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Re: Yuri receives hypocrite of the week award (was Re: Ecological Economics and Entropy)
In <01bbe1f3$722a54e0$6b093593@Rick> "Richard W. Tarara"
<rtarara@saintmarys.edu> writes:
>
>jw <jwas@ix.netcom.com> wrote (along with a lot of other fantasy-world
>ramblings)
Do you believe this kind of introductory remark makes your
yet-to-be-made case any stronger? Well, as
we'll see in a second, the case needs any help
it can get.
>> 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.
>>
>
>Not without an unlimited, essentially free source of readily available
>energy.
Unlimited? No: just sufficient for this number of people.
"Essentially free" is a "readily available" nonsense:
the energy source needn't be any more free than
the sources we use now.
Such a source exists, the sun.
Our present energy consumption is about 1/15,000 of the
sunlight falling on *this planet only*.
This fraction of sunlight alone could support
"many trillions" - at the present meager rate of energy
consumption.
But a simple calculation will tell you that the sunlight
falling on this little mudball is about 1/2,200,000,000
of the sun's total output. Multiplying these two numbers,
15,000 and 2,200,000,000, we obtain 3.3*10^13.
That's how many times more energy the sun produces than
people consume.
There are less than 6 billion people in the world.
Suppose there were 100 trillion people
in the solar system.
Let us also assume the efficiency of sunlight use of only
one percent...
Then each of the 100 trillion people will
have 20 million times more energy at her or his
disposal than the average person has today.
This appears ample - for the foreseeable future.
I was extremely conservative in my estimate.
There's a huge margin.
And that's counting *only* the energy that comes from one
well-known source, the sun. No doubt new breakthroughs
will occur, new possibilities open up. They always do.
But the above calculation ignores this well-tested certainty.
In this sense only, it is unrealistic.
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