We're all Doomed

[CableLight]

Anybody ever take any Ecology classes? The stuff we're going over now is pretty interesting and ominous at the same time. Check it out:

Cognitions of Disaster

- The population of the Earth is currently ~6.5 billion and growing at a rate of ~1.5% a year. With a finite supply of fossil fuels which, with the exception to coal, are projected to be completely depleated within our lifetimes (well, some of us) and a hunger/malnutrition rate of 20-40%, you can see something isn't quite right. Since we're not even feeding our current population, is it possible to feed an increasing one?

Some possible theories suggested include:

1) Synthesizing the essiential amino acids and protiens into forms of food currently alien to man. This is possible, yet current production costs yield market costs far too great for most people to afford, let alone the people who need them the most (i.e. people in poverty).

2) More food from the sea. Making up roughly 75% of our world, it should be an ideal place to look towards in our search. Yet, the current population incorporates ~10% of their diet from the ocean. Also, even if we wanted to get more from the ocean, it only produces roughly 100 grams of usable human "food" per meter per year, which is basically the equivilent to the Sahara desert. This is mainly due to every form of life depending on the abundance of plant materials and their ability to produce food of their own (i.e. photosynthesis).

phytoplankton -> zooplankton -> small fish -> big fish -> humans (arrows indicate what consumes what). With photosynthesis effectively eliminated at around 300 ft below the surface, the "producer base" is nonexistance. Only forms of creatures at least partially carnivorous or those that surface are found. It should also be noted that most nutrients plants would need are found on the ocean floor, while all the light they require is found at the surface.

3) Vegitarian diet. Going against our biologic nature would result in the need to consume much more vast amounts of plant biomass than concievably possible to get a healthy amount of the essential amino acids and protiens for survival. Also, the proverbial "box" of creatures that are naturally herbavores is only so big, and infringing upon it could push some of those creatures out of existance.

4) Increase amounts of cultivated land. There are essentially 30 billion acres of land on the planet. We use ~3 billion for cultivation. Given that, with the right equipment, it's possible to virtually grow anything anywhere, why not expand how much land we use? Simply put, manipulating photosynthesis in greenhouses and whatnot = $. A lot of money.Once again, cost rules out.

5) Increase yields on existing croplands. With the use of irrigation systems and fertalizers to optimize soil for cultivation, the amount of food produced would be greatly increased. Yet, again, the cost of doing this is the limiting factor that prevents it from being reality. Also, the use of fossil fuels increase with increased production. Apparently it takes like 9 K-cal of energy to get 1 K-cal back. Eliminating the use of fossil fuel-dependant machinery would, of course, severely limit production.

Then there's some random figures and statistics we got...

3 billion acres x 2 people/acre (supported) in addition to the ~10% of our diet we get from the ocean = enough currently availible food for ~6.6 billion people. Note that this is not a stable number, but it does seem possible to feed the world with our current situation if it weren't for costs. We got some other figures/projections about it maybe being possible to support 9-10 billion in 50 years or something, but our population would still be too much of a factor.

That's as far as we got so far...I dont know, I just think some of this stuff is interesting.

 

[Nocturnal]

read this: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffsimon_pr.html

 

[TyTe`EyEs]

After reading CableLight's thread and then looking at the link provided by Nocturnal, a feeling of deja vu came over me. I'm pretty sure this thread was made a long time ago.

 

[Julian]

we will never run out of fossil fuels.

 

[CableLight]

Wow thats a long-ass essay that I'm not going to read right now.

I'm not saying that I firmly believe all this stuff, but that's why I brought it here - for discussion on it. I mean, my professor isn't insane or anything...He's got the phD in Ecology and has been doing this stuff since the 60's, so thats what mostly added a little validity to what he was saying (unless he's actually evil and must be stopped).

How credible is the essay thing, though? It says the Julian Simon guy is a professor of business administrations and that his essay thing was "circa 1997."

 

[CableLight]

Okay, I lied...I just finished reading it.

Aside from being a 10 page hand-job to the Julian Simon guy, I wasn't very surprised. The guy seems a little wacko...

A lot of it seemed to be "Here's this idea, but Julian Simon says it's not right - because he used facts!" But it doesn't list a lot of the information to sufficiently back it up.

