I think this is the good way to approach it if you're a space nerd who's deeply concerned about population growth and how little any side of the political spectrum has done to address it. We're not anti-human. Live long and prosper! Just as long as it's mostly out there, where you can't take the sky from me.
On planet Earth, we're messing up big time. What the global ideal population would be depends on trading off numbers against resource constraints. If we don't want resource constraints, want everyone to live like kings, and want minimal harm to the environment, then I think we're looking at 100 million people. If you settle for the median American quality of life with some reasonable technological upgrades to reduce environmental impacts, then we're looking at a billion people, one-tenth of what we'll see in 89 years. For larger numbers with modest environmental impacts, the only way I can imagine an ideal life is if people get most of the high quality of life experiences through virtual reality.
It's a rotten shame that the left in the US has mostly forgotten about the population problem due to some overstatements decades ago, and a fear of doing anything that tar them with espousing a policy that's also espoused for racist reasons by racists. The right is even worse, either ignoring the problem for ideological reasons or dog-whistling racist or fear-inducing reasons to control population. All the above gets magnified tenfold when discussing immigration to the US, where we convert the usually-young immigrants into highly impacting Americans, with descendants.
Maybe we can take the latest milestone of 7,000,000,000 people to do something about population, and even about immigration, without playing into the hands of racists.
*I think we'll pass the Singularity point in less than 50 years.
A science fiction writer whose name I can't recall at present pointed out that moving to other planets or to space stations requires resources, and that Earth would not have enough resources for everyone to move out there.
ReplyDeleteWouldn't have to move everyone. Move some and reproduce heavily.
ReplyDeleteI really can't imagine why our robot overlords would want 100 gigapeople cluttering the solar system.
ReplyDeleteSee also several recent posts on Tom Murphy's new blog, 'Do The Math', http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/ in which he points out (a) that exponential growth has to stop, (b) that Space Is Hard, and (c) that even if we go to space, Exponential Growth has to Stop. On all these subjects he got a certain amount of flamage from internet space cadets, a remarkable species whose faith in manifest destiny can blind them to basic arithmetic. The same thing happened to Charlie Stross when he tackled some of the same subject matter on his blog a while ago.
ReplyDeleteRe ideal population, it's unclear to me that there is any upward pressure on population once we are all rich. It seems more likely to me that, if we can get past the current crisis, we will stabilise at a few billion people, who will very gradually become more far-flung. Brakes on growth of populations have little to do with resource limits and much more to do with education and emancipation of women.
Aside from "Do the math" the other go to for discussion of the singularity and colonisation of space is Charles Stross's blog.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/06/reality-check-1.html
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/10/trick-question.html
And numerous other threads over the last 5 years and longer. If you are into SF and havn't read any of his books you need to go out and buy some of them now. Especially recomended are "Halting state", the Laundry series (Which contains scenes of eldritch horror which should be familiar to any of you who have worked in a burueacratic environment) and "Saturns Children" in which humanity has made AI's and robots but managed to die out because of low birth rates, pollution of the earth etc. So the robots carry on living without humans...
Stross earlier wrote something specific to space travel -- it focuses at first on interstellar, but winds up examining the same problem within the solar system:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html
He quotes Bruce Sterling:
I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach.
Albert Bartlett's informative lecture on exponential growth:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY
People need to watch this lecture, or at least gain an understanding of compound growth. "Modest" annual growth of 1-2% becomes frightening when you start looking at numbers.
"...internet space cadets, a remarkable species whose faith in manifest destiny can blind them to basic arithmetic..."
ReplyDeleteAnd the need that some humans have for certain luxuries to which they have become accustomed. Oxygen and water for example.
badger cubed - I forgot about that thread, that's the one which seemed to start it all off. Of course part of the problem might have been that to many people, Stross was a singularitarian prophet, after the stories which were collected in "Accelerando".
ReplyDeleteImagined spherical cows, ok. Cubed badgers, I don't know.
ReplyDeleteRandom thoughts about population:
ReplyDeleteThe typical US resident is a heavy user of natural resources, and the population growth rate is very slow. Growth is mainly by immigration.
Much of the world's population suffers from extreme poverty and is barely avoiding starvation. The population growth rate is high.
Which group is causing the problem? If concerns about population are really driven by questions of resources, then the US population is causing most of the problem, not poor people in Bangladesh. Much of the urgency though is about the world's poor.
By the way, all of this is not a confirmation but a refutation of Malthus. Malthus believed:
if wages are greater than subsistence wages, then population grows.
if wages are below subsistence wages, then population shrinks
if wages = subsistence wages, then the population is stable (unchanging).
