World population is the most critical issue.

Tags

humanities survival, Population critical issue, Save humanities future

Population control is the most unpleasant issue of all. There are several good reasons why it is rarely discussed by people and virtually never by politicians. Individuals hate to discuss population control because it seems to interfere with their second most imperative demand of life, the right to the creation and survival of their children. The first imperative of course is personal survival. If you as an individual don’t survive long enough to have children then you are the end of a billion years of successful evolution. Not a single one of your ancestors failed to have children and they programmed into your genes the urge to survive and to reproduce, and in the case of all mammals the protection of their children.

All of this works out quite well in the natural flow of life, as it forces the maximum number of children upon a species and then lets the various vagaries of the world destroy the least lucky, which generally means those not as well adapted to their local environment as their siblings and cousins. This abstract natural method is not vicious because there are no ethical  or emotional motivations involved, but it is painful and in the end every individual dies. Humans operated under this natural law up until recently and it caused no problems.

The earliest we could claim humans were causing a problem for the natural environment is when we began consuming large quantities of energy stored as fossil fuels. That took off in earnest with the invention of the coal-burning steam engine and was just beginning to cause a worldwide pollution problem by about 1825. Nothing really serious at that time, but then along came the coal-burning electric power-generating plants, powered farm equipment, automobiles and jet airplanes, and as they say, much much more. Still, this pollution problem would not be an existential problem for humanity, but it was an side effect of the stage being set for a massive population explosion. With a huge population of interactive intelligent beings, the laws of nature were explored and then exploited, and that was so productive that great numbers of people came into being and many of them became involved in creating even more advanced technical devices. This has been wonderful for us — so far.

You and I have been privileged to grow up and live in a world with an abundance of marvels, and we take them for granted, and we take continued progress for granted. Unfortunately, there is a downside to science and technology that made this all possible, but this problem can be coped with if we choose to do so. If we fail to choose to make the necessary adjustments it means the extinction of humanity in the not too distant future. The reason for human extinction is simple enough — humans now have the technology to create Weapons Of Extermination (WOEs). These are far worse than what are known as Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) some of which individually can kill a million people. Most of the WMDs are not so potent, but in a major war these weapons won’t be used individually and their results will combine and the results will be cumulative and thus more destructive. Probably these, even in combination, will not kill everyone, with exceptions.

What I am thinking of as WOEs are the combined effects of the 30,000 atomic weapons and the diseases intentionally designed to be more lethal and resistant to all known means of cure. Also, the geneticists will probably come up with some form of evil little monsters to do us in. I value what Craig Venter and his followers are doing, and they are making the world a better place, but I am afraid there will be a dark side to their success.

I have met some of the scientists and others involved in this type of research, and they are very nice people. Dedicated researchers trying to improve the world by finding out how nature works and then making devices which make our lives better. Unfortunately, sometimes nations have wars and in a moment these wonderful things that make our lives better get converted into horrible things which kill other people. I wrote a sonnet many years ago addressing this unfortunate problem:

---

When man’s most brilliant children speak of peace,
They do so in a most deceitful way.
With one hand they give us a golden fleece.
But, with the other, all of us, they slay

When Armageddon dawned all men still loved,
Mankind, and beast, and tree and clear blue sky.
But then, these man brought blasts came and proved,
The best for life that man could do was die

With mister Noble’s gifts and Einstein’s too,
Seeming love turns suddenly to proven hate,
That renders pulsing life to stinking goo.
Is this for me and you? Is this our fate

We need no villains with their subtle shifts,
With heroes such as these to bring us gifts.

---

It appears impossible to me at this time, for the currently super over-population of seven billion people to come down to a reasonable Earth population of seven million without a Doomsday war. So, I don’t worry about it anymore and have started trying to create the possibilities of a Post-Doomsday society which might have the possibility of founding a society where the world population could be defined at a specific number and then maintained at that smaller number indefinitely. It is a large number as far as large-sized species are concerned, but very small compared to current numbers.

The way to set up the post-Doomsday world is to have an abundant supply of certain things, some of which are to be provided by the EarthArk storehouse placed on Mt. Vinson in Antarctica. In that location a seed bank will be kept permanently cold and the stored items will be viable for thousands of years. The other critical thing is to define a government which will support long-term stability and maintain the population at a restricted level. Perhaps the most difficult thing to do will be to create a mind-set for the public which is willing to accept a man-made law of controlled reproduction as opposed to the natural law of maximizing fertility. The future people need this, because natural animal reproductive urges will lead in short order to another population and a scarcity driven Doomsday war. Unfortunately,  with each of these cycles the Earth will become a much poorer place for all of its inhabitants.

