As the article reports, the late agronomist Norman Borlaug helped fix the world food problem, and the late economist Julian Simon helped get the world thinking about how little of a problem population growth really is.
"One thing that happened on the road to doom was that the world figured out how to feed itself despite its rising numbers. No small measure of thanks belonged to Norman E. Borlaug, an American plant scientist whose breeding of high-yielding, disease-resistant crops led to the agricultural savior known as the Green Revolution. While shortages persisted in some regions, they were often more a function of government incompetence, corruption or civil strife than of an absolute lack of food.
"Some preternaturally optimistic analysts concluded that humans would always find their way out of tough spots. Among them was Julian L. Simon, an economist who established himself as the anti-Ehrlich, arguing that 'humanity’s condition will improve in just about every material way. [This has proven to be true all over the world.] In 1997, a year before he died, Mr. Simon told Wired magazine that 'whatever the rate of population growth is, historically it has been that the food supply increases at least as fast, if not faster.'"
I am old enough to remember when the ideas in the book The Population Bomb seemed like fresh, new ideas. Decades later, the world Ehrlich and I still live in seems more like a confirmation of criticisms of the book[1] than like a confirmation of the book. Since the book was first published, I have spent many years living in Taiwan, starkly poor when I was born and still poor when the book was published, and one of the more densely populated countries of the world during most of my lifetime, but today a prosperous, delightful place to live. The population of the United States has increased greatly in my lifetime, but the United States is still a great place to live too. Fears of great harm from a population explosion were just wrong, that's all. This article is part of a great article series published by the New York Times looking back on predictions from earlier eras and how they turned out.
Anything other than techno-utopianism on HN? Cue the Norman Borlaug worship! Nevermind the fact that the "high-yielding, disease-resistant crops" only perform better when doused with biocides and chemicals (which leads to soil loss, contaminates aquifers and other waters, and ultimately leads to desertification).
We're only surviving today by stealing from our future. That's what "unsustainable" means. The problem is that the future catches up with you. The fact that industrial agriculture seems to work today obscures that fact.
Soil loss and desertification is generally caused by excessive tillage, not by chemical use. Chemical use in modern farming has drastically reduced tillage requirements.
>Soil loss and desertification is generally caused by excessive tillage, not by chemical use.
It's both. Herbicides wipe out soil-stabilizing fibrous root networks. Fungicides wipe out soil-stabilizing mycelial mats. Nitrogen fertilizers poison the microbial environment in healthy soil (with about a trillion organisms per cc), destroying a significant source of organic matter. Insecticides kill off the earthworms, which aerate the soil allowing it to soak rain instead of running off (taking soil with it).
Any fertilizer that's mined out of the ground is obviously transient, so the ability to have a food system without fertilizer is a Very Important Thing.
I guess we'll have to switch to pure-meat based diet then. Native grass is the only thing that grows well and reliably on the majority of North American farmland without tillage or chemicals. And the best way to turn grass into calories is to run it through something with four stomachs first.
So if you want to raise cereals and vegetables, you have to choose: tillage or chemical use. The latter is much easier on the soil, even if it's not perfect.
You speak as if industrial farming is the only way to grow food, but of course that's false.[1] In fact after subtracting out government subsidies (including subsidies on chemical inputs) industrial farm fields are a net loss. TL;DR industrial ag is a way of funneling your tax dollars to chemical companies.
Chemical use can be eliminated (yes, even to grow cereals!) by cultivating healthy living soil. The easiest way is with green mulches/cover crops, which serve the same thermodynamic functions but using sunlight instead of fossil fuel.
* Legumes fix nitrogen. Yep, solar powered.
* Insect predators eat pests. They're part of the food chain, so they're solar powered.
* Deep rooted plants[2] bring up minerals (essentially micro-scale mining on site in response to mineral deficiencies) and make soil. Photosynthesis, natch.
You get the idea.
I don't really have to say that an erosive food system that compromises humanity's only closed-loop habitat is a bad value, do I?
>make energy cheap enough and we can desalinate enough water to re-green the Sahara desert
So all we're waiting for is "power too cheap to meter", eh? :D
Planting trees can also green deserts[1], and does so without perpetual future energy inputs from desalination. This makes sense when you realize that plants cause rain.[2] The reverse is also true - cutting down forests creates deserts.
