe it would come down to mostly body heat ultimately? At certain ridiculous population densities, body heat alone would be enough to heat the buildings. So then you can get rid of furnaces, but perhaps not, microwave ovens and stoves. And even a "standing room only" world of people, wouldn't be all that much body heat to heat the planet. But it starts becoming a problem, when you stack multiple human bodies on top of one another in skyrises, beyond that density level. I seem to recall that the human body, only emits the equivalent in heat, of a 40-watt incandescent light bulb. Actually, it doesn't matter what type of light, 40 watts is 40 watts of heat. Where it matters, is that compact flourescents, may produce "60 watts of light" with just 13 watts. That means, if your light fixture is rated for only 60 watts, you can now put a 100-watt flourescent equivalant into it, as it only counts for some actual 23 watts of heat. But why compact flourescents? Why can't I buy LED light replacements? Aren't LEDs even better? Unremarkable science? No, that's what we can use, nothing-special-science, that we have already, for the rather comparitively modest gains in human population, we can reasonably expect during our lifetime. Just build some more cities and suburbs, build some more power plants, a few more roads and freeways. Nothing at all probably needs to be invented, to double world population yet again. Simply expand the scale of plumbing and flush toilets, we already know how to do all that stuff. But I hardly think that the "gigantic solar panels" and such radical adaptations, are quite ready to go, and you are assuming that backward corrupt governments will just "out of the goodness of their hearts," make all these changes in a timely manner? I'm not so sure that gigantic solar will prove to the best energy option anyway. There may be many other better options by then, if ever. Housing could be so small in family units, but why so small? All those technology options, I imagine that most people probably want a little more space. So stack housing units if necessary, but make them more spacious. Come on, we need ideas that can be sold to a (gullible sometimes) public. Why suggest incomplete or inconsistant ideas? While I support high-density housing as a useful tool for accomodating more people, it's not the only tool, and I don't at all suggest "requiring" it. High-density housing is only for those people who all want to live in the same desirable places, say like a college campus, or in the center of town where the jobs or desirable places may tend to cluster, or for more affordable housing options, for those people who want to choose that route. I don't at all suggest that people can't still have big houses in China. Just build more of them, and let humans cover more of the land, as they may come to or need to. I think you can go more than 500 deep too, but there's little need to, anytime soon, if ever. These "warrens" don't even have to be leveled. They can bend with the contours of the land, although that makes the floor count a bit more confusing. Some areas may only go down to floor #30, while others may go down to floor #-15. Or would the lowest floor anywhere, start off arbitrarily as floor #1? You could even carve out various city names, within the same huge arcology building. Now why do you suppose that food would be hydroponic, and eating utilitarian? Not necessarily. There may be synthetic processes to produce food, far more efficient than hydroponics, and why couldn't there be as many recipes for synthetic food, as anything? The Sony Playstation 2 game, "Project Eden" suggests an example of where some food might come from. Their "real meat" was growing in a tank. Looks like some sort of genetic engineering to me, growing meat as if some sort of plant or via bacteria? Now that's probably "real meat," not veggie-burgers for vegan wimps, so it probably cooks up, just the same as real meat. Loss of "ecodiversity" is handily offset by the great increase in possible "diversity" within the human race, by there being so many people alive. Remember that humans are of far more value than the plants and animals. If not, why are we even exploring this rather unlikely venture? If plants and animals are worth just as much as humans, we may as well just tear down all our homes, and sleep in the field with the rest of the animals. Don't you imagine it may sooner or later come to such a lowly status for humans, if the confused animal rights activists get away with the insanities that they propose? Of course it's plenty of time to construct all that stuff, because the workforce would be growing right along with the population. Most any human can each build many, many homes, if they have the time and the tools and technical guidance. Although it would likely never be done that way very much, why couldn't "home kits" be sold, with a DVD telling you how to put them together? They could be geodesic domes, hexagons, modular, whatever. By the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, entropy in a closed system always increase with time. I see a few potential problems with this "law." First of all, the earth is not truly a closed system. It receives energy from the sun, and loses "waste heat" to outer space, the natural temperature of which, is actually rather cold. The "background" radiation, supposedly that left over from "The Big Bang," is only about 3ºK. Probably somewhat more than that, out in outer space, at earth distance from the sun. But in the "shade," would the ambient temperature of outer space, still be close to 3ºK.? Or might some satelite still be "baking" in the "waste heat" of the earth? How cold does it get, on the cold/dark side of the moon? So