Will the Earth Ever Fill Up?

[C C]

http://m.nautil.us/issue/51/limits/will-...fill-up-rp

EXCERPT: [...] The English cleric Thomas Robert Malthus challenged the 18th-century view that society was headed toward perfection. Instead, he argued that runaway population growth and limited resources will ultimately lead to famine and misery. [...] The following decades saw the appearance of one carrying capacity estimate after another. In 1995, mathematician Joel Cohen, at Rockefeller University in New York, tallied up dozens of global forecasts published to date, and found that they varied widely, from less than 1 billion to more than 1 trillion. Most early estimates were, like Pearl’s, far below 6 billion, the world’s population at the time.

According to Cohen, their flaw lay in the assumption that resource constraints, and hence carrying capacity, were fixed. In mathematical lingo, K was a constant: It never changed. This presumption, Cohen said, ignored human innovation. “Let us recognize, in the phrase of U.S. president [George H.W. Bush], that ‘every human being represents hands to work, and not just another mouth to feed’,” he wrote in the journal Science. “Additional people clear rocks from fields, build irrigation canals, discover ore deposits and antibiotics, and invent steam engines; they also clear-cut primary forests, contribute to the erosion of topsoil, and manufacture chlorofluorocarbons and plutonium. Additional people may increase savings or dilute and deplete capital; they may increase or decrease the human carrying capacity.”

This had been the missing ingredient in early population models: Humans don’t just extract from a fixed set of resources, but can create new resources through invention...

MORE: http://m.nautil.us/issue/51/limits/will-...fill-up-rp

[Syne]

It's the same flaw as in thinking that economics is a zero-sum game. It ignores innovation and entrepreneurship.

[confused2]

Economics concerns itself with 'more'. The distribution of 'more' is a matter for politics. To be electable in the US the government has to borrow 'more' - a government that tried to redistribute wealth through taxation would be unelectable. The idea that more people will produce more may be false. With increasing automation the point may (soon if not already) be reached when a substantial proportion of the population are effectively parasites on an economy that has no use for them. The US model of borrowing money to win elections isn't applicable to many poorer countries.

If a landowner in a poor country is given the option of growing (say) strawberries in return for dollars which can be used to by cars and weapons or sale of staple crops in exchange for the local currency - which will the wise landowner choose? Would a large (and growing [edit and increasingly poor]) local population influence the choice?

[C C]

Would a large (and growing [edit and increasingly poor]) local population influence the choice?

Just to sell as firewood for cooking, I vaguely recollect a news video piece in the past dealing with impoverished locals harvesting scraggly brush and the few remaining small or emaciated trees along the fringe of a quasi-arid, barren landscape. Needless the say, the desolate terrain was accordingly increasing in size (or rootless soil getting more susceptible to being wind-blown).

Deforestation in Sub-Saharan Africa
http://web.mit.edu/africantech/www/artic...tation.htm

EXCERPT: While deforestation in other parts of the world is mainly caused by commercial logging or cattle ranching the leading causes in Africa are associated with human activity. Developing countries rely heavily on wood fuel, the major energy source for cooking and heating. In Africa, the statistics are striking: an estimated 90 percent of the entire continent's population uses fuelwood for cooking, and in Sub-Saharan Africa, firewood and brush supply approximately 52 percent of all energy sources.

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[RainbowUnicorn]

Economics concerns itself with 'more'. The distribution of 'more' is a matter for politics. To be electable in the US the government has to borrow 'more' - a government that tried to redistribute wealth through taxation would be unelectable. The idea that more people will produce more may be false. With increasing automation the point may (soon if not already) be reached when a substantial proportion of the population are effectively parasites on an economy that has no use for them. The US model of borrowing money to win elections isn't applicable to many poorer countries.