We are doomed to a Doomsday war, because we have already vastly overshot the permanent carrying capacity of the Earth. Our future offspring may learn to live with man-made laws to supervene nature’s second most powerful demand. My hope is that the first imperative, the desire to survive, will ultimately prove stronger than the second imperative, to eagerness to reproduce. You and I will not live to see this happen, but we can easily provide for a much better world for those who do survive.

Support The EarthArk Project.

Food price increase means human population decrease.

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World food prices

We have lived in a world of abundant food for our entire lives, but that happy condition is now approaching its Malthusian limits, as the population nears the food producing capacity of the Earth. We still have plenty of food potential as long as we have plenty of oil to power our economy and create fertilizers, and the only famines at present are caused by political manipulations of the food creation and distribution. From Yahoo News

The World Bank’s food price index rose by 15 percent between October and January alone. The increase has been driven by volatile global trading in wheat, corn and soybeans. Global corn futures more than doubled since this summer, from $3.50 to $7 a bushel, in part because of higher demand from developing countries and a growing biofuels industry.

As food prices go up there will be a trend toward planting more human food crops to the exclusion of creating fuel for cars and other chemicals, then there will be a reduction of cropland being used for animal feed. That will mean the price of hamburgers and milkshakes will go up faster than the price of vegetable-based meals. Our American meals will increasingly look more like traditional Chinese, Indian and Mexican ones with more basic grains. Perhaps more toward the modern California cuisine as seen in the salads from Trader Joe’s market, which are probably healthier than the fatty diet most people have become accustomed to. These changes will be encouraged by normal economic processes forcing the price of animal feed to go higher.

The present food price hikes are not the precursors to Doomsday which I have been writing about for a long time, but they are continuing examples of our moving inexorably toward that day. This summer, the commodity analyst Chris Nagel said, “We need to get good crops, all around the world, in all of these commodities,  You just don’t have much room for error.” That means we are getting close to levels where large shifts in production towards more human food production are getting near. The problem is that by the time next year’s crop comes along we will have seventy-five million more humans to feed, so if we are approaching a critical limit right now we will certainly exceed that limit in a few more years. Possibly there will be enough of a buffer in food production to produce double the amount of human food we presently do, but that will probably require lifestyle changes most people will be unwilling to make. Also, it simply may not be possible, but even if it is possible, if the human population doubles, in forty years that food will all be eaten up and we will be in far worse condition for preventing collapse than we are now.

This problem bothers me, but the politicians’ voluntary unwillingness to even talk about it annoys me even more emotionally because it is so profoundly irresponsible. Another problem is that when problems come along it brings out an ugly side of people. Many people, even in these good times, respond to other people’s problems with hostility, and when things get bad and the price of everything goes much higher they will become even uglier. From the comments on the Yahoo article we read:

1. Oh great, among the hundreds of other things we all have to worry about, now we all have to worry about starving to death. And I’m not talking about just the poor either.
2. Tell the world that the US is broke and don’t come to us. Our food prices are much higher, too. We are broke so don’t think we will bail you out,
3. Not to worry, humans. Pretty soon you will be eating Soylent Red, and when the food riots begin, you’ll be eating Soylent Green.
4. When OPEC cut their prices, maybe we’ll lower grain prices.
5. We dont have a food shortage. We have a population surplus.
6. Get used to it. Thanks to the lies from the UN’s IPCC and the global warming scam the world is now using food for fuel instead of drilling for oil.
7. We really need to stop using corn to produce ethanol. Even if this were a real solution to ending our dependence on foregin oil (it’s not), it woudl still not trump the poor’s need to eat.
8. This could be a good thing. Maybe if food costs more people will eat less and get in better shape. America is one of the most obese countries on the planet.
9. As Scrooge said “I suggest they die and decrease the surplus population” Stop sending food to people that live in a f’n desert and keep breeding when they cant even feed themselves. It’s not cruelty. It’s Darwinism. Mother nature cant fix the population problem if we keep cheating.
10. We really need to ask ourselves WHY we allow liberals to reproduce! It’s like encouraging a cancer to spread!
11. This has been coming for a few years now, I am quite prepared for it as are many others. You lefties and welfare slime can starve or wait in line for your food rations, I will be laughing at you.
12. I got plenty of money and food. Time for the third world which is responsible for the overpopulation to cull the herd. Take responsibility for your actions!!!!!
13. Behind the scenes, they are probably celebrating. Population control though starvation.
14. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is capable of fixing this mess as much as we’d like to think there is someone out there that will.
15. While I agree that stable political systems are a part of the problem, simply having ‘arable land’ is no guarantee of plentiful food production.. Unless ‘arable land’ includes a consistent water supply then really how much good is it?
16. Stop all exports of US produced Food.. Let the world starve.. it will make is easier to take over the world.. and once we are in control we can own the oil fields.. Bah ha ha…
17. It’s global warming, not socialist, anti-productive governments that have caused this food crisis.