the Earth isn't a closed system, so what all might that imply? Second, I am not convinced that it even is a "Law." Could it be more like a common "observation?" If some "exception" can be found, that it is somehow possible to re-order supposed "random" "waste heat" energy, then home central air conditioners could be upgraded into "heat extractors" that actually provide homes with electricity to power the home, rather than consuming electricity. Cars would have "cold" radiators, rather than hot, as they "suck in" the "waste heat" energy from the air. Unlike the supposedly "green" hybrids, "heat extractor" cars, would have little net effect on the environment. They wouldn't build up heat, nor would they need fuel. Drawing energy from "heat extractor" batteries could cause them to sweat a little from condensation, as they drop in temperature, in effect self-recharging. Thus, energy/mass conservation is preserved. It's like a "perpetual motion machine," in that it "recycles" otherwise wasted energy. But "heat extractors" may still not be able to stop the "rundown" of the universe. They in effect, would perhaps be sort of like just better "solar collectors," not actually needing the sunlight to find some energy. I have an old computer program that does a computer animation of such an idea. They call it "Maxwell's Demon," I think. He's like some microscopic hypothetical guy, who holds a tennis racket, and stands in the gateway between two tanks of some gas. Every time a fast molecule comes along, he lets it pass, and when a slow molecule comes, he uses his tennis racket to bounce it back to the cold tank. Or vice-versa. After a while, one tank of gas is hot, and the other cold. By using some refrigerant or something pumped between the 2 tanks, it boils on one side, expanding in volume, and condenses on the other side. Now you can drive a turbine and extract the useful energy. The computer program explains that "Maxwell's Demon" won't work as intended, because supposedly, it takes energy to move the tennis racket. About the same energy, as to run a refrigerator. But I am not convinced. Anyway, if some "exception" can ever be found, your "waste heat" problem, is handily solved. Waste heat can be converted into food manufacture, or into powering the air conditioners, or whatever, without it all building up on the (outer) surface of the planet. Then we can move onto the next problem, of just how tall a building can be built, until it can no longer support its weight. Whoops! Technical error. Why should we be limited to single-stage cooling? What if the condensor "waste heat" side, is also air-conditioned by another cooling-stage? Something like how rocket engines blast people into space. Right now, the technology is so bad, that the weight of the rocket fuel, is too much weight to lift into outer space. The problem is solved with multiple rocket stages, each one providing a boost, and then finally the final stage launches into orbit. Or with the Space Shuttle(s), the solid rocket boosters that drop off and don't make the entire journey. Even the big fuel tank drops off, doesn't it? At least they took a step toward reusability, but has it yet really saved us taxpayers much money, compared to cheaper rocket engine stages? How many flights must it make, to pay for itself comparitively? How do refrigerators make liquid nitrogen, or liquid hydrogen, needed for super-conductors? Isn't that perhaps multiple-stage refrigeration? Haven't I heard that liquid-nitrogen ceramic superconducting, is a lot cheaper than liquid hydrogen? Because liquid nitrogen isn't nearly so cold. Perhaps they can then skip a stage or two? Anyway, your example tells why the hot coils on the back of some old or cheap refrigerators, need adequate ventilation. If they are allowed to build up heat, that heat will then spill over into the evaporator coil in the freezer, and it will run, and run, and run, trying to get cold. If ever the fan on the outside condenser unit on your central air ceases up, that's likely a very serious condition that could either overheat the compressor, cause the high-side refrigerant pressure to surge, reduce cooling effectancy, or trip some computer-detected error shutting the system down. The example I have read of, assumes that refrigeration problem to be solved, via multiple refrigeration stages I would presume, so the "limit" then becomes when the outer surface is glowing red-hot, and can't be heated any further, without melting. But that pumps out an incredible amount of heat into outer space, perhaps getting close to enough to be warm even on the moon?, so it's a rather meaningless limit. But that would boil off the oceans, so the example assumes the oceans to have been pumped into flasks. Or wait a minute. Couldn't the oceans be under the red-hot "roof" as well, with cities on top of them? I just came across some webpage on Seasteading, describing how entire cities might sit on legs allowing the ocean waves to slosh through underneath. Something like an oil rig I imagine. That's the old Malthusian mantra, that if humans don't control their numbers, nature will. But they can't prove that nature would ever be able to cause such an unnatural, human-unfriendly balance. People are not going to bake in their heat, if the air conditioning is just built stronger and stronger. And no doubt there would be backups upon backups, to guard against system failures. Sometimes, I find, sometimes it's almost cost-effective to have some backups. For example, when I bought my house, it came with gas heat, and central air. It's poorly insulated, and the baseboard hot water heating, just wouldn't quite keep it as warm as I like, on the coldest days of winter. It probably hurt the systems capacity, that