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Re: Yuri receives hypocrite of the week award (was Re: Ecological Economics and Entropy)
First of all, my comments were in response to jw's contention that the
solar system could support trillions. So I'm taking HIS assumption, and
trying to look at how reasonable (or unreasonable) that may be. I take
jw's comments to suggest that the slowing of population growth is a BAD
thing. I have no problem if the earth's population really does stabilize
at 12 billion or less, BUT it is certainly not clear (from a couple decades
of stats) that this will happen. Anyway--
Ok--dljs rainfall figure you currently get almost 7600 liters of rainfall
per person per day. Of course this rainfall must serve ALL water dependent
systems (of which man is only one) but nonetheless seems adequate. BUT,
allow jw's trillions to exist (agreed they don't now and won't--but to
argue against jw lets just let the earth's population rise to 1 trillion)
and you're down to 45 liters per day per person. This is not likely to be
enough.
David Lloyd-Jones <dlj@inforamp.net> wrote in article
>
> 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.
>
>
<snipped stuff on lack of energy to desalinate needed water>
>
> 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.
>
>
We don't have enough affordable, clean, energy available today to maintain
the world's population (approaching 6 billion) at a Japanese middle class
life style. This would require about 3 times today's energy production (at
U.S. usage--5 times). Yes there IS enough solar input to support even 12
billion but this is not available today at a cost that can be
afforded--someday perhaps. However the area of collectors needed to support
a 12 billion person population at reasonably high living standards is
staggering.
> 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.
>
>
> 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.
>
Can we be certain this will continue? The change in U.S. demography,
especially the ethnic make up, is effecting population growth rates here,
and the pressures are not downward.
> 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".
>
I'm quite comfortable with thousands (100,000 people filling the Rose
Bowl), even a million or two--my wife's school collected a quarter million
tabs from soda cans last year. Billions is where I lose conceptual
comfort--but again, the trillions are jw's not mine.
{My training is as a nuclear physicist--we have to deal with VERY large and
very small numbers all the time. While it never becomes 'intuitive', one
can (through numerous analogies) become reasonably comfortable with these
large and small numbers. For example--as above, 100,000 people fit (with
room left over) in the Rose bowl. I've been in such crowds, so I CAN
visualize and conceptualize this number. It takes 60,000 rose bowls to
hold the world's population. Again, a number not beyond one's
comprehension. This kind of thing helps--even though it is still very
difficult to comprehend how many 6 billion really is. I have a bunch of
such tricks to deal with a trillion as well ;-) }
> 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...
Land use figures again presented only to refute jw's trillions supportable.
However, the fact that if for some reason the growth rate drop stalls--say
at about 1%, then it only takes a few centuries to have really massive
populations. To me, it is clear that resources (like water and food),
disease, political and economic realities will intervene to prevent such
population growth--but others, like jw, seem to decry population
stabilization.
Of course if the earth's population is not controlled at the 10-12 billion
level, the only effective way to 'house' these billions is high density
cities. But such beasts are huge ENERGY sinks.
BTW: Unless the earth's population REALLY stabilizes at zero growth,
you'll never get enough people OFF the earth (to extraterrestrial colonies)
to matter. With the yearly growth being nearly 80 million now, the
technology of space travel (and the energy costs--still the focus of the
newsgroup I'm reading--Sci.Energy) won't be able to even dent this figure
for a LONG time.
Rick Tarara
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