Sedna, space probes?, colonies? what's next?

In article ,
G EddieA95 wrote:
The population will go down if Earth goes to subsistence. If don't agree that
it will have to go down otherwise. And aren't you afraid of the necessary
*means* of getting it down?

It will start declining of its own accord around the end of this century,
by a middle-of-the-road current-trends-and-no-surprises projection. The
growth *rate* has been falling for decades now, as industrialization and
its consequences reduce the birth rate in one country after another.
(A number of the industrialized countries would already have negative
growth rates, were it not for immigration; a few do anyway.)

Solar can make the world work, especially if efficiencies improve.

Only if it's accompanied by massive investments in power transmission
infrastructure. The sunlight and the power demand aren't in the same
places, and current power grids are hopelessly inadequate for matching
the two up.
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |

"John Savard" wrote in message
...

Certainly the U.S. is drastically overpopulated.

....much snipage...

I fear you totally miss understand the nature of life.

First a quick point, technology level is among other things, a function
of population. Technology level is also limited by average
intelligence, which is overcome somewhat by specialization within larger
populations. IMO your proposed optimal population size would not be
technologically sustainable, and if history is anything to go by, I
doubt it could even sustain the rule of law.

However I think the main point you miss is that you assume humanity to
be a singular species society made up of god like beings. The poor will
always be with us because the can. Outlawing poverty, (equivalent to
genocide), would be like killing all dung beetles because you think, (in
your god like arrogance), that their biological niche is demeaning to
*them*. Note, it is their life, not yours.

Like a diverse eco system the poor keep the rich honest, and vice versa,
preventing competition between individuals would soon lead to general
corruption, the promotion of uselessness and the ultimate destruction of
humanity. Human beings should and are diversifying to fill all
available niches, from the rubbish heaps of Bangladesh to the ivory
towers of the West. Passing moral judgment upon the poverty niche is
the epitome of hubris.

What is essential is the freedom of opportunity to find your niche, the
lowliest kid on a rubbish heap in Bangladesh, given the talent, should
be able to rise to the highest possible position, though it need not
necessarily be easy, (and vice versa). The primary role of society is
to insure a level playing field for free and open competition between
individuals This also serves as a sound basis for the accomplishment of
higher goals, which benefit all individuals.

Pete.

John Savard wrote:
On Sat, 20 Mar 2004 01:38:18 +0000 (UTC), Sander Vesik
wrote, in part:

You should also seriously consider proving that the number of people in
poverty would be smaller if the number of people would be lower, and not
vice versa.

It is obvious by observing groups of people in different countries on
Earth now that two things lead to poverty:

a lack of access to technology, and

a lack of access to resources.

Neither of which has any particular relation to the size of the population,
or even more, population density. If you don't see how this is relavant,
look at say Belgium -
* it has had (mod for wars) monotonicly increasing population
* it has had a constant good access to technology and innovation
* it has had a decreasing amount of resources
* it has had a monotonicly decreasing number of people in poverty

It is also very easy to show that should the population growth stop - or
worse, decrease - the number of people living in poverty will start to grow
very fast.


It is possible for a country with limited resources to be prosperous
if it is a world leader in technology - like Japan - and prosperity
can also come from having lots of resources relative to a small
population - like North America and Australia a hundred years ago.

The country being prosperous has little or anything to do with the percentage
of people in poverty. There are plenty of countries that are prosperous yet
have very steep curves


Why should I have to "prove" the obvious, whereas the obviously silly
notion that a larger population, in which resources such as arable
land, water, and metals would be driven to higher prices, being
scarce, and human labor, being common, would become cheaper, would
lead to prosperity and not poverty is not given the burden of proof?

No, you have to prove it because you are using an extremely silly
Malthusian notion that has no basis in practice and to which any
number of counterexamples exist - while being suported at best by
one example in which total destruction of basicly all of the territory
of a country in going after a single mineral resource has left the
country in poverty after depletion accompanied by squandering of money.



John Savard
http://home.ecn.ab.ca/~jsavard/index.html

--
Sander

+++ Out of cheese error +++

In article ,
John Savard wrote:
1) Black Americans are unable to find land in the West available for
homesteading, and thus they are not able to catch up with white
Americans, who were able to homestead land during a time period when
the ancestors of today's black Americans were already present on
American soil, but were not eligible to participate.

The time for homesteading was in the last century. Very few of today's
black Americans would *want* to homestead now, in the same way that very
few of today's white Americans want to.

This sounds very like many white abolitionists of the Civil War era --
including Lincoln -- who thought the solution to the problem of slavery
was to give blacks the opportunity to return to Africa. It did not occur
to them that most American blacks considered themselves Americans and did
not *want* to emigrate; they wanted a fair deal in America.

The days when the dream of many urban Americans -- black or white -- was
being a subsistence farmer in the West are long gone.

2) Because of the large areas of land required for agricultural
production in the U.S., insufficient wilderness habitat is available
for reintroducing bison to the western plains in sufficient numbers to
permit the return of the Plains Indians to their traditional mode of
food production.

Uh, "traditional mode of food production"? If that's hunting bison on
horseback, remember that there have been horses in the Americas for only
a few centuries -- they were introduced by Europeans.

