Earth's Carrying Capacity

How many people can the earth support?

On Mon, 16 Aug 2004 01:52:32 -0400, Gactimus wrote:

How many people can the earth support?

Are you talking midgets or basketball players?

Gactimus wrote:
How many people can the earth support?

Bloated, wasteful Americans or semi starved African Pygmies?

This is the first question to ask.

The others are quality of life, technology, and how cooperative and
altruistic the people are assumed to be.

You can feed a LOT of people on pure spirulina, grown in the equatorial
ocean deserts. But nobody would WANT to live.

Best way to stabilise population is to make the individual lives comfortable
( and that means supporting everyone, with fair distribution of accumulated
wealth, not just in the hands of a few, as well as renewable energy and high
technology ) so that individual struggles for procration and security from
large families are diminished.

Concentration of population in a relatively few area ( arcologies would be
nice for the aging populations ) so that everyone feels 'crowded' already,
while maintaining proportions of pure wilderness barred from human
settlement. both on land and in the oceans. This would ensure that
populations never went over the carrying capacity of the planet, since the
only hunting, fishing and farming would be in the remaining areas and the
reservees would ensure that it never got large enough to start an extinction
from harvesting pressures.

But who'se dreaming? The people in charge are not looking for solutions to
the woes of the world. They are looking for thier own advantage, so no
amount of speculation will affect the reality of declining ecosystems and
increases in poor populations.

Gactimus wrote:

How many people can the earth support?

Six billion so far and we have yet to even start farming the oceans, 70%
of the surface of the planet.


--
"It has to be big", Tyler says. "Picture this: you on top of the world’s
tallest building, the whole building taken over by Project Mayhem. Smoke
rolling out of the windows. Desks falling into the crowds on the street.
A real opera of death, that’s what you’re going to get." -+Chuck
Palahniuk, "Fight Club"

In article , Bill Bonde (
``Soli Deo Gloria'' ) writes


Gactimus wrote:

How many people can the earth support?

Six billion so far and we have yet to even start farming the oceans, 70%
of the surface of the planet.

My impression is we've halfway farmed them to death. Coastal
fish farms apparently cause pollution which wipes out the rest of
the local ecosystem, and free-ranging fish, whales, etc. are nearly
eliminated.

This has an observable effect on public policy, since fish is brain
food - some people claim omega-3 from fish is essential for brain
development, although I don't see how our ancestors on the
African savannah got hold of it; maybe this is a theory especially
for the Aquatic Ape faction. Come to think, it also doesn't account
for vegetarians (/real/ vegetarians /don't/ eat fish).

Robert Carnegie at home, at large
--
I am fully aware I may regret this in the morning.

"Robert Carnegie" wrote ...
In article , Bill Bonde (
``Soli Deo Gloria'' ) writes

Gactimus wrote:

How many people can the earth support?

Six billion so far and we have yet to even start farming the oceans, 70%
of the surface of the planet.

Just because we have six billion being supported right now is no guarantee
that six billion is a figure that can be supported for the foreseeable future
with their current lifestyle. I _don't_ actually think it is the case yet but
the skydiver with a broken parachute scenario can apply.

Skydiver A pulls his parachute release, nothing happens,
pulls his emergency parachute release, nothing happens.

Skydiver B, "How are you doing?"

Skydiver A, "Just fine - so far."

My impression is we've halfway farmed them to death.

Fish farms have their share of bad news stories. However I think
they still pale when compared to the fishing industry itself.

Robert Carnegie wrote:
In article , Bill Bonde (
``Soli Deo Gloria'' ) writes


Gactimus wrote:

How many people can the earth support?

Six billion so far and we have yet to even start farming the oceans,
70% of the surface of the planet.

My impression is we've halfway farmed them to death.

If you consider them a farm, then you can apply fertiliser. The majority of
the oceans would bloom with a bit of iron added. The equatorial oceans are
effectively deserts despite the water and sunshine because of this single
shortage. Retaining the iron in floating rafts of plastic sheeting would
eliminate the problem with dissipation and removal of the iron after a short
time in open ocean. The Millenium Project ( Marshall T. Savage) had some
ideas on that under the project name Aquarius. Kind of a bit overambitious
but if you scale it down a bit to use for farming of food from the oceans it
might be very useful.

Coastal
fish farms apparently cause pollution which wipes out the rest of
the local ecosystem, and free-ranging fish, whales, etc. are nearly
eliminated.

There is a lot of evidence that putting aside a fairly substantial
percentage of the area (expecially 'nursery' areas) can allow for a much
higher harvest in the areas that remain by making the ocean produce more
fish which then move into the fishable areas for capture. It is the
wholesale destructiveness of bottom dredging, gill nets, and the 'tragedy of
the commons' that is mostly killing wild stocks along with the dead zones,
parasite epidemics and dilusion of survival genes of the non wild fish
farmed stocks.


