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



On 6 Dec 1996 02:10:20 GMT, "Rick & Bea Tarara" <rbtarara@sprynet.com>
wrote:

>Well you can set a practical limit by finding out the total amount of fresh
>water on the earth and divide by the average water usage per person
>(including that used for growing crops and raising livestock).  I don't
>have those numbers handy (or even know where to find them). 

Yes, you could do it that way.  Let's just assume that the average
human has 1/100th of a square mile of land and it rains six inches
that year: 32 acre-feet right thare.  Do you want to drink it, one
eight ounce glass at a time, three times a day? 
 
I don't have my calculator handy, but I know what an acre looks like,
so I know you can drink all day, all night, and still take baths.
 


>                                                                Of course
>you'll offer to desalinate the oceans--but one of my points to jw was that
>this takes ENERGY which we 'ain't' got.  

This is horseshit.  Incomig sunlight is several hundred watts, a big
fraction of a horsepower, per square yard, everyplace between the two
Tropics.  Even in the subtropic and arctic regions, the incoming
amounts to a vastly greater amount of energy than is being consumer --
not be the people living there, but by the entire human race.

>                            However, if you want to get really
>'crazy' take the total amount of water on the earth--about 1.5x10^21 kg
>(almost all in the oceans) and divide by 50 kg the approximate amount of
>water in an adult person.  You get about 3x10^19 people.  jw would be
>thrilled, this is 30 million, trillion people.  Of course that ties up ALL
>the earth's water, none left for crops, bathing, drinking, any other
>biological life, etc.  Each person would have to carefully recycle every
>gram--but of course this is ridiculous.  It does, however set an absolute
>limit, although I suspect that the amount of other elements necessary for
>human life and their abundance on earth would set an even lower limit--any
>biologists out there with that number?
 
Um, well, that gives us one way of being crazy.
 
Since in my lifetime we are only worrying about a population of 12
billion or fewer, and stable at that, I really can't get too upset
over these 3*10^19 people.
 
Particularly since they don't exist.

>Of course each of these 30 million,trillion people get a whole 17 square
>millimeters of the earth's surface for themselves!  We can use the whole
>earth for this since all the ocean's waters are tied up in people.

Like I said, they don't exist.  You're frothing on.

>Even at jw's trillions, we have a problem with space.  At 1 trillion,
>that's only 100 square meters per person (of dry land).  Obviously you have
>to build up, down, or go undersea to spread this trillion out, but any of
>that takes HUGE amounts of energy--for construction, heating, cooling,
>sanitation, lighting, etc., etc.  Even 1 trillion is a ridiculous figure
>for an earth population, and the technological and energy constraints on
>establishing large colonies in this solar system are also out of the
>question.  But, for jw and those who decry any kind of population control,
>at a 1% annual population growth we WOULD hit a trillion in only a little
>over 500 years from now!  

Froth, froth.  Our birth rate is dropping.  The absolute number of
births is dropping.  The number of possible mothers in the world will
start dropping before 1998.  Population is coming under control,
thanks to the choices people are making about how to live.

I doubt that you even know what a thousand of anything looks like, so
callow and stupid are you in throwing around these nonexistent
"trillions".
 
>If anyone has fresh water stats I also would like to see them.  What we
>need is:
>
>Total fresh water supply:  could probably use average rainfall over land
>time area.

Excuse me, weren't you the one lecturing us?

>Average water use per person: (including water needed to produce food)
>Energy cost per unit to desalinate salt water:

Not needed: Rain does it for us.

>From a Biologist or BioChemist a figure of rare elements necessary for
>human life.

Will an accountant do?  Carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen,
phosphorus, and a few odds and ends.  The phosphorus runs out first:
when we have trillions living on the Dyson Sphere.  We shall recycle
the dead assiduously.

>The amount per person and the total estimated amount (near the surface) of
>the earth.

Hunh? If you're talking trillions, Earth is a tourist resort by then.
?But I'll give you Bucky Fuller's old jape about density: if you held
a normal cocktail party on all floors of the buildings of Manhattan,
you could invite the human race.
 
Obviously the East River subway would be a little bit crowded when the
party broke up...
 
                                                          -dlj.
>
>
>-- 
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>+++++++++
>Richard W. Tarara
>Department of Chemistry & Physics	Free Physics & Energy Instructional 
>Software
>Saint Mary's College			available at:	
>Notre Dame, IN 46556
>219-284-4664				http://estel.uindy.edu/aapt/rickt/software/
>rtarara@saintmarys.edu	
>http://www-hpcc.astro.washington.edu/mirrors/tarara/
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