The Sun is God just like the Ancients said.

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Doomsday, Enjoy yourself while you're still in the pink

We humans have a natural and insatiable desire to reproduce our species, and there are powerful political forces to ensure that that appetite is satisfied. Our last unsuccessful presidential candidate has an abundance of offspring and is promoting his fellow co-religious members to follow the Bible and go forth and cover the world with their kind. That attitude might have been reasonable up until about 1825 AD when humans began to conquer the Earth to the exclusion of all other species and even minerals; and because we humans have such a very long life, and are rapidly using up all the consumables, coupled with a rapid population doubling, and explosive ramping up of pollution, there is a snapping point in the not distant future. I am not alone in saying this, but until everyone is subjected to a human law controlling population to a sustainable number we must rely on nature to solve our problem for us.

When population collapses occur the typically drop to below one tenth of their  sustainable population. Our pre-industrial agriculturally sustainable population in 1625, was about half a billion people and in 1825 about one billion. Natural population collapses always shoot below the long term average sustainable number. Human collapse will with little doubt be accompanied with a massive world conflict. When that conflict comes, and it is inevitable with population overshoot, there will be massive amounts of radiation and sun-obscuring dust left over from the A-bombings. That will cause such devastation of the life-support ability of the Earth that our population will drop to one tenth that of a natural collapse below the sustainable population. Thus, a not unreasonable number to speculate about is roughly one tenth of one tenth of the half billion sustainable population, or about five million survivors. Unfortunately, that is supposing an even survival rate across the whole planet, and that is unlikely, and a more likely outcome would be essentially total annihilation in the northern hemisphere and the rate above of about one tenth of one percent in the southern hemisphere.

World population by latitude projected on a map of the Earth. Only South America and Australia are mostly below the equator.

The graphic is from http://www.maproomblog.com

The current population below the equator is roughly 879 million or about ten percent of Earth’s total human population. With my totally abstract reasoning, and total guesstimate, it would seem the number of surviving folks in the south would be about a million.Now when you read about people having large families, like there is infinite abundance ahead, just consider what uncontrolled population growth will bring within the lifetimes of currently living babies.

On the lighter side there is a huge source of energy to support larger numbers of people than are now residing here and it is inexhaustible. Pollyanna optimists aver that gas, oil, coal, uranium and clean air will last for decades, but some kids now living will live for ten decades, which is well beyond their projections. Those natural resources are soon be in short supply, but there is a billion-year supply of energy from the sun. It comes to us in two forms: sunlight and its derivative, the wind. The Earth’s natural heat engine powered by the sunlight is accessible as wind.These two resources are variable on a daily basis but on a yearly or millennial basis they are as inevitable as the sun shining.

The supply of solar energy is vast, but not infinite, and ultimately it can’t compete with our current population growth, which is infinite; and probably energy functionally obtainable directly from the sun can’t sustain our current population permanently.

So what’s the answer to this problem? We must write and accept a post-Doomsday Constitution which enforces population controls. The reason it must be post-Doomsday is because people have very little ability to foresee events which have never happened. With some experience of Doomsday people will be more willing to cooperate, but to impose population control on the world now would cause a major war, and thus it is impossible. What we can hope for at present is moderation, but even that is impossible because people’s desires are infinite. Thus population collapse is in the not distant future.

I wish someone would offer a solution.