I don't know, I'm not an expert so I'm not going to say it's wrong, but the essay seems a little shady.

<edit> Editing my edit...Found the answer.

 

[GlutusMaximus86]

Originally posted by TyTe`EyEs
After reading CableLight's thread and then looking at the link provided by Nocturnal, a feeling of deja vu came over me. I'm pretty sure this thread was made a long time ago.

Well I remember Pook made a thread a long time ago about humans "dieing out" because people were having less and less childeren. I read a few replies and some were like Cablelight's post here, but I didn't read all of them bc I simply thought the thread was incredibly stupid and that Pook's argument lacked much credibility.

 

[CableLight]

This isn't about humans dying out, though...This is like, energy needs and such.

 

[7 Virtues]

Odd, how most solutions to exponetial populations growth involve better and more consumption of resources, rather than the better and obvious solution of limiting populations growth.

 

[CableLight]

Well, accourding to the guy in that essay, people are a complete boon to the world, so limiting our reproduction would be an egregious crime of unimaginable proportions.

I'll go on record saying my most "What the fvck" moment came at the exact instant I read that he thought the world needs more people.

 

[Nocturnal]

Let's talk about the idea that people are the most important asset to society.

Are they?

Thanks to advanced technology, one farmer can currently feed 129 people. In 1960, one farmer fed 25 people. Has our nations population increased 5 times since 1960? Our farmer-to-eater efficiency has.

As far as running out of land goes, you can give everyone a 5 ft diameter circle and fit the global population into a single city. There is plenty of land.

Everyone says things like, "At the current rate, we will have run out of food by 2030." I don't think we will. Check out the article I posted and look for this:

"'Population has never increased geometrically,' says Simon. "It increases at all kinds of different rates historically, but however fast it increases, food increases at least as fast, if not faster. In other words, whatever the rate of population growth is, the food supply increases at an even faster rate."

Read further down and you can judge it for yourself.

But hypothetically, lets just say that if we continue to grow at the current rate, we will run out of food in a few decades. The real question is, is our growth rate constant? I pulled these off of a website:

# The growth rate of the world's population appears to have peaked around 1970, when the annual rate of growth was 2.09 percent.

# By 1980, annual population growth was down to 1.73 percent, and by 1990 to 1.7 percent.

# By 1995, the annual increase had slowed even more to 1.5 percent.

This is just one example, and if you google, "overpopulation myth" you will find plenty of information with EMPIRICAL data that is pretty hard to flat-out deny.

Anyway, if you still don't believe me, here's another article. (Next Post)

 

[Nocturnal]

Overpopulation? Fiddlesticks!

Dr. Narveson, Jan from the University of Waterloo

THERE ARE NO INHERENT LIMITS TO GROWTH In the late twentieth century, it once again became popular to claim that the world is "overpopulated" and that we were headed for demographic disaster. Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb predicted massive starvation well before the end of the century. It didn't happen. World population did indeed roughly double in the second half of the twentieth century-but the per capita output of food (and everything else) increased. Not just in the rich countries either: all the world not under communist control did botter. People were-and are-eating better than ever despite phenomenal population growth. Malthus held that the earth is incapable of increasing agricultural output at more than an "arithmetical" rate, while population expands at a "geometrical" rate. He was wrong. Food output not only increased at a geometric rate, it actually increased faster than population.

The Malthusians didn't know what hit them. Actually, some of them still don't-we still hear them muttering that we have "too many people." But there comes a time when the facts clobber you in the face with such force that it's impossible not to notice. Despite all the claims, when starvation occurs, it is due not to agriculture and the limited "carrying capacity" of the planet but to politics. To be more precise, there are two sorts of starvalions: little and big. In the little ones, natural disasters beset a few thousand unfortunate people, creating short-term emergencies. Then the rest of us rush them supplies. If the local governments are any good, the supplies actually get to those who need them and lives are saved. If the local governments are corrupt, incompetent, or inhuman, the supplies are pilfered, and those in need don't receive them. In the big cases, governments actually cause the starvation. In the twentieth century, government-made starvations were the only kind there were. For example, Maoist China starved more than thirty million people. When communal agriculture was disassembled and Chinese farmers could work the way they wanted to, China increased its food output by 50 percent in a single decade and even began exporting food to the USSR in the 1980s. Bad politics is what you need for starvation. For adequate food production, you need free farmers and markets. The earth isn't the problem. Its political leaders are.