These comments at the bottom of the Yahoo article cover the basic problems, but I don’t see any easy political solution to them, certainly nothing we would be willing to live with with our current political world view. The big problem is that we are contending with Mother Nature and she always wins. You may hate Malthus’s ideas but think what you will, population is presently expanding toward the food supply the Earth will supply, and the fact that food prices are rising is what will happen as food supply becomes scarce. Even with our technical innovations, and they are many, the basic problem exists. When times permit it people will have more children. We have been living in an age of prosperity and continue to do so, but population can’t grow forever, not because I say it can’t but because the natural laws of nature, Mother Nature, say they can’t.

When Mother Nature speaks we obey or she kills us.

Population control is a forbidden subject

Tags

Cause of Doomsday, Doomsday, George McGavin, population, population control, Population explosion

In the popular British magazine How It Works, Dr George McGavin of Oxford University  is interviewed. The article is about the world’s ecology, more specifically about insects and to some extent about humans and their impact on the world. The following quote is about population, a subject popular with biologists.

There are some great individual efforts currently being undertaken in world conservation, however what we have to do is not worry about single species preservation but saving natural habitat on a large scale. If we do that then you save everything. In fact if you save insects, you save everything else. I think it has to be from the grassroots up, so saving the panda is fine but by saving the entire habitat you save them and everything else as well. Of course that is something that we can’t seem to do at the moment as there is a great big elephant in the room, which all governments and politicians won’t even talk about, and that is the rapidly increasing human population. There are now 6.8 billion of us and rising. Of course it’s not that we are bad or evil, just that our impact is so enormous. I mean when I was born only 56 years ago there were only 2.4 billion of us, so just in the time I have been breathing that number has almost tripled, and all those people need education, homes, land and food. That is the real problem and it is an intractable issue, I think, as everybody wants to have children. It is just like a bacterial colony on an agar plate – everything is fine for a long time but eventually expediential [sic] growth will cause the colony to reach the edge of the dish and all hell breaks loose. We are exactly the same, it is just a bigger agar plate. HIW: What realistically can be done then in your opinion? GM: Ha ha! If I new [sic] that I’d be head of the UN! A VIP! Seriously though, I think the best thing we can do is have one or two children. What we should keep in mind though is that we see the world through an incredibly small window in time. We have been here for such a short period in terms of geological time and after we have gone other species will exist and continue to do so. Insects, for example, have been around for 4 million years [sic]and will be so long after we are gone.

This was obviously a tape recorded conversation because in this quote there are several egregious errors which an Oxford don would never make. I have underlined them in the text. The weird term expediential growth was surely spoken as exponential growth, and new was clearly knew which the spell checker missed, and 4 million years was clearly intended to be 400 million years. Perhaps those errors are easily overlooked and I wouldn’t have commented upon them, except that they are at the core of my arguments for the necessity of The EarthArk Project.

Exponential growth of living species is natural when conditions are normal, and we were in balance with the Earth up until 1825, when the human use of burning fossil fuels could no longer be accommodated by our Earth’s CO2 digestion system. Since that time our population has gone from one billion to seven billion people and now the Earth isn’t even coming close to containing our pollution. Our pollution is now accumulating in the atmosphere and oceans and is beginning to create havoc, like melting the glaciers away toward non-existence. Billions of people depend upon glacial melt-water to sustain their food crops. When the water is gone the people will starve to death and will be gone too. We are presently living in a wonderful world built upon one-time use resources the Earth is providing. These one-time use things include oil, coal, water, and many other things, but even recyclable metals like copper will be consumed away with a few recyclings, and when they become permanently in short supply the population of people dependent upon them must decline too.

George McGavin recognizes these problems and he has the very long view of life processes. The life of the class insects is approximately ~400,000,000 years age. That number was no doubt misquoted as 4,000,000 years in the article, “but what’s a couple of zeros to a magazine journalist?” With his longer view he realizes that humans are a recent species ~40,000 years and our human written history is very short ~4,000 years and our personal consciousness ~40 years, but very unfortunately our political consciousness seems to be the next election, or about 4 years. All of those zeros really do mean something important and with the usual short view seen by the public and the politicians the population explosion isn’t visible to humans. So, their political representatives and media refuse to address it. Therefore, because of this institutional shortsightedness modern humanity is on a collision course with a population collapse created by unconstrained exponential growth.