This has an observable effect on public policy, since fish is brain
food - some people claim omega-3 from fish is essential for brain
development, although I don't see how our ancestors on the
African savannah got hold of it; maybe this is a theory especially
for the Aquatic Ape faction. Come to think, it also doesn't account
for vegetarians (/real/ vegetarians /don't/ eat fish).

If you read about it, their is a plant that produces just about anything the
animal kingdom produces. The original flax seed ( and oil ) for example, is
equally rich in Omega 3 compared to fish oil. However, the modern
Genetically Engineered strains are deficient. They bred it out because the
Omega 3 oils oxidize more readily and thus do not stay fresh on the shelves
forever. Must take all nutrients out of the food so that nothing will find
it edible, including you and me. But it will look GOOD sitting on the store
shelves. Not to worry. You can get it artifically enhanced in specialty
products like eggs ( acutally they feed them a diet rich in the non-ge
flax ) and there is a butter now that is also rich in Omega 3 ( and
spreadable at refrigerator temperatures ) in the U.K. by feeding flax seed
to the cows. The omega 3 oils are lighter and so raise the melting point of
the butter.


Robert Carnegie at home, at large

"Bill Bonde ( ``Soli Deo Gloria'' )" wrote in message ...
Gactimus wrote:

How many people can the earth support?

Six billion so far and we have yet to even start farming the oceans, 70%
of the surface of the planet.

Given the current political and socio-economic arrangements, if you
try to farm the surface of the oceans, you will probably be shot on
suspicion of terrorism or drug dealing.

We have the technical means to farm the oceans and support many
billions sustainably. But those technical means cannot be brought to
bear under the current socio-economic system.

Buckminster Fuller has already written the book I would like to write
on this topic, so I will just link to it.

http://www.bfi.org/grunch_of_giants.htm

The design science revolution is complete, or nearly so. In order to
make use of the technically superior designs, however, we need a
different system of socio-economics and politics. And I don't see
that coming soon.

Our technicians are smart enough to save us from disaster ninety-nine
times over. But almost every time a technician comes up with a smart
idea, a politician manages to ruin it. The U.S. trips to the Moon
were a rare example of technology that managed to get used.

Right now NASA has a lovely blueprint for a effective start on the
space elevator.

http://flightprojects.msfc.nasa.gov/fd02_towers.html

The U.S. doesn't have a few billion to waste on extravagances like
sustainable agriculture or space-based energy extraction, but they can
always scare up a few billion for a war.

"Gactimus" wrote in message
...
How many people can the earth support?

Trillions would be practically possible, even at living standards above
the present, some areas already have such population densities. It is
even possible to do this in an environmentally friendly way, accounting
for the required energy, resources and effects.

Of course obtaining a population of a trillion would take time and would
provide economies of scale and specialization that would seriously
advance our technological status, and increase our standards of living.
However, before then I would expect space to become the path of least
resistance. I might also expect the start of speciation of the human
race.

Note that current birth rates are artificially low, in the very long
term the evolutionary imperative will adapt to the likes of birth
control, and other such recent mitigating effects.

Pete.

In sci.space.policy Gactimus wrote:
How many people can the earth support?

Multiply the population density of Biosphere II, which could probably
work at that population density, with the area of the earth, and you get
200 billion.
If you only use the bit +-30 degrees from the equator, including the oceans,
then that's 100 billion.

For much over this, you have to go with pretty heavy engineering,
glassing over large portions of the planet, active heating and cooling.

For over 500 billion, you are basically looking at the
the whole planet glassed over, and growing genetically engineered
optimised food.

At over a hundred trillion, with
direct energy-food conversion,
space power beamed to earth,
solar filtering to remove all IR from sunlight,
1500 square meters of floor for everyone, gardens every tenth level,
and 100 levels, waste heat begins to become a big problem, and you need
to start to do active refrigeration if you want to keep the surface at
current temperatures.

The earth is a wonderfull natural resource, which should not be squandered.

If you smash it up into little bits, and use it to build habitats.

A quick trip to http://www.webelements.com/ later, after grabbing th
e appropriate bits of the site, and correlating abundances of crustal
abundance of elements with human abundances, the following shortfalls
were found:
Element, Human, Earth, amount of needed. (amounts in ppm weight)

N 26000 20 0.000769231
C 230000 1800 0.00782609
H 100000 1500 0.015
Au 100 3.1 0.031
P 11000 1000 0.0909091
Cl 1200 170 0.141667
S 2000 420 0.21
Cd 700 150 0.214286
O 610000 460000 0.754098

This naive calculation indicates that you need around 150 tonnes of crust
to build a human, or around 300 tonnes for an american
Assuming that the crust goes down 10Km, and has a density of 4, that's
around 270 people per square meter of crust, that's about 4*10^17 people,
or the equivalent of the population of the UK, for every person alive now,
neglecting the earths core.

If you want a conventional biosphere feeding them, rather than direct
energy-food converters of some sort, you'r probably going to need
a fair bit more nitrogen, which might limit you to 4*10^15 people or so.