If a landowner in a poor country is given the option of growing (say) strawberries in return for dollars which can be used to by cars and weapons or sale of staple crops in exchange for the local currency - which will the wise landowner choose? Would a large (and growing [edit and increasingly poor]) local population influence the choice?

you would need to establish the monetary rule of the other currencys concurrently.


you make an excellent point. the babyboomers had more jobs than they could work.
now there is less jobs than people.
what happened inbetween is unchangable
the money is gone.

however ... quantitative easing by manipulation of increasing distribution to retired parasites is probably the best alternative to masses of dying rotting corpses of babyboomers littering the streets.

while all those 60+ stand there with their hands out expecting a free ride...
what will the millenials say ?


it is quite a fascinating thing to observe from a safe distance.

as far as millenials are concerned, politicians are parasites. they produce nothing and cost massive amounts of money and act entitled.

how will society proceed ?

[elte]

http://m.nautil.us/issue/51/limits/will-...fill-up-rp

EXCERPT: [...] The English cleric Thomas Robert Malthus challenged the 18th-century view that society was headed toward perfection. Instead, he argued that runaway population growth and limited resources will ultimately lead to famine and misery. [...] The following decades saw the appearance of one carrying capacity estimate after another. In 1995, mathematician Joel Cohen, at Rockefeller University in New York, tallied up dozens of global forecasts published to date, and found that they varied widely, from less than 1 billion to more than 1 trillion. Most early estimates were, like Pearl’s, far below 6 billion, the world’s population at the time.

According to Cohen, their flaw lay in the assumption that resource constraints, and hence carrying capacity, were fixed. In mathematical lingo, K was a constant: It never changed. This presumption, Cohen said, ignored human innovation. “Let us recognize, in the phrase of U.S. president [George H.W. Bush], that ‘every human being represents hands to work, and not just another mouth to feed’,” he wrote in the journal Science. “Additional people clear rocks from fields, build irrigation canals, discover ore deposits and antibiotics, and invent steam engines; they also clear-cut primary forests, contribute to the erosion of topsoil, and manufacture chlorofluorocarbons and plutonium. Additional people may increase savings or dilute and deplete capital; they may increase or decrease the human carrying capacity.”

This had been the missing ingredient in early population models: Humans don’t just extract from a fixed set of resources, but can create new resources through invention...

MORE: http://m.nautil.us/issue/51/limits/will-...fill-up-rp

.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/business/economy/this-miracle-weed-killer-was-supposed-to-save-farms-instead-its-devastating-them/2017/08/29/33a21a56-88e3-11e7-961d-2f373b3977ee_story.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/b...story.html

[C C]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/b...story.html

Critics say that the approval process proceeded without adequate data and under enormous pressure from state agriculture departments, industry groups and farmers associations.

I.e., how safe can sci-tech output be if regulating agencies that manage it can be bought or intimidated?

Those groups said that farmers desperately needed the new herbicide to control glyphosate-resistant weeds, which can take over fields and deprive soybeans of sunlight and nutrients.Such weeds have grown stronger and more numerous over the past 20 years — a result of herbicide overuse. By spraying so much glyphosate, farmers inadvertently caused weeds to evolve resistant traits more quickly.

Lots of manual labor lurking on the horizon in terms of old-fashioned seeking out and hoeing the weeds in fields ("Got a long row to hoe!"). Lots of unemployed people lurking on the horizon in terms of smart machines taking their jobs. But dubious that farmers could afford to pay them or the legal system in this day and age would accept the higher-educated native population being loaded onto migrant-labor buses and shipped around across the country as needed; or that said spoiled / pampered population would accept such a demotion in pride and pay no matter how close to deep poverty they were. Similar outcries if the incarcerated were utilized as "free or cheap workers" in revivals akin to chain gangs (prison population over two million plus and growing, over four million plus and growing on probation or parole).

Probably moot, anyway, since smart robots or farm equipment may likewise fill that void or need of non-chemical weed eliminators. (Also grounded in the idealistic fantasy of a continuing onslaught of Trump-oids successfully stopping illegal aliens or not allowing a flow of "guest-worker" status should there be success.)

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