McGavin throws up his hands in despair at how to cope with the coming population problem, but it isn’t impossible, and the largest country in the world, China, does have a population policy, and it has permitted their responsible politicians to contain their population growth and replace it with astonishingly rapid economic growth. Until the entire human population has a similar policy which contains the population to an Earth sustainable number, at whatever the technology permits, we as a top predator type species are condemned to fight to the death our fellow species members for food and the other necessities of life.

The problem is how to convince politicians that population must be stabilized. Unfortunately, as McGavin mentions, it is a subject forbidden for politicians to even discuss. Because the CO2 to melt the glaciers is already in the atmosphere the billions of people dependent upon that water are doomed to lose their food supply. When that starts happening everyone will see the clouds of Doomsday blowing, but it will be too late to prevent catastrophe.

Some people, myself included, have been thinking Doomsday began with the explosion of the first atomic bomb on July 18, 1945. Or perhaps with Roosevelt’s signing of documents which began the Manhattan Project to create those bombs on December 7th, 1941, a few hours before Pearl Harbor was attacked. But now I am thinking that perhaps Doomsday really began with James Watt’s creation of a really successful steam engine. All of those things might have been inevitable, given the intelligence and creativity of human beings, and thus the real beginning of Doomsday was when the first woman first spoke to another saying umm, about some guy at a party they were attending. That act set humans on the path to creating language and all of the qualities which we humans have which the other creatures don’t have. In any of these views –

Humanity has been living in Doomsday for a long time, and it has been fun.

Estimating the total world population of humans – historical.

Tags

Historical population, Population estimates, world population

World population is presently about seven billion people. That is a carefully done estimate by professional demographers so let us accept that as being accurate to within ten percent. There is no use asking for a more precise number even at present, and when estimating historical numbers an accuracy of half to double a given number may be overly optimistic.

What is proposed here is a an easy way to remember historical populations. This method is accurate enough to stay historically oriented to population. There are more precise numbers but they should be taken with caution especially when reflecting sudden changes, such as the plague of 1347, where the accuracy is even more suspect. Sometimes data presented will show mathematical precision which isn’t really there. For example, say there are about one hundred thousand people living in a city and about one third of them died in the plague. The quick and easy calculation, commonly seen will do something silly like: a town with a population of 100,000 is struck by plague which is reported to have killed a third of the people. So a precise calculation can be made by dividing the population by 3 which equals 33,333 died leaving a population of 66,667 living people. This is precise enough mathematically but is obvious nonsense in fact. The problem is that a precise number is used for the calculation which gives an exact number when others see this number they think it is accurate to the number stated and they use it to calculate other things. Thus, we sometimes see things which are treated as accurate but when checked into the data was soft and intended for general conclusions and thus any precision is totally suspect. Here is a wonderful site World Population Since Creation which plays lots of mathematical games, some of which are good some of which are “hopefully” intentionally hilarious.

Hoping not to fall into total nonsense there is presented below some reasonable estimates of world population. As you look over the chart notice how widely divergent these professional estimates are. In an effort to cut through the confusion I have been using a simple estimate to keep things in perspective. It isn’t intended to be precisely accurate but it is usually within the error ranges of professional demographers, and it has the advantage of being very easy to learn and to remember. Look over the chart and then look at my method below.

Historical Estimates of World Population

(Population in millions as estimated by professional demographers. When lower and upper estimates are the same they are shown under their name which means “Lower.” For a more complete rendition of this chart a click through is at the bottom.)