I wasn't trying to heat every room, as that cuts down on total radiator capacity. I added gas logs, so that I might have some heat during power outages. Now the A/C is low on freon, and it's a really old system. So they tell me that a heat pump is about the same price. Okay. I'm leaving all the old heating systems in. Now I'll have triple redundancy, or 3 ways I can heat. If they jack the price of natural gas up too high, I can heat via electricity now. They're leaving in the old thermostat, and adding a new one, so that I run either system I want. Never a view of the surface? That's inaccurate as well. Haven't you heard of "virtual windows?" What's a virtual window? Simply a TV crossed with a webcam. Virtual windows can be "shared." What would you like to see outside "your window?" Forest, ocean, actual place, recorded previous place, a daily time-lag to correspond to your work shift, maybe a computer screen saver, burning logs on the fire, fish aquarium, etc.? Maybe some common areas, a webcam onto some restaurant, some shopping mall, watching other people play video games, etc. Virtual windows might even be holographically computer-rendered, or 3-D. So as you walk by, you can see the parallax effect and the view changes. Project Eden also preserved the old social stratifications, of the "nicer" places being toward the top, and the lower areas being more infested with crime and not being such great places to live. After all humans might not be so well able to solve all problems? Project Eden wasn't actually "crowded," but it seemed to have some of the typical human corruptions in its government. But I think the game really was about, a handy excuse to not have to design all the right polygons to make natural scenery look realistic. So much easier to do lots of really-tall buildings, than grass and trees and flower and all that flowery stuff, that inconveniently, isn't square or rectangular. Actually, I think such hypothetical warrens, would look much like Star Trek. Carpetted floors, most everything easy and modern, great lighting, spacious rooms, common areas, comfortable. It just wouldn't look so "natural," and it would be more like a sci-fi spaceship, and not so much "outdoors" or "nature." Well except that nature and humanity have finally become, much the same thing. So it would be "natural" after all, because what else would people know by then, being born into such a world? Yeah, but it's so hypothetical, and has little or nothing to do with the actual population reality. The world isn't anywhere near "full" of people. Heat extractors could solve that problem. Not to mention providing free, unlimited "fuel" for cars. If the "waste heat" can ever be tapped for doing productive work, the energy can be changed into matter, or in fact, be redirected to be beamed away, at higher frequencies again. So in other words, we aren't God, and still are dependent upon God. So what else is new? Okay, populate Mars and the moon "earth-full" too, if ever needed, or even possible. Mars has as much land as Earth, minus the area of the oceans. Come on, all that imagination, and yet missing "obvious" imaginations? Didn't you forget the handy armies of worker robots? Why can't they convert asteroids and such, into giant spaceships, to house people? The problems of transporting people? Perhaps spaceships will be crowded, and somewhere I heard the claim that married people may not be able to go for more than 4 days without sex. Funny that so little is ever considered on that. Fortunately, airplane rides don't take so long. But a ride to Mars might. Especially if supposedly to relieve growing population "pressure" on Earth. Might they have to allow people to have sex in public? I figure that it would be like on sci-fi movies and TV. Spacious spaceships, that people can reproduce more children on, with a reasonable level of privacy for such matters. Maybe that's why Star Trek "invented" Warp Drive, to be able to travel faster than light. But that likely isn't just about population, but because the distances in outer space are so great, and we the audience need for the story to play out in just an hour or two, or at least within the lifespan of the characters in the story. Gas giants may be worthless in their present form. So extract the matter, and build something else with it. Food replicators I think can change one element to another. It's simply E=mc^2, right? Or m=m. Conservation of energy/matter can be conserved. Or nothing much really changes? Is that the future, or the here and now? Doesn't it really just depend upon your perspective? Are you an optimist, or a pessimist? And what if so many of us are so "unenlightened," that we don't even want to "escape." Who's to say that any place out in outer space, no matter how isolated and far away, is any better than Earth? Isn't outer space, like a barren empty desert? No Wal-Marts, no breathable air, no flowers, no sky. Not even any spaceships (yet). I don't believe in such "earth control." Let the natural flow of human life flow naturally. Welcome babies to happen when they happen. Let the human race naturally grow just as populous, as it would naturally be able to grow to. Shouldn't such matters as to how numerous humans might "eventually" become, be determined by God? Humans don't even begin to understand the population control "mechanisms," and how animals are kept "in check," while humans are held "in check" far more loosely, by intelligent design (God), by such factors as how long it takes us to multiply, long generational delays compared to animals, waning fertility in old age, and if conditions were ever so unfavorable, people might cease to multiply even without all the "family planning" deceptions and coercion.