How could the population pessimists have been so wrong? To begin with, there never was any real basis for Malthus's conjecture about the relationship of food supply to population. That he should have thought that there was reflected what we might call the "materialist fallacy." It consists in thinking that wealth is somehow a pile of stuff or "material" rather than what it really is, the effective human utilization of our resources. The materialist idea is that we are taking from this pile, diminishing it; as we "consume" more, there is less left. Eventually the pile must shrink to zero-yikes!

But the idea is totally wrong. Consider the most basic "stuff" of all-food. How much food can a given piece of land produce? Malthus thought the amount was fairly small and could only be improved a little bit. In fact, it is very large; moreover, there is no real way to say how much food you "can" grow on it using advanced technologies. Farmers all over the world are becoming more efficient. American Midwestern farmers grow several times as much corn from one acre as they did a hundred years ago. Improved varieties of grain, better fertilizers, and many other things go into the equation. The idea that eating is a matter of slowly "using up" something that we must eventually run out of is a sheer misconception.

Most people's vision of burgeoning population in the twentieth century is distorted. Far from being a problem of people having more and more children, as most supposed, twentieth-century population growth was driven primarily by a steady increase in longevity In the United States, life expectancy almost doubled. Birth rates are on the decline almost everywhere and have been for decades. Indeed, there is now talk about not only a leveling off in the rate of increase but an actual decline in population as the new century goes along-hey, if you want something to wring your hands about, try the eventual demise of the human race from nonreproduction! Reproduction rates rise and fall, and there is no point in trying to predict them for the long term.

Pessimists now tell us that all these new people won't ever be able to enjoy Western standards of living. Said a United Nations committee in 1996: "Continued growth in per capita consumption to levels currently enjoyed by the developed countries for a future global population of 10-12 billion is clearly not sustainable." But they're dead wrong. There is simply no reason why all of us, including people in the poorest countries, shouldn't be able to drive a Mercedes eventually. In the future, most Chinese will likely have cars, nicer houses, and all the familiar goodies to go with them. It isn't just that the amount of iron ore in the earth's crust is vastly greater than what would be needed to make the three billion or so motor cars for equipping the world: it's that quantities of this or that have very little to do with it. We make cars out of whatever works best, and what that might be in the farther future is impossible to predict.

Those who doubt this have two problems. First, they simply don't realize how much in the way of natural resources, strictly defined, the earth contains. Second, they don't understand how little that has to do with anything. Regarding the first: the story of every material resource is that as time goes by, estimates of available quantities increase. In 1950, annual world oil consumption ran to four billion barrels, and "proven reserves" were approximately ninety billion barrels-enough for twenty-two years. In the subsequent forty-four years consumption rose to more than 640 billion barrels, yet proven reserves were ten times greater than in 1950! (The current figure is eight hundred years.) The same is true of every material resource. The earth's supply of x is good for millennia or even millions of years. What's a poor prophet of doom to do?

The other point is more basic. How many of the really nice things in your life are hugely consumptive of matter? Buildings, bridges, roads, ships, cars? They are all constructed of plentiful materials-no problem there, even if we covered the planet with them-which, of course, we will not. What about the rest? How much matter goes into a great oil painting by Van Gogh, now worth fifty million dollars? Or your computer? Or the down-filled parka that keeps us northerners comfy on the coldest winter days? Or the compact discs that store thousands of hours of beautiful listening on my shelves? Thinking about this will lead you to see that the whole idea that modern civilization is based on huge "consumption" of "natural resources" is way off base. What it "consumes" is ingenuity, talent, skill-and the neat thing about their "consumption" is that they don't get consumed. Writing the complete works of Shakespeare left Shakespeare quite intact, though it enriched the rest of us immeasurably.

A favorite sport of pessimists is to worry about energy supplies. The pessimists haven't noticed that the total amount of energy reaching Earth from the sun is about ten thousand times what humans use, even in our energy-hungry modern age. They haven't noticed that humans are quite capable of using energy more efficiently, if need be. The story of ultimate collapse due to exhaustion is, again, utterly without foundation.

