X-Message-Number: 5493
From: Peter Merel <>
Subject: Very Happy New Years?
Date: Thu, 28 Dec 1995 23:11:02 +1100 (EST)

Rodney Perkins writes,

>Yet another resource is John McCarthy's WWW page called "Sustainability of 
>Human Progress" at http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/

Hey, this is really cool - thanks! 

However I'm not much reassured; McCarthy quotes some good sources that
suggest we can feed 10 billion people worldwide with our present
technology, and that predictable improvements via genetic engineering
and so forth can boost that to enough food for 15 billion.

So I went and had a look see if I could find out when those populations
might be reached. There are a lot of population research sites, but the
best I could find was the UN site at

http://www.undp.org/popin/popin.htm

from which I obtained the following:

--

                     World Population reached:

                    1 billion in      1804
                    2 billion in      1927, (123 years later)
                    3 billion in      1960,  (33 years later)
                    4 billion in      1974,  (14 years later)
                    5 billion in      1987,  (13 years later)

                     World Population may reach:

                    6 billion in      1998, (11 years later)
                    7 billion in      2009, (11 years later)
                    8 billion in      2021, (12 years later)
                    9 billion in      2035, (14 years later)
                   10 billion in      2054, (19 years later)
                   11 billion in      2093, (39 years later)

 Source:  Population Division, Department for Economic and Social Information
          and Policy Analysis, World Population Growth from Year 0 to
          Stabilization, (United Nations, New York), mimeograph, 6/7/94.

--

Notice the sudden slowing in growth after 2021. I imagine that the actual
figures and dates will be quite different, because I think that population
growth has to get pretty chaotic when resource limits start to bite. I doubt
any study's ability to predict what really happens after 2020.

But the one thing this really impresses on me is that, even accepting
McCarthy's rosy figures about carrying capacity, unless we have
Drexlerian nanotech soon, real resource limits will be experienced this
century. Whether the experience is of the apocalyptic sub-Saharan
variety, or only the profoundly uncomfortable Chinese kind, is a fine
question.

>I suggest reading "The Ultimate Resource" by Julian Simon for good counter 
>arguments. 

I'll seek it out, but could you summarise it for the list?

>One of the chapters in  "Engines of Creation" by K. Eric Drexler also
>presents some very good criticisms of these types of ideas. 

Drexler and Merkle paint a marvellous picture, but they don't pretend to
know how long it will take to produce working nanotech, do they? The
safety aspects alone are looking like a significant bottleneck - can
anyone here give some reasoned argument for thinking that nanotech will
be working as advertised before 2100?

--

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http://www.zip.com.au/~pete/           |            Reject Nothing.            |


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