P.S. It is conceivable that giant spaceships could deal with a quadrupling of the population by the time they reach their destinations. It would even be desirable to have "large" seed populations to start the new colonies. Even a sperical spaceship a few miles wide, I may want to recheck the calculation, could hold an entire present world population of people. Not that it makes any difference, because I don't even see much use, in going to Mars. Other than in sci-fi, to encourage people to "think outside the box." Sending humans magnifies risks, and sends the life-support costs soaring. Robots do the exploring job far cheaper, and don't even expect a return trip.
600 million North America and South America should not be populated at all except by natives and then everywhere else is as it was around 1,000 years ago in terms of human population
Your original hypothesis had no such limit, and was clearly worded to imply that no such limit was necessary. I refuted that hypothesis and you modified it to conform to the limit set forth in my refutation, with plenty of room to spare. That's fine. This is how science works. Your updated hypothesis is no longer remarkable. The consensus of the demographic predictions I have read is that the population will level off at just about the figure in your post, and in fact somewhat lower, within a century. Our atavistic tribal instinct that drives much of our politics may cause a problem with this many people on one planet, but our technology certainly will not. The efficient and sustainable agricultural techniques of the sparsely populated Western Hemisphere could easily feed twelve billion people, and creating the infrastructure to transport that food to them won't strain the world economy. Fine, and I accept your clarification of your hypothesis. Nonetheless, a scientific interpretation of your many posts that express this hypothesis (and "scientific" is the only type of interpretation that serves as a reference standard on this website) easily identifies the consistent implication of an unbounded future, e.g. your cursory allowance for off-planet emigration. As I said already, that's fine. You are debating like a scientist and that is all we ask. That was the point. We can't falsify the hypothesis that the other problems can't be solved, so the essayists purposefully postulated solutions to them to help the argument along. Then they came face to face with the waste heat problem and focused on that as the final limiting factor. Of course. But the laws of physics reassure us that there is a limit to our ability to reduce it, which is the thermodynamics of human metabolism. Our bodies produce more low-frequency energy ("waste heat") than required to maintain a temperature of 98.6 degrees (37C). That waste heat must be dissipated or we will die. Yes. You are reproducing the (as I said) unremarkable and elementary calculations in the essay I read 40 years ago. No, even in the doubling-every-thirty-years model used in the essay, we have rather a lot of time to turn each of the principles set forth into a functioning technology. Many people focus on the array of solar collectors and microwave transmitters because they foresee that as the most difficult in many ways: energy, materials, testing, transportation, zero-gee habitats, not to mention politics, personnel management and quality assurance. Personally I think that bulldozing the earth's surface into a perfect ellipsoid plus redirecting the flow of all water into irrigation and life-support will be a pretty tough project. Furthermore, building a 500-story, 25000-mile-wide condominium that provides more-or-less the same living standard to every inhabitant will require careful oversight to put it mildly. Perhaps. This was thought up forty years ago. Nonetheless none of the people I have shared this with, with serious expertise in many disciplines, could offer a better alternative. They didn't pick 500 because of the limits of construction, although there were considerations of pumping air and water. They arrived at it from calculating the population limit. They will fit in a mile-deep warren so there's no reason to complicate the scenario with unnecessary excavation. Those are my words. The essayists were more vague. I don't think the movie "Soylent Green" was out yet but the underlying concept of creating food by largely inorganic processes was. Still, we're a long way from unlocking the mystery of photosynthesis (much less abiogenesis) and without it we can't convert energy plus inorganic matter into organic matter. Obviously one of the principal authors of this essay was a physicist. He took all of this into account. Heat is electromagnetic radiation and the transfer of energy by this means is limited by the speed of light. That was all factored in. I suppose this hypothesis does not deserve to be dismissed as pseudoscience because of the reasonable way you phrase it. Nonetheless, your hypothesis falsifies a major component of the scientific canon, after all of the testing and peer review it has withstood, and therefore it certainly qualifies as an "extraordinary assertion." You are required to submit some extraordinary evidence before we can reasonably use it in a discussion which so far has stuck faithfully to basic, uncontroversial scientific principles. Of course. And if an "exception" can be found to the lightspeed limit, we can solve our population problem by "beaming" billions of people to Tau Ceti. The limitation is entropy, enforced by the lightspeed limit. No matter what material (or empty space) used as a conduit for the waste energy, it can only travel as fast as the speed of light. When you've