It's a bit curious that the response to population concerns is that we can feed ourselves. There is much more to life than mere subsistence. The world can not all live like Americans. There aren't presently enough resources for this to happen. Maybe when we mine the moon and asteroids but not right now.
Great harm from the population explosion has been done. The environmental damage is enormous. Yes, we can still feed ourselves but this is not the only aspect of population growth fears.
People say this all the time, but it's simply not true. There is no limit to our resources because they can be recycled endlessly. The atoms don't wear out.
The only input necessary is energy, and we are working hard to make that cheaper and cleaner.
Your last paragraph indicates that you agree with me. I did specify that at this time the world can not all live like Americans. I left open the possibility that in the future this might no longer be true. Hence I don't understand the point of your response. You agree with my statement in the second paragraph but disagree with it in the first. You also ingored the part about environmental damage.
You don't have to mine the moon. The Earth is sufficient.
> I did specify that at this time the world can not all live like Americans.
No. Even right now we can all live like Americans.
For animals, resources are limited. What is there, is what is there.
It's not like that for human. Humans create resources if they need them. If the whole world wanted to live like Americans we could create the needed resources.
Doing so thoughtlessly creates pollution, but it's not an essential part of the process.
Energy is still limited. At our long-term growth rate of energy use, we have fewer than 300 years before we start observing warming from thermodynamic limits on energy dissipation[1]. This is completely independent of the method of energy production, and simply a function of how quickly the Earth is capable of radiating thermal energy out into space.
>People say this all the time, but it's simply not true. There is no limit to our resources because they can be recycled endlessly. The atoms don't wear out.
Maybe atoms don't wear out, but neither can resources (that are not merely inter-changeable atoms) be "recycled endlessly".
You cannot "create petrol" after it runs out, for example, unless you spend more energy that you get from it, which defeats the purpose. And there are tons of minerals we use that are of limited supply and non-recycle once used.
Besides any "recycle" cycle creates byproducts that we can't pile up forever.
> You cannot "create petrol" after it runs out ... unless you spend ... energy
I mentioned energy already. If you have energy you can literally create petrol from thin air.
> And there are tons of minerals we use that are of limited supply and non-recycle once used.
No there aren't. If you think there are any then post the name of one.
> Besides any "recycle" cycle creates byproducts that we can't pile up forever.
Those byproducts are made of useful atoms, there is no reason we can not process them. It costs energy to do so, so it's not worth it right now, but that doesn't mean it will always be like that.
The Earth will never run out of resources, it can't. All you need is energy, and the universe has a stupendous amount of that, we just need to harness it.
>The Earth will never run out of resources, it can't. All you need is energy, and the universe has a stupendous amount of that, we just need to harness it.
You started with how we can't ever run out of resources, and then you added the proviso of harnessing universe's "stupendous amount of energy" (plus finding ways to make those resources by recycling -- and in a non-lossy way at that).
In the actual world, where we don't have this unlimited tappable energy at hand at the moment (and with the limitations of energy production methods) we can very much run out of resources.
Whole lot of technological leaps to get from were we currently are to this "we tap into the universe's energy supplies with great success" and "we recycle everything" state.
I checked your list and it makes the same mistake malthusians make over and over and over. It assumes no change in production, just that everything stays the same. (It also assumes no recycling.)
But in the real world when there is a shortage people find new sources, figure out alternatives, recycle more, and tons of other things. Like I said several times: Humans create resources when they need them.
> You started with how we can't ever run out of resources, and then you added the proviso
I didn't add it, energy was explicit from the start. We don't have to harness energy from other galaxies, our own home planet has tons, and the sun has far more. The "universe" part is just to say we'll never run out even if it goes short on our planet in the distant future, ignore that part if it bothers you, it's not necessary.
> In the actual world, where we don't have this unlimited tappable energy at hand at the moment (and with the limitations of energy production methods) we can very much run out of resources.
No. We can not run out. You keep underestimating people. If we need it, we'll make it. You don't need unlimited energy, just a finite amount.
Look at water in Israel - 20 years ago they had a shortage, now, they have an abundance. Why? Because they needed it, so they figured out how to make driking water.
If we run short of energy, we'll find a new way to make it. All that is required is the the need. There are tons of untapped energy sources, many of them environmentally clean.
Why don't we tap them now? Because we don't need to. That's all.
