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Re: Yuri receives hypocrite of the week award (was Re: Ecological Economics and Entropy)



In <01bbe079$983e3960$6b093593@Rick> "Richard W. Tarara"
<rtarara@saintmarys.edu> writes: 
>
>
>
>> >jw (jwas@ix.netcom.com) wrote:
>> >
>> posting. Below are statistics... for the planet Earth.
>> 
>>     Year             Population 
>>                        Growth
>>                         rate
>> 
>>     1970                2.07
>>     1975                1.76
>>     1980                1.71
>>     1985                1.68     
>>     1990                1.58     
>>     1995                1.41     
>>     2000 (projected)    1.28     
>> 
>The numbers I get (from Britannica Annual World Data Sheets) are even
a
>little lower (1985-1996) averaged over 2-3 years

My source was  U.S. Bureau of the Census, International Data Base;
these are midyear figures.

>It's important to keep in mind that 1.00 IS NOT ZPG, 0.00 IS.

This is true; and these rates are obviously moving towards
zero - and beyond zero. It is important to keep
in mind that population growth is a lagging indicator;
population still keeps growing even after fertility
falls below replacement levels, as it did in many
countries.



>These are
>annual percentage growths.  At 1.4% gowth today, we add 80 million
people
>per year.  Even as the percentage drops slowly, the absolute growth
can
>still be increasing--such is the nature of such growth.  

No: the absolute growth is already decreasing:
   year       populatiion        rate     absolute
                                          increase
-----------------------------------------------------
    1989     5,194,206,959       1.67     87,337,583
    1990     5,281,544,542       1.58     83,947,792
    1991     5,365,492,334       1.52     82,302,295
    1992     5,447,794,629       1.48     81,284,496
    1993     5,529,079,125       1.44     80,305,662
    1994     5,609,384,787       1.45     82,033,007

    1995     5,691,417,794       1.41     80,933,222
    1996     5,772,351,016       1.38     80,362,443
    1997     5,852,713,459       1.36     79,912,950
    1998     5,932,626,409       1.33     79,640,559
    1999     6,012,266,968       1.31     79,210,215

    2000     6,091,477,183       1.28     78,710,475

>as posted earlier, even (what seems like) a modest growth of 1% cannot
be
>sustained long term (thousands of years)

With present trends, the rate will be negative in 
just a few decades.

> {in 17,000 years there would be
>more people than atoms in the Universe!}.

We should be so lucky to encounter *that* kind of
limit. Limiting growth for *that* reason
would be like bending when you see
a rainbow, for fear of bumping your head
into it. 

For how long has the known universe
been at its present size? Answer: a year or two:
the estimated number of galaxies increased by
a factor of five recently, due to Hubble's
observations. That's a lot of real estate.

Is this *all* the universe?
There is no data on that: there's a horizon
beyond which we know nothing; the Big Bang
bubble is finite but might be a local phenomenon in
a larger whole. 

Is this the *only* universe?
Not known; but there's a strong suspicion that
there may be others.

A hundred years ago the known universe was infinite,
euclidean, static, eternal and unique; now it is finite,
curved in higher dimensions, expanding, rather recent,
and perhaps one of many.

A hundred years from now? No one knows.

Thousands of years from now? Utterly
beyond the horizon of prediction and
even imagination. Kids might be creating
universes then as our kids create soap bubbles...
a wild fantasy of course; but not known to be
impossible.

But we can be *certain* that at least many trillions of 
human  beings can be sustained comfortably in this solar 
system alone. When we get that many (not soon, if ever!), 
we can take another look. It will all look very different
then; no use second-guessing our wise descendants.




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