got fifty quadrillion people each emitting forty watts of waste heat, that is inevitably going to heat the surface of the planet to 125 Fahrenheit just as fast as that energy can dissipate out into the universe at lightspeed. These guys did the math and I've had physicists check it over the years. It is simply not an Einsteinian-level calculation. Trust them. I'm sure there are ten members of SciForums who could do it in half an hour. Mister Q is probably one of them. It isn't nature that will cause the balance but the people, in your unedited scenario in which they would blithely keep doubling their numbers indefinitely. The "nature" in this case is not the nature of Malthus's time, which was things like the water table. It is the laws of physics, which are part of the structure of the natural universe. The man who cites religion in his writings and had to go back and shore up the imprecise language that invalidated his own hypothesis is nailing me on the technicality of waxing poetic. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Nonetheless "cabin fever" is a documented phenomenon. We will commit almost all of the human race to a life without ever once seeing or breathing a non-artificial atmosphere at our peril. You're back to that again. It has already been refuted. Thermodynamics does not allow this. You have already used up your quota of one extraordinary hypothesis per post so we won't treat any more of them with respect. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! This is a science website. The fundamental premise of science is that the natural universe is a closed system whose behavior can be understood and predicted by theories derived logically from empirical observations of its present and past behavior. Hypotheses of a supernatural universe that is unobservable and illogical, including inhabitants that control the behavior of this universe in unobservable and illogical ways, are antiscientific. Excessive posting of such hypotheses is trolling. There is only a finite quantity of matter in the solar system. Once you convert it all into more warrens you've extended the date of the entropy limit by a few generations but then you still run into the same problem. You have not heard that from very many married people. Take my word for it. The "generation starship" concept has been elaborated to death in sci fi. You have to have a ship literally the size of a city so that civilization can be maintained by a critical mass of inhabitants. At a minimum it would be built like the 3000CE earth, with minimal size private cubicles. Indeed. At relativistic speeds it will take sixty years just to travel to the nearest star which probably has a planet. There is no hope of a "galactic civilization." A trip from one edge of the galaxy to the other would take several hundred thousand years. Again the antiscientific hypothesis of a supernatural universe. You are trolling. Yet another time. There is a Sticky in Biology and Genetics to which all discussion of evolution denialist theories is limited by the Moderators. Of course. The spaceship will presumably be constructed in orbit out of material scavenged from asteroids. Still, the people must be lifted out of earth's gravity well. Have you calculated the amount of energy that will use?
So your argument is that we should destroy everything because of aliens? Like: We know that our continued course of action will leave the earth a wrecked planet, where the vast majority of people live in total poverty, eking what meager living they can from the decaying remnants of civilizations around them (maybe they'll have a Thunderdome!). Therefore, we should continue our course of action, because aliens MIGHT show up before we wreck the planet, in the hopes that we MIGHT get off the planet and terraform Mars so we can live on it in the hopes that when the earth goes, we can live there. Nope, I'm not buying it. (Note that any technology that could at all make Mars habitable would have immediate and relevant effects on earth. It would be better to figure out how to live on earth, so we can then figure out how to live on Mars, rather than visiting just visiting Mars.)
I'm good with that. I'm native. I was born here. If you're referring to those people who preceded me, they aren't really natives either. They came across a land bridge about 10,000 years ago from Asia. Also, if this is our litmus test, all those pesky English should get the hell out of the British Isles too: they are descended from Celtic invaders who then mixed with various invaders from the Romans, then Saxons, then Jutes and Vikings, then Franks and finally those bloody Pakistanis! They should all leave. Also, Arabs should leave North Africa... they're invaders too. While we're at it, let's limit human habitation to just Africa since that is the cradle of humanity and everywhere else was just concquered land. That sounds about right. ~String
It is just a ballpark figure based on that today's 7 billions is definiatelly too many. So a 40% reduction would do good. Now when people go for a really low number like a few 100 millions, you have to keep in mind that a certain mass is needed to keep the economy going and for production of this and that. If the number of humans is too few, (let's say 300 millions) lots of new invention won't be made because not being economical. Now that could be argued that not necesserily bad... Also as Elcid pointed out earlier, this ideal number changes by time. If we can establish a healthy BALANCE with nature where we have our food and energy and mineral needs covered, we don't use up more resources, spaces than we create,, this number can go up or down.