Maybe the purpose would be to have a portable fuel with high energy density that is backward compatible with an enormous installed base of existing vehicles, fueling stations, etc.
> there are tons of minerals we use that are of limited supply
If asteroid mining becomes a reality, it's not
> non-recycle once used
I'm no chemist, but it seems that if the economic need is great enough, with only energy you'd be able to melt / vaporize just about anything and separate the atoms by mass with centrifuge.
Well, maybe not helium (which has a tendency to fly to the top of the atmosphere). It's kind of a shame we use a non-renewable resource to create balloons as decorations and toys for children, that only last a day or two.
If the recent trend of Chinese and Indians immigrating to the U.S. continues and the decline of birth rate for U.S. Caucasians continues, by 2050 the U.S. population may roughly reflect the world population by ethnicity, i.e. equal numbers of Caucasian, African, Hispanic, Indian, and East Asians. If there's a collapse around 2050 as predicted and the world population needs to suddenly reduce from 9 billion to 500 million, such an immigration-based country with control of the world's oceans and weapons would find it easy to convince its population that citizenship is the best determiner of who survives and who doesn't. There'd probably also be some religious overtones when the U.S. government sells the idea to its people.
An excellent example of how not to react when your theory has been proven wrong:
"The end is still nigh, [Ehrlich] asserted, and he stood unflinchingly by his 1960s insistence that population control was required, preferably through voluntary methods. But if need be, he said, he would endorse 'various forms of coercion' like eliminating 'tax benefits for having additional children.' Allowing women to have as many babies as they wanted, he said, is akin to letting everyone 'throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor’s backyard as they want.'"
>But if need be, he said, he would endorse 'various forms of coercion' like eliminating 'tax benefits for having additional children.'
This is such a confusing quote that it's almost certainly taken out of context. Isn't eliminating a taxpayer-funded subsidy removing a form of coersion?
Not the most eloquent way to sway people's opinions by equating their children to garbage; as much as he's not wrong.
The first and foremost "pollutant" source of environmental damage and degradation are humans. Simply speaking, the only way that humanity has any real chance at fighting global climate impacts is by limiting and reducing reproduction. But it's a really difficult topic to talk about, let alone even just bring up. It's the 1 million pound gorilla that cannot be seen for all the gorilla blocking the view.
Population growth is half of the problem. I do not deny anything you have said, however...
What do you make of the DINK couple that has foregone their reproductive rights for the sake of "environmental concerns" but still get themselves a couple of pets and treat them as upper-middleclass children. One would say, disabled children that are never going to become productive members of this society and most likely will be dead by age 16.
Maybe there would be enough room in this world for the people we already have - at least for long enough that the correction in overpopulation comes from the fertility rate rather than otherwise - if those of us at the top of the pecking order would not insist on wasting so much real wealth in our natural but unexamined impulses.
This comparison is a really bad one. The amount of resources a dog consumes is very very very very far below the cost of raising a child (~$250k in the US, up to age 18). And that's just til age 18! There's another 80 years of adult life after that, and the rate of consumption only increases (especially if they themselves have children etc). I think your key error here is counting unproductivity of the pets as an issue: from the perspective of resource consumption, that's not a bad thing.
This may sound like a pedantic complaint about your point, but the fact of the matter is that the average DINK couple who decides not to have kids is going to be using massively less resources, despite having a lavish lifestyle as a substitute. I agree that discretionary resource consumption is a perhaps-underrated concern when compared with raw population, but the point you're making really has nothing to do with that.
1) I'm not obsessive enough to think that making an estimate of life expectancy far in the future is a good use of time when it has no impact on the point I'm making.
2) More directly: more than 25% of 16 y/o's are expected to live to 100[1]. We're talking in this thread about rich DINKs in high-income countries, and income and life expectancy are correlated; According to a recent study by UMich, those in the top quintile of income born in _1940_ have a life expectancy at age 55 of 90 years old[2]. It seems an extraordinary claim to say that life expectancy won't climb by (at least) another few years for the richest cohort of people in the world over the next ~century.
If you're going to be childishly pedantic, at least try and be accurate.
I'm aware that life expectancy at age 55 is not the same as LE at age 18, but at-birth life expectancy numbers aren't available broken-down by income, for obvious reasons. It turns out that (unsurprisingly), the rich have a very low mortality rate before age 55, so this doesn't particularly skew the numbers.
