But why would disease rise up due to overpopulation? Public health is very advanced nowadays and can stop most plagues that would decimate a country or kill large numbers of people. Seeing how medicine is constantly advancing, and seeing how the world was able to create an ebola vaccine and stop the virus pretty well, those skills will only get better. I do not forsee hundreds of millions of people dying from infectious disease plagues anytime soon, especially outside of Africa.
As far as famine, like I was saying earlier there are several forms of waste/inefficiency in our current global agricultural methods
We don’t use all arable land
Of the land we do use, not all of it is used to grow high calorie staple crops
Lots of land is not used productively by western standards
Lots of staple crops that are grown are used for animal feed or industrial usage (something like 80-90% of corn grown in the US is used for animal feed or industrial/fuel usage I believe).
Fixing any one of those things (not to mention changes in biotech and agricultural advances which ideally could result in corn yields of 300 bushel/acre within the next few decades) should avert famine.
To me the likely outcome of overpopulation and resource depletion ends up being a world that has a weird mix of wealth and poverty, where most people are stuck at middle income lifestyles and where some consumer goods are abundant and dirt cheap, while others are rare and very expensive. I don’t know if that’ll result in war.
If the world wants to get serious about overpopulation, we have to promote birth control in Africa. Outside of sub saharan Africa, most of the rest of the world will see their population stabilize or decline this century.
Did you read my post? I didn’t say anything controversial. Basically, resources are scarce, and it causes most human conflict. This has always been the case. The earth was “overpopulated” in 0 BC and it is overpopulated in the same sense now. Maybe even less, considering how much less violence and strife we have now. But saying “resources are scarce and unevenly distributed” isn’t as exciting as saying “population bomb”.
We’re never going to get to the point where there are more people than the earth can support, because that person won’t ever get born. That doesn’t mean maintaining a smaller population than we can support at a bare subsistence level isn’t a good idea. But that takes education, access to birth control, women’s rights, etc, not draconian baby quotas and scaremongering. Unfortunately scaremongering is cheap, but birth control and education aren’t.
It not like those Africans haven’t heard of birth control.
The remaining high birth rate countries all have very high poverty rates and lots of farmers and herders. In that environment, children are an economic benefit.
If people think that a pension plan and good national health insurance will support them in old age, they will have fewer children. The worries about paying cram school and university fees, common in high income economies, also reduce the number of children. Without economic growth, free birth control still won’t be attractive.
Hopefully Chinese investment in Africa will grow the economies in the region, because nations seem to drop to sustainable fertility rates at 5k per capita.
Ever is a long time. I’d say the next 100 years is right out, though.
So’s warp drive. Doesn’t make it something doable.
What’s the use of that? We don’t have working fusion reactors for the H[sub]3[/sub] to fuel. Maybe “in 50 years”…as always with fusion.
Only if we have the technological ability to actually reach it and exploit it large-scale. Not theories on how to do it, but the actual existing heavy lift capability, the mining capability, the ability to return it to Earth.
Capability we’ll need to attain *with the depleted resources *which necessitate the need to go offworld in the first place. It might be there’s a tipping point, where you deplete the resources past the ability of the remaining remaining resource base to provide for the space program needed to acquire extraterrestrial resources…
I’m not talking about economics. I’m saying we don’t have the tech. Now. And we’re not going to have the tech in 100 years. Sure, we’ll have the tech to to maybe retrieve a sample from an asteroid. But actually exploiting an asteroid? Enough to make up for what we have now on Earth, rather than as an exercise in what we *can *do? Not now. Maybe in 100 years. Maybe.
> What does concern me is that population will grow in Africa. They will go from 1
> billion now to 4 billion by 2050 or so.
Where do you get this number? Nothing I’ve seen indicates that the population in Africa will grow this fast. Even assuming the fastest population growth anyone has predicted, the population couldn’t reach 4 billion even by 2100.
Yes, and of course we can expect that the population growth rate that has only been the case for the past several decades will now last for another seven hundred years.
Thats right. The point really is that you need women to have nearly 2 babies on average else that population becomes extinct in long run.
In year 1920, world had 1.8 billion people and today, 7 billion+ & counting. We could do with few less people. I think the world should have no more than 2 billion people.
That’s not my point. My point is that you can’t take current trends and project them for hundreds of years in the future. We should see what can be done about getting the countries that are still growing to slow down and soon stop that growth. The countries that are not growing should start to think about how to bring up the growth rate, but there’s no real hurry about doing that.
same proven things - Literacy, TV, internet etc. People will realize it takes a lot to bring up kids, that they will have to give up things like time, energy, money, their own personal development etc and so, having many kids won’t even cross their minds.
I am not too sure. For example, say a country stops having kids for 40 years (impossible situation but still). Then that country is sure to die out in next 50 years.
[QUOTE=MrDibble]
Ever is a long time. I’d say the next 100 years is right out, though.
[/QUOTE]
And we won’t need to do large scale asteroid mining in 100 years because of any critical resource shortage, so shouldn’t be a problem. Of course, I think you are wrong on your time scale…as I said, companies are working on this today and project testing of the concepts in the next 10-20 years.
And cell phones, desktop computers and such weren’t doable 100 years ago yet are today. I think that asteroid mining is closer to the realm of reality than a warp drive is, even though a warp drive is theoretically possible.
No, we don’t. And any such mining would be predicated on have a market for the material. Doesn’t mean you can’t plan to exploit a resource is there is a future market for it. And the point is, several companies AND several governments (notably the Chinese, though I think it’s mostly for propaganda purposes) have and are looking into such efforts).