If these assumptions are all valid, then wages will not rise above subsistence wages.
Admirers of Malthus should confront his belief that the constant threat of poverty and starvation served to teach the virtues of hard work and virtuous behavior. Malthus advocated repeal of legislation to help the poor.
I have two space colonist fantasies. They both demand Benign Others to extricate us from our mess. I've never been able to decide whether I'd prefer to be one of those selected to go to infinity and beyond in our alien's human biodome project or to be one of the ones left behind to nurse a shattered Earth back to life.
ReplyDeleteIn the limit of infinite free energy everything is possible. Reality sucks.
ReplyDelete"Admirers of Malthus should confront his belief that the constant threat of poverty and starvation served to teach the virtues of hard work and virtuous behavior."
ReplyDeleteWell, in the case of many poor people in difficult circumstances, hard work and virtuous behaviour = having as many children as possible to fetch firewood, carry water from a distant stream and similar tasks. The tasks? Unskilled work that can be done piecemeal. Several children can simultaneously carry more water home in smaller containers in less time than one strong individual with a larger container could manage. Weeding the farm, shepherding the animals, feeding the chooks can all be done by small children with no more training than watching the older kids do it.
And it's more virtuous to have more children to ensure that there are always a some survivors.
Malthus of course knew nothing of modern contraception, and probably little more about the education of girls and women. What we need is for it to become socially unacceptable to be a grandmother at less than 50 years old. We don't need just to reduce the numbers of children women bear. We need to reduce the number of generations alive at one time for any given family.
If women for the last few decades had been producing _exactly_ the same number of children, but in an environment where the average age at first birth was 5 or even 10 years later than currently, we wouldn't have anywhere near 7 billion population. (Because 5 or 10 years later for the parents becomes 10 or 20 years later for the grandparents - much less generational overlap. Fewer great-grandparents. Great-great-grandparents - virtually none.)
MinniesMum
Its the chickens what are spherical.
ReplyDelete"(a) that exponential growth has to stop, (b) that Space Is Hard, and (c) that even if we go to space, Exponential Growth has to Stop."
ReplyDeleteI don't have a problem with any of that, but I'm still unimpressed with the claim that we won't colonize space, especially if we relax timeframes. Think 200 years is too soon? How about 1000 years, or 5000? Still a blink of an eye.
I might have screwed up the post though, in that this SF idea I led with is interesting, but what we really need to do is focus on getting population under control.
Spherical vs. cubed depends on whether you're going for an exact solution, or are willing to deal with a finite difference method.
ReplyDeleteThe best way to control population is to advocate women's equality, to educate girls and give women access to birth control.
ReplyDeleteThe rubbish put out by Matt Ridley on climate change and climate scientists has been quite in evidence the last couple of days. His view on climate is not the only area where he is shown to be a crank. He also puts out rubbish on how a global population of 9 billion will be better than a population of 7 billion:
ReplyDelete"The population may surpass nine billion by 2050. We, together with our 20 billion chickens and four billion cattle, sheep and pigs, will utterly dominate the planet. Can the planet take it? Can we take it?
Yes. Not only is such a huge population going to prove indefinitely "sustainable"; it is actually likely that the ecological impact of nine billion in 2050 will be lighter, not heavier: there will be less pollution and more space left over for nature than there is today".
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/There+plenty+room/5427626/story.html
Eli, it is the journey, not the destination. Why consider a median American lifestyle is what is wanted? Different strokes for different folks. Elitism is just as bad as racism, after all. Survival itself may be reward enough. If we can muster the resources for deeper space colonization, the colonists will at least be out of sight and mind for a generation or two, then we can see how things play out. Perhaps shorter but much more lively lifespans are in order, so we can just ship the long lifers to space to pursue their longevity dreams.
ReplyDeleteIan - I had a look at the post on watts wrong with that.
ReplyDeleteRidley manages to indicate that he is in fact both quite intelligent and really gullible and dumb. He accepts Montforts farrago, swallows denialist talking points whole without submitting them to rational evidence based questioning and generally shows why Northern Rock went bust.
Good point badger3X.
ReplyDeleteI don't know exactly what it is, but I'm sure it's good.
More to the point of this post however:
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/science-%26-technology/discovery-of-earth%11like-planet-means-it%27s-okay-to-destroy-earth-201109144301/
ndcodeblue mentions Albert Bartlett's plain English lecture on growth
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, on David Archibald's carbon sympathetic thread at WUWT, many commenters are completely missing the point Bartlett makes.
I think that I might finally be running out of words to describe the ignorance of cornucopians...
Bernard J. Hyphen-Anonymous XVII, Esq.