I would be very interested to see an actual peer reviewed study on this. Until that happens I'm happy to throw my own uninformed opinion on the internet based off a sample size of me.
My first thought would be that as a DINK with pets the resource usage of my 2 spayed and neutered dogs which weren't bred on a puppy farm is miniscule compared to even one child who goes through diapers, clothes, eventually builds a house, and will forever contribute to filling up our landfills. Furthermore that one child is unlikely to be spayed and neutered so they will contribute to exponential population pressure.
Whatever the resource consumption rate is for owning spayed and neutered pets (per couple per year). It's eventually going to be dwarfed by exponentially increasing resource consumption rates of "productive members of society". I really would prefer if people would produce a little less.
It's difficult to talk about because it's not politically correct (or politically advantageous) to talk about the root cause issues. So you get bean-counters selling dystopian nightmares.
Generally speaking, high birth rates correlate with poverty. Improve standards of living, particularly for woman and disconnect access to medical & family planning resources from religion and birthrates decline. If you don't think that 50% of your kids will die before reaching adulthood, you don't have 12 children.
The 1 million pound gorilla is our collective failure to look past our tribal/national boundaries.
Things have been going very well but I can't help but think we now have this huge selective pressure breeding for humans who will still have large families in the new environment. This isn't a problem that we'll have to deal with in our or our grandchildren's lifetimes but barring regulation or eugenics it seems inevitable.
I don't think geological records are all that helpful in this case. There has never been a life-form that pushes the pendulum the way humans have. We have done so many things to limit and prevent the natural cycles that would have by now surely led to a significant limitation of the human population.
War, famine, disease, disaster, etc. they have all or are all being limited if not practically being eradicated. The danger is that if you keep pushing and pushing the pendulum the marginal effort needed to push it not only becomes ever greater and the duration which is can be held decreases, but the risk of something causing the pendulum to slip and swing freely exponentially increases. We are approaching several means in which the biosphere that is earth may collapse. We don't even really understand all the finer intricacies of our world, there is absolutely no chance we could even identify some sort of black swan even that we sure as hell won't be able to prevent, let alone reverse.
It all seems to grotesquely stupid how ignorantly we are treating our only habitat. The very single place that we can exist at the moment and we are risking it all on a stupid bet.
Populations expand until they collapse their food supply. Equilibriums are reached eventually but they are never very stable, at least from a geological time frame.
Humans have overcome a number of hurdles, but to say we are immune to the same pressures is just hubris.
Already populations are declining in wealthy countries, what will happen in JApan in 50 years? No one knows because it's never happened to such a wealthy technologically advanced country.
Food cost spiked several times in the 2000s leading to food riots and was a likely catalyst of the Arab Spring.
World fishing stock is over exploited and total world wild catch has flat lined the last 5 years, aquaculture has made up the difference but that is an entirely new area and the environmental effects are uncertain.
Technology may save us, but blind optimism is no different than baseless pessimism.
Global climate change is happening, no one knows how fast or have massive those changes will be, we just know it's happening. From a geological perspective we are already living through a mass extinction event, our influence has been profound and will be seen for millions of years in the fossil record.
Just wait until your children's children see what we call parks: huge structures surrounding a park with a super-fine mesh filament that traps even the bacteria and insects in the enclosed park.
Outside those areas, you'll likely see scrubgrass and other drought resistant and pollution resistant superweeds.. Because that's all that will grow.
I've had these portents in dreams. Maybe they're real: maybe I was actually there in my dream. Or maybe it's just a fantasy born in my head. All I know is if it's real, it's bleak.
Basically, it turns out that your population explodes when you're very poor, but then stabilizes and even shrinks as your society gets richer and richer. We have a population paradox: the highest-impact lifestyles are lived in countries with falling populations, while the major population growth takes place where the resources don't exist to disincentivize it.
> Basically, it turns out that your population explodes when you're very poor, but then stabilizes and even shrinks as your society gets richer and richer.
IIRC, "strong social support network" is more accurate than "richer" as to the factor that reduces natural growth rate.
Neither of these is a binary category; countries can be richer than other countries but have a weaker social support system (the US, compared to many other developed countries, is a good example -- it also, has a higher natural population growth rate than many of those poorer-but-with-stronger-social-support countries.)