In most cases, we have *NO CLUE* what the truly-pre-European society of
North American natives looked like. European explorers, plants, animals,
and most especially diseases ranged well ahead of Europeans who kept
records, and often radically altered the local way of life. The De Soto
expedition of 1539-42 -- the first Europeans to venture inland in the
North American Southeast -- found the Indians living in Aztec-style city-
states, with organized agriculture, government, and religion. By the time
serious European settlement of the area began, a couple of centuries
later, this was all gone, and moreover it was all forgotten: the locals
were primitive hunter-gatherers, with not even a tradition that their
ancestors had been semi-urbanized farmers. European epidemic disease was
probably to blame; even the De Soto records speak of epidemics among the
natives. The same thing could easily have happened elsewhere unrecorded,
and probably did.

Automation and cheap imports have been allowed to destroy American
industry, taking away many union jobs, so that it is much harder for
ordinary working-class Americans to get jobs at wages that permit
human dignity.

It has long been hard for people trained for yesterday's jobs to find
well-paying jobs today. This has been a constant in North America since
at least the 19th century. Even back then, industries and occupations
often became obsolete within a single lifetime. (As a particular case in
point, a century ago, most Americans were farmers. Not any more.)

America will not be overpopulated when:
*everyone* has a house in the suburbs; *no one* has to live in a
crowded city apartment for economic reasons;

Many of us actually prefer city living, where population density is high
enough to permit efficient delivery of services like public transit.
(Attempts to expand service into the suburbs have been the financial ruin
of many formerly-self-funding transit systems.)

I could respond to the rest of the rant, but this has already taken too
long to write...
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |

On Sun, 21 Mar 2004 00:38:54 +0000 (UTC), Sander Vesik
wrote, in part:
John Savard wrote:

Why should I have to "prove" the obvious, whereas the obviously silly
notion that a larger population, in which resources such as arable
land, water, and metals would be driven to higher prices, being
scarce, and human labor, being common, would become cheaper, would
lead to prosperity and not poverty is not given the burden of proof?

No, you have to prove it because you are using an extremely silly
Malthusian notion that has no basis in practice and to which any
number of counterexamples exist - while being suported at best by
one example in which total destruction of basicly all of the territory
of a country in going after a single mineral resource has left the
country in poverty after depletion accompanied by squandering of money.

Belgium is a country with modern technology and which is wealthy, so
of course they can engage in manufacturing.

Things like raw materials, energy, and arable land are *vital* inputs
to productivity. And the number of people in the population represent
how many ways the output of production must be divided; if that
fraction of the production isn't enough, then some people will not
have enough.

I have not denied that resources can go further when you have
technology and capital. But these are also not unlimited at any one
time.

John Savard
http://home.ecn.ab.ca/~jsavard/index.html

Henry Spencer wrote:
In article ,
G EddieA95 wrote:
The population will go down if Earth goes to subsistence. If don't agree that
it will have to go down otherwise. And aren't you afraid of the necessary
*means* of getting it down?

It will start declining of its own accord around the end of this century,
by a middle-of-the-road current-trends-and-no-surprises projection. The
growth *rate* has been falling for decades now, as industrialization and
its consequences reduce the birth rate in one country after another.
(A number of the industrialized countries would already have negative
growth rates, were it not for immigration; a few do anyway.)

And a lot of these don't like it and are trying to reverse the trend, even
if it should come at the expense of reduced productivity - France would be
an example. As people live increasingly longer after retirement,


Solar can make the world work, especially if efficiencies improve.

Only if it's accompanied by massive investments in power transmission
infrastructure. The sunlight and the power demand aren't in the same
places, and current power grids are hopelessly inadequate for matching
the two up.

Most industrial nations appear to need massive investments in their power
grids anyways, as they seem to have been rather overoptimistic of their
state and trends of their use. Coupling large solar power stations in
Sahara to European power grids directly may not be an option - so say
hydrogen based transport may be needed in between.

--
Sander

+++ Out of cheese error +++

On Sun, 21 Mar 2004 00:46:12 GMT, in a place far, far away,
lid (John Savard) made the phosphor on
my monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that:

Things like raw materials, energy, and arable land are *vital* inputs
to productivity.

Really? Is that why Hong Kong is so impoverished and unproductive?

I wrote:
The time for homesteading was in the last century...

Actually, make it the one before that -- I meant the 19th.
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |

In article ,
Sander Vesik wrote:
(A number of the industrialized countries would already have negative
growth rates, were it not for immigration; a few do anyway.)

And a lot of these don't like it and are trying to reverse the trend, even
if it should come at the expense of reduced productivity...

They're not likely to succeed. The economic pressures to have fewer kids
are major -- in an urbanized, industrialized society, children are a large
net drain on a family's financial resources -- and people with easy access
to effective contraception will mostly opt for small families. Fighting
this takes more than pious pronouncements and tiny cash handouts to parents,
and I don't see those governments taking the sort of drastic measures that
would be needed to have a real effect.
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |

(Henry Spencer) wrote in message ...
I wrote:
The time for homesteading was in the last century...

Actually, make it the one before that -- I meant the 19th.

Will you send yourself a T-shirt? :-P