On Jul 24, 2008, at 2:27 PM, hkhenson wrote: > At 12:00 PM 7/23/2008, Bruce Bostwick wrote: > >> Pretty sure we're headed for a population crash at least that drastic >> regardless. it's obvious to me that the earth cannot support 6-7 >> billion sustainably no matter what we do. > > With a lot of low cost, low environmental damage energy the earth > could support somewhat more than the current population--in style.
That's been obvious enough to me that it's the premise of at least one book I'm working on. Energy is everything -- without it, we can't produce food (on anything like the scale it's being produced on now, at least), we can't get to and from work or do most of the kinds of work we do, we can't transport goods from where they're made to where they're needed, etc. With more of it, with lower cost and less to zero environmental impact, yes, we could make Earth look like Coruscant and sustain it indefinitely. (Tangential: That was one of the things that always bugged me the most about the Star Wars movies .. the enormous amount of energy obviously being consumed with no explanation as to the energy sources, other than they obviously had nearly limitless supplies of it.. :) But the "if that energy source exists" is a BIG if. I'm hoping it's found very soon. (And I'm also hoping we use at least some of it to start terraforming Mars and maybe some other places to live in our solar system, so we don't have our entire population at the mercy of one biosphere. But that's just me .. I'd move to a Mars colony tomorrow if they were recruiting.) >> And there are certain parts >> of the population doing their best to outbreed everyone else just to >> skew future demographics. So it's likely to be a hard crash, and not >> a very well controlled one at that. > > This would worry me more except I think the age of genes is about > over. Eh? "Grotesque oppression isn't okay just because it's been institutionalized." -- Toby Ziegler _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