I think "very poor" is a little inaccurate. Hunter-gatherers are "very poor", but don't have a population explosion problem. The societies that have population explosion are traditionally agricultural economies with restrictive gender norms that have not fully industrialized.
Basically, it's all about the returns to education. When women have reproductive choice, and when the returns to higher levels of education increase, then parents have fewer children but invest more resources into raising them.
In 1972 the »Club of Rome« published »The Limits to Growth« [1] where they used a computer model to model possible scenarios for the longterm development of human society. More than forty years later the actual development is pretty close to a scenario predicting a collapse mid century. This chart [2] based on a study from 2008 [3] compares the prediction of the »standard run« scenario with thirty years of actual data.
Well hang on a second. You show a graph and claim that "the actual development is pretty close to a scenario predicting a collapse mid century". But the model to date (1900-2000) shows steadily increasing population, food production, pollution, etc. Unsurprisingly, the 25 years of reality on the graph (1975-2000) following the date of the model shows steadily increasing population, food production, etc.
The model then predicts a sudden shift in 2025 without any inherent explanation. There's a vaguely-defined downward-sloping "resources" line on the graph that seems to drive the sudden shift, but there's no actual data given for the 1975-2000 period to know if actual "resources" are tracking the model. I'd guess not --- as much as the Bakken shale oil formation may have some serious environmental impacts, it (and many other discoveries) have dramatically increased energy resources. Food production doesn't show any signs of immediate collapse. Renewable energy is still expensive, but it's getting better faster than many expected. Etc.
So, 25 years of steadily increasing population does not validate this model in any meaningful way. The model depends on a sudden shift in ~2025 that no empirical evidence supports. It might still happen -- I can't rule it out -- but the data given hardly confirms this model.
Not to say that this is concrete evidence or to lend any credence to The Limits of Growth predictions, but there are at least some concerns about overfishing the oceans and a possible collapse there.
There's no denying that civilization today is unsustainable.
I doubt any of these models will be accurate. But do they need to be? Either our technology will make our current lifestyles sustainable, or reality will catch up with us and cause much distress.
Our unsustainability is exponential, and our innovation is exponential. We have two exponential curves. If the depletion/unsustainability curve wins, we all die horribly in something resembling a cross between Mad Max, ISIS in Iraq, and Day of the Dead. If the innovation curve wins, we might reach 'escape velocity' and achieve some kind of post-scarcity society.
This is the road we are on: hideous mass death or utopia. I don't see a third possible outcome. Exponential stuff is like that-- the only potential outcomes are extreme.
Makes me wonder if the ancient religious visions -- e.g. Revelations -- about a 'heaven or hell' outcome aren't prescient bits of intuition about the fundamentally binary nature of human destiny. One way of thinking of it is that we're a cosmic civilization in its early startup phase... meaning that success or failure are the only two possible outcomes.
How do you define sustainability? Various metrics suggest human society has a likely chance of sustaining its most important trajectories: http://radicaloptimism.org/wiki/Human_Society
See also The Rational Optimist by Ridley, The Improving State of the World by Goklany, etc.
So, I guess you didn't read the article? If you're going to contradict the article maybe you should give a few reasons. After all the guy from Stanford was wrong.
This is what complex systems do. Simple linear causal reasoning just breaks down... there are too many feedback loops, chaotic functions, etc. Things will look completely normal and then wham, the system will suddenly and without apparent warning undergo a radical shift.
Look at how economic bubbles pop. You'll have a roaring, humming economy collapse within hours or days and nobody knows why. The postmortem generally takes years. Sometimes the reasons seem 'obvious' but that is only in hindsight. Nobody ever succeeds in calling the top of a bubble -- despite the huge financial reward of doing so -- except by sheer luck.
LTG was an attempt to apply complex systems modeling at the global scale to answer questions about the long term viability of our current civilization. So far it seems to be tracking reality in some ways, but as you correctly state we do not know whether this is spurious correlation or actual evidence for the validity of the model. We also know -- see the work of folks like Ilya Prigogine -- that it is actually impossible to predict the future of systems like this with certainty. There are strict limits on prediction in complex systems.
So we don't know. LTG is scary, but for all we know it won't come to pass.
But we'll know soon. We get to find out in the next 25 years if all the work we've done to build a better future over the past 500 years is a total mirage and all our children are all doomed to starvation, warfare, and misery. Fun times.
