Barry Brooks wrote:
[snip]
> Well, there are about 10^77 atoms in the universe. Let's ignore that
> over 90% of these are Hydrogen, Helium and Lithium atoms---we'll fuse
> more carbon, uranium, etc as we need it.
>
> A human weighs about 70kg, or 70000 grams. Lets assume this is all
> Water (H2O). A water molecule has an atomic mass of 18, so a gram of
> them contains 6.02x10^23 molecules, and the human body contains about
> 7x10^4*6.02x10^23 molecules. Ignoring the constants, This leaves room
> in the Universe for about 10^77/10^27 or about 10^50 humans, all living
> on faith, standing on air.
>
> Can we agree that this is an upper limit?
>
> At our modest growth rate of 1.5 percent per year, we will reach this
> limit it 1.015^n = 10^50, or n = (50 ln 10)/ln 1.015 $\approx$ 7733 years.
>
> There are always limits.
>
> Mike
> --
> Michael D. Sofka [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> CIS Sr. Systems Programmer AFS/DFS, email, usenet, TeX, epistemology.
> Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY. http://www.rpi.edu/~sofkam/
>
> Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to use the
> Web and he won't bother you for weeks.
I had previously calculated that the earth is currently very sparsely
populated:
That, if reduced to an emulsion, the current quantity of warm, squirming
living human bodies (ca. 5*10**9) would cover the earth to a depth of
only
a small fraction of an inch. I would again call attention to the
Sherwin-Williams Paint Co.'s logo: A huge paint can pouring paint
onto the top of the globe --> to "cover the earth".
The question, it seems to me, is not so much how many persons *can*
the world (earth or universe, or even just Mexico City, Cairo, etc.)
accommodate, but what is the human population level beyond which
the quality of life begins to degrade due to limits of physical
resource constraints which cannot be overcome technologically.
I believe there was popular movie that proposed the food of the
21st century would be some combination of algae and recycled
cadavers (soylent green???). I believe every person has a right to
gourmet meals. Not a sarcastic: "Let them eat cake!", but a
Kantian: "No more of us than we can bake cakes for [Gateau
St. Honore, or health-food carrot cake, as the taste of the
time may be...]!"
I have recently discovered (via postings on rec.pets.cats) that
something a classically German educated philosophy professor
(Preuss) I had at Yale for a course on Hegel's _Phenomenology_
said, is even more true than I could have imagined. Prof. Preuss
said:
A man eats, and a dog eats, but the two
do not thereby do the same thing.
*He* meant that, for the human, eating is a freely chosen
act which is part of a symbolically projected life-project
(some persons, sometimes, choose to eat in the mode of
going on a hunger strike; Jesus's "Last Supper"; Francis
Ford Coppola's daughter throwing a $1000 a plate charitable
fund-raiser dinner at a Napa vineyard to the accompaniment of
a screening of Abel Gance's "Napoleon", etc.).
I have recently learned that some dogs' consider cat feces
a delicacy. Do we want to live like dogs in an
overpopulated world?
\brad mccormick
--
Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but
Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world.
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA
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