Which are being looked at today by several companies and countries and could be developed if we ever had a real market need for such things. Because we don’t have something today doesn’t mean it’s impossible in the future. 3D printed rocket parts are just starting to be tested and have huge potentials, as do many new materials being looked at. What there isn’t today is a huge driving need to develop really heavy lift capability, as space exploration is still in it’s infancy and still more a prestige project that one being driven by market or economic need.
You say this like a Peak Oiler, as if whatever resource we are talking about will just suddenly fall off a cliff with no more left and some Mad Max dystopian nightmare ensuing. Markets don’t work that way. We won’t wait until we are nearly out of X to start building a space mining system…in fact, we are doing the preliminary work and testing TODAY and we don’t need it and probably won’t for centuries. But the resources out there are so vast that even though today it’s easier to get whatever rare material or metal you want here on Earth it’s STILL attractive to look into.
We don’t have it TODAY. But look at how rapidly technological progress is happening across the board. Materials science especially is happening at dizzying speed. Like I said, 100 years ago it would have been hard to conceive of a smart phone or laptop computer and someone in your shoes could have been assuring someone in mine how there is no way we’d have such things in 100 years…and they would be wrong. Whether or not we have asteroid or moon mining (I think we will have some limited asteroid mining testbeds in the next 20 years, personally) will depend more on whether there are markets for such things than on whether or not we could develop the technology, IMHO. However, we won’t be going to space in the next 100 years because we are running out of some critical resource here on Earth due to population growth…I was simply point out that there is a whole solar system worth of stuff out there once we get to the point of needing it.
‘Mining’ the lunar regolith to extract [SUP]3[/SUP]He as a fuel for nuclear fusion is this decade’s version of solar power satellites, i.e. a seemingly vital terrestrial application of a space resource that actually makes no sense whatsoever technically once you get into the details. The D-[SUP]3[/SUP]He fusion reaction offers about two orders of magnitude less specific power output than the D-T reaction at a triple product condition that is 200 times less than the D-T reaction. The advantage–that the energetic yield is primarily alpha particles and ionizing radiation rather than neutrons–does make it appealing from the standpoint of being able to directly convert the output to electricity but there are other was to utilize neutron output for yield (e.g. lining the chamber with fissionable elements which can then be used to generate thermal energy by induced fission). Given that we cannot even achieve overunity D-T fusion at this point, the excitement of using [SUP]3[/SUP]He as a fusion fuel is somewhat premature to say the least, and if we did find D-[SUP]3[/SUP]He to be viable, it would almost certainly be far easier to breed it from tritium rather than to sift through millions of tons of lunar regolith per kilogram of [SUP]3[/SUP]He.
Entertaining but nonsensical Sam Rockwell movies aside, there is absolutely no reason to mine the Moon’s surface for helium, and most of the rare mineral resources we might seek from space are likely to become obsolescent with advances in materials and computing technology. The reason to engage in exploitation of space resources is to allow in-situ utilization of materials for a sustainable industrial presence in space without having to haul up every single consumable and product from Earth’s surface at enormous expense. There is no fiscally justifiable case for lunar or asteroid mining in terms of resources on Earth, and arguing that we’re okay to consume and waste precious resources here because we’ll just extract them from space ignores the essential point that in order to get to the point of sustaining a human population in space we would have to learn how to conserve and recycle first. We might as well just start learning to do that now in this relatively benign, resource-rich environment instead of fantasizing about how great everything will be in our space future of unlimited free materials and hotels orbiting in the rings of Saturn.
There’s no reason to assume we will ever be able to do everything with nuclear that we do now with oil. Even simple electrical generation has some unsolved byproduct problems.
What about non-power applications of fossil fuels? You have an idea in mind for a new source for hundreds of millions of tons of ammonia? If not, overpopulation may produce its own unhappy solution.
So, you agree…any such mining of anything on the moon (including He3) would be predicated on market forces. If there isn’t a need to mine anything, per your assertion here, then there wouldn’t be any market forces for doing so. Right? Of course, we DO sift through many many tons of crap to extract resources here on Earth, so it would all be about whether or not it was economically feasible.
Doesn’t it current cost over $1000 per gram to produce btw? Or am I thinking of something else?
Man, always with the negative waves. FTR, I never said anything about being able to simply use up resources because we’ll always have space or whatever…assuming that was directed at me, it’s a strawman. I merely pointed out that we don’t live in an enclosed system and that there are vast resources in space, assuming we ever got to the point where we needed them because of some critical shortage of unobtainium or something here on Earth. I agree that in situ utilization is the focus and probably the most use for those resources out there, and is certainly the focus for most of the folks putting up millions or 10’s/100’s of millions in investment to look into this, but while there is no economic case to be made TODAY for some sort of trade or manufacturing in space that brings materials or products produced there back to Earth we are talking about 100’s of years in the future (if ever) since we don’t need anything today. There is simply no economic need today for such a thing since we aren’t running out of resources in any sort of meaningful way today…at least, no resources where we have no technological or structural alternative to them that resides here on Earth and merely costs more in economic terms.
Anything that can’t be powered by electricity can be powered using biofuels. If by “unsolved byproduct problems” you mean toxic waste disposal then that is something that can be solved. Otherwise I have no idea what you mean.
Ammonia isn’t made from fossil fuels. Did you mean something else?
Natural gas is used in the Haber-Bosch process to make anhydrous ammonia fertilizer. It’s one of the major elements of global industrial food production.
I think that asteroid mining is closer to the realm of reality than a warp drive is, even though a warp drive is theoretically possible.