>The model then predicts a sudden shift in 2025 without any inherent explanation. There's a vaguely-defined downward-sloping "resources" line on the graph that seems to drive the sudden shift
What a fantastic question! You're thinking in the right direction.
The explanation involves systems theory, so I'll let an expert explain. https://youtu.be/HMmChiLZZHg?t=420 1h30m, but it's the best explanation of Limits to Growth out there.
The model is a qualitative one and one should not take the output as quantitative predictions. The bad thing is that there are essentially no scenarios without collapse. I think until around the turn of the millennium there were still reasonable scenarios that could have avoided the collapse but after that even scenarios with unrealistic policy changes and technological advances tend not to avoid a collapse.
I of course hope that the predictions will turn out to be wrong or at least to pessimistic but we surly know that complex systems can unexpectedly change their behavior at the flap of a butterfly.
To me, whats always stark and telling about the nature of opinions on such issues as population explosion is that they are always so entrenched, fully-formed and hardened as if each side had already made up their opinions sans any late emerging data.
Setting that aside for a moment, I always listen intently when non-political actors and philanthropists like Bill Gates have things to say about where we are headed as a human collective. Without exception, I'm almost always disappointed with how little in the way of criticism he levels in the area of unchecked population growth.
That could be partly due to the fact that anything he or anyone with his stature says, is endlessly twisted out of shape by demagogues to suit their personal agendas and motives, often with negative outcomes. For more see the Pakistani resistance to common vaccinations. [1][2]
Why is there such fanatical levels of orthodoxy even in issues that could benefit from our prudence and forethought?
Why are there parties on either side of this issue with their heels dug in, defending their viewpoint with tone-deaf arrogance?
Why are even such secular issues colored with such partisanship?
[1] Bill Gates: Violence in Pakistan and Nigeria threatens plan to eradicate polio by 2018
For the rest of the natural world, human population is an absolute disaster. The Anthropocene is a direct result of the pressure human population places on all other species on this planet.
99% of all the species that ever existed on earth are now extinct. The vast majority of these extinctions occurred before humans were a significant presence in the ecosystem. Maybe the more accurate statement is that the natural world is an absolute disaster for all living populations.
That isn't particularly fair though, since most biologists would have roared from the rooftops top stop other extinction events if they could avoid them.
And we are the cause of the current mass extinction. Through the innovation of society we have conquered the planet in a way few other multicellular organisms have managed to in the past, where they gain some evolutionary advantage that enables them to in short order effectively conquer all of their habitable zone.
It isn't unique though, the only difference is we can look at it happening and have this spark of wit in the back of our heads that tells us while we individually contribute little to the event we collectively are destroying biodiversity.
That isn't to say biodiversity is particularly saintly. Its gone away before, will go away again, and all we are really doing is eliminating anything that is not beneficial to us and that cannot coexist with us, not even through attack, but just by claiming our habitat as our own. Yes, our ignorance in how we allow it to happen might be our downfall if we kill off essential species in food chains that cripple ourselves as a result, but thats the risk you take dominating an environment the way we consistently do.
Its the same way any evolving mammal 60 million years ago would have been stomped out by dinosaurs that dominated their habitat, preventing the evolution of most mammalian life we know today back then.
That's not completely true. There are some species that have adapted well to human domination. To give a trivial example: there are bacteria that only live in human bodies. They wouldn't do well if there weren't so many humans. :)
Pet species like dogs and cats are other trivial examples.
But there are larger non-pet species that have adapted
to live in an environment dominated by humans. Rats are one such example.
I've always maintained that breeding needs to be licensed. You need a license to drive, own a firearm, hell in some countries you need a license to own a goddamned TV. A breeding license with forced sterilization and tax penalties for non-compliance would eliminate this problem in a complete fair and equitable way.
It's not often you can put "forced sterilization" and "completely fair" in the same sentence and be correct. In my opinion, you didn't pull it off here.
That's why I inserted the clause "forced sterilization". How do you stop someone from having a family of 5-7 children who's dirt poor, uneducated and believes it's part of their culture to be "prosperous" through progeny?
My thoughts when confronted with "we have a finite planet with finite resources" is more "why don't we expand beyond the earth?" rather than "We have to limit the number of children people can have". So, why don't we?