Then there ia "global warming," a propagandist's paradise. The gap between confirmed relevant information on the one hand and proposed political responses to it on the other is mind-boggling-and you aren't going to find the facts on page one. But you will find them in abundance with just a bit of looking. I'll mention just one point. The Kyoto Accords call for measures that, depending how thoroughly they are implemented, will carry price tags running to trillions. Yet fifty years of Kyoto-mandated Spartanism will yield an expected reduction in global temperatures of only about 0.1 degree Celsius. What's the point, especially when such global warming as has been confirmed so far has been good for humanity, for example by extending northern growing seasons?

All told, the "overpopulation" scare may be the biggest single mistake in the history of social science. Theory and common sense conspired to fail in the grandest possible way, and the only question is how it managed to take so many people in for so long. Meanwhile humanists, of all people, should recognize that people are inherently a good thing. Having lots of people enables human society to diversify ever more elaborately, creating more interesting goods and services for all tastes and types. There's room (and air, and food, and so on) for a lot more of us than there is any reason to expect there ever to be. People claiming to be humanists should, so to speak, count their blessings and stop deploring the fact of demographic opulence.

 

[CableLight]

No, no, no...I'm not trying to say we're running out of food. That's not what I was saying at all.

I'm saying that even though we have a enough food possible that we're not currently doing it. That's what the whole thing about 20-40% of people suffering from hunger and malnutrition. What I was talking about was that we're not necessarily running out of food, but it's not getting to everyone. The examples given were possible alternate methods to what they're doing now.

 

[Dominus]

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/
Good info right there.

Basically, energy problems are non existant. Sure, we'll eventually use up the easily accessed oil, probably before the 22nd century. Of course, we've also go plenty of other sources of oil (coal, tar, shale) which are, in some cases cheaper at the moment. Fossil fuels will likely last long enough for us to find another planet with fossil fuels. Or at least cold fusion or some other comparable energy source.

Speaking of nuclear power, we've got enough fuel for that for a few billion years.

And many famines of the recent era have been more due to human intervention than natural causes. Take Ethiopia for example. Between wars with Eritrea and a marxist military junta the country has basically been through hell.

In short, the vast majority of problems humanity faces are mainly due to mismanagement on our part, with rare exception.

 

[Nocturnal]

Originally posted by CableLight
No, no, no...I'm not trying to say we're running out of food. That's not what I was saying at all.

I'm saying that even though we have a enough food possible that we're not currently doing it. That's what the whole thing about 20-40% of people suffering from hunger and malnutrition. What I was talking about was that we're not necessarily running out of food, but it's not getting to everyone. The examples given were possible alternate methods to what they're doing now.

There is an important title which describes the areas you're mentioning... developing countries.

Many 3rd world countries are suffering from serious political trauma and until it is corrected the economy isn't going anywhere fast.

 

[CableLight]

Originally posted by Nocturnal
There is an important title which describes the areas you're mentioning... developing countries.

Many 3rd world countries are suffering from serious political trauma and until it is corrected the economy isn't going anywhere fast.

3rd World countries, yes...But I'm not really sure what you mean by "developing." A lot of these places in Africa and whatnot aren't necessarily developing in the sense I'm thinking of it, but they still suffer from a lot of hunger-related issues.

So the question arises - How is this solved? Can it be solved?

 

[Ice Cold]

Right now we're consuming 2x the resources that are regenerated annually...

The greenhouse effect increases the concentration of the CO2 in the atmosphere AND the temperature. This will lead to greater acidity of the world ocean, which is beleived to kill off many of the key zooplankton species...

Also the crap about the greenforest...

And the nukes...

And the feminism...

No aliens yet, though...

 

[Dominus]

Originally posted by Ice Cold
Right now we're consuming 2x the resources that are regenerated annually...

Care to provide a source? Cuz I honestly doubt that figure.

 

[Ice Cold]

Originally posted by Dominus
Care to provide a source? Cuz I honestly doubt that figure.

no, i don't care enough about this debate to dig up the litrature and quote the pages.

 

[diplomatic_lie]

Doesn't Ethiopia have some of the most fertile lands in the world?

And doesn't Rwanda have far more natural resources than Monaco?

Farms don't work if everybody is too busy fighting civil wars to tend to them.