Yeah, I doubt someone with a sustainable habitat on Mars, and enough resources to send some back to Earth, is going to just send them without getting paid more than it would take to claw them out of the ground on Earth in the first place. It would make more sense to just keep the resources on Mars where one can use them, rather than wasting 95% of them transporting 4% to Earth.
I remember some discussion of this in Kim Stanley Robinson's "Green Mars", IIRC: he points out that it's simply too energy-inefficient to ship a few billion human beings out of Earth's gravity well, and no extraterrestrial habitat will have an ecosphere anything the size of Earth's.
Earth is simply the best place to support humans in the galaxy, and it needs to be sustainable in its own terms. We can and should live elsewhere, but that doesn't mean Earth will be any less important to us.
Establishing sustainable colonies off Earth would put some of our metaphorical eggs in another basket, and make it more likely that our species could survive a major catastrophe. It's something we should be able to do in the next few decades or centuries, and I'm all for it.
But given current or reasonably foreseeable technology, we're just not going to be able to ship off enough people to relieve population pressures on Earth.
(Question: Has emigration to North America ever made a significant dent in population pressures in Europe, Asia, or Africa?)
Population alarmism in developed countries was funny: id did not peter out until deep into birthrate decline.
I remember one book of many: Hugely overpopulated world, old people killed to make room, not one child in sight during the whole action. As if people grew on walls like mold!
However, overpopulation already ruins undeveloped countries. Overpopulation lead to poverty and poverty to overpopulation. I can't imagine how this is going to resolve.
In the near term global warming is going to destroy a lot of arable land in third world countries and severely restrict water availability. How we respond we'll have to see, but we are not stopping the runaway greenhouse effect at this point that will make a lot of the equatorial belt uninhabitable.
I recently started reading Philip E. Tetlock's Expert Political Judgment[0] and Ehrlich gets namechecked pretty early in it. For me, this article proved timely.
Ehrlich gets credit in my book for making concrete falsifiable predictions and acknowledging some are wrong. He follows a classic pattern identified by Tetlock in claiming his major error was a matter of timing.
My questions:
1. To what extent did his efforts help forestall the catastrophe he predicted? Any at all? In the article, his efforts are cited as having a significant impact on Indian family planning policies. Any way to measure the impact on the population numbers?
2. Was anybody citing Borlaug and the Green Revolution at the time he made his prediction? Was the Green Revolution complete at that time or its impacts a foregone conclusion? If not, how much more probable might his predictions have been absent this revolution? (I guess question hints at another excuse-making Tetlock pattern: the historical counter-factual or "I just got unlucky!")
If world population tops out at about 10 billion, following the UN "medium" projection, that could be manageable, but the population of Africa, the poorest continent, is projected to double from 2010 to 2050. I wonder how that will work. I am looking at the "Projections of population growth" Wikipedia page.
"One thing that happened on the road to doom was that the world figured out how to feed itself despite its rising numbers. No small measure of thanks belonged to Norman E. Borlaug, an American plant scientist whose breeding of high-yielding, disease-resistant crops led to the agricultural savior known as the Green Revolution. While shortages persisted in some regions, they were often more a function of government incompetence, corruption or civil strife than of an absolute lack of food.
"Some preternaturally optimistic analysts concluded that humans would always find their way out of tough spots. Among them was Julian L. Simon, an economist who established himself as the anti-Ehrlich, arguing that 'humanity’s condition will improve in just about every material way. [This has proven to be true all over the world.] In 1997, a year before he died, Mr. Simon told Wired magazine that 'whatever the rate of population growth is, historically it has been that the food supply increases at least as fast, if not faster.'"
I am old enough to remember when the ideas in the book The Population Bomb seemed like fresh, new ideas. Decades later, the world Ehrlich and I still live in seems more like a confirmation of criticisms of the book[1] than like a confirmation of the book. Since the book was first published, I have spent many years living in Taiwan, starkly poor when I was born and still poor when the book was published, and one of the more densely populated countries of the world during most of my lifetime, but today a prosperous, delightful place to live. The population of the United States has increased greatly in my lifetime, but the United States is still a great place to live too. Fears of great harm from a population explosion were just wrong, that's all. This article is part of a great article series published by the New York Times looking back on predictions from earlier eras and how they turned out.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb#Criticisms
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