Year	Lower Average	Upper	Biraben	Durand	Upper	Haub	McEvedy	Thom	Upper	UN, 1999
11,775 BC	15
10000 BC	1	10					4	1	10
8000 BC	5					5
6500 BC	5	10
5000 BC	5	20					5	5	20
4375 BC	30
4000 BC	7						7
3000 BC	14						14
2000 BC	27						27
1175 BC	60
1000 BC	50						50
500 BC	100						100
400 BC	162		162
200 BC	150	231	231				150
1 AD	170	400	255	270	330	300	170	200		300
1 AD	200
200 AD	190	256	256				190
400 AD	190	206	206				190
425 AD	125
500 AD	190	206	206				190
600 AD	200	206	206				200
700 AD	207	210	207				210
800 AD	220	224	224				220
900 AD	226	240	226				240
1000 AD	254	345	254	275	345		265			310
1100 AD	301	320	301				320
1200 AD	360	450	400			450	360
1225 AD	250
1250 AD	400	416	416							400
1300 AD	360	432	432				360	400
1340 AD	443		443
1400 AD	350	374	374				350
1500 AD	425	540	460	440	540		425			500
1600 AD	545	579	579				545
1625 AD	500
1650 AD	470	545				500	545	500
1700 AD	600	679	679				610	600
1750 AD	629	961	770	735	805	795	720	700		790
1800 AD	813	1,125	954				900	900		980
1825 AD	1,000
1850 AD	1,128	1,402	1,241			1,265	1,200	1,200		1,260
1900 AD	1,550	1,762	1,633	1,650	1,710	1,656	1,625	1,600		1,650
1910 AD	1,750									1,750
1920 AD	1,860									1,860
1925 AD	2,000
1930 AD	2,070									2,070
1940 AD	2,300									2,300
1950 AD	2,400	2,557	2,527			2,516	2,500	2,400		2,520
1975 AD	4,000
2026 AD	8,000

Sources: US Census Bureau Historical Estimates of World Population

This graph has my estimates inserted in bold type using a generalized formula, see below. This method is intended as a quick way of remembering approximate populations over the entire human historical period. The bolded data is not too distant from the population experts boundries for maximum and minimum for three thousand years. There may be authorities which would include any specific population estimated for a specified date. The formula requires only knowing that world population was near four billion in 1975 AD and 200 million at 1 AD. Going forward or backward from 1975 the population is doubles in fifty years by doubles, thus going back doubling the amount of years halves the population and that procedure is followed throughout the chart which included as bolded data above. The method gives a good guess back to 1,000 BC which may be as accurate as the population data permits. But it is easy to shift method slightly at 1AD with 200 million people and modifying the halving time at starting to 500 years rather than 50 as from 1975 that adjustment gives a fair estimate all the way back to the advent of agriculture. This concept is hard to describe but is easier to understand if you look over the list below. Set the boundary for these guess at +/- 20% or more.

2025 AD = 8 billion ( this added 50 years to to 1975 to double)

1975 AD = 4 billion remember this date and population ½ in -50 years =…

1925 AD = 2 billion (½ in -100years =…

1825 AD = 1 billion (½ in -200years =…

1625 AD = ½ billion (½ in -400years =…

1225 AD = ¼ billion (½ in -800 years =…

425 AD = 125 million

Shift the method a bit to 500 year for halving

1 AD = 200 million – remember this date and population (½ in -500 years =…

500 BC =100 million (½ in -500 years =…

1000 BC = 50 million (½ in -1,000 years =…

2000 BC – 25 million (½ in -2,000 years =…

4000 BC = 10 million (½ in -4,000 years =…

8000 BC = 5 million (½ in -8,000 years =…

16000 BC = 2.5 million

A good guess has a working central point with upper and lower boundaries.

What if we had a population explosion in reverse?

Tags

Population explosion, Population implosion

Some of my friends were born in 1925 when the population of the Earth was 2 billion people. Since that time it has grown to 7 billion and that’s 3½ times bigger. But, what if instead of having that huge population increase we had experienced a proportionate decrease? What if the human population had gone down by 3½ times to only 570 million during these friends lifetimes. Would people still be as happy and contented as they presently are or would they be feeling absolutely devastated by unrelenting disasters? Even the worst human tragedy of historical times, the Black Death, reduced population from 450 million to 350 which is only 22% of the people gone not 71%. What my friends experienced in their long lifetimes, and they are still going strong, was vastly more significant for humanity than the Black Death but in reverse. For all of the people who presently exist the other species of the world had to make adjustments and many simply died. That is their equivalent to the Black Death because we ate their food.

Bubonic plague called The Black Death ravaged Europe 1346-1351

The human species from the long term perspective is in a very unusual population condition. Population explosions happen to other species occasionally when they have an abundance of food and for some reason an absence of predators but then they invariably have a population crash. Either there is a crash in food supplies or their predators reproduce and eat them. The explosion that the current human population grew up with we now believe is a normal world but trippiling a population in a single lifetime isn’t normal and a crash is inevitable. We have access to ancient but temporary energy sources like coal, oil, gas and uranium which give a huge but one time boost to our food supply which is also incredibly unusual but it won’t last forever.

When these various unique supports for the ongoing human population boom run their course and are exhausted the population must drop back to a smaller number. How can we know or even speculate what that new number will be? One way to estimate what that new number will be is to estimate the population back when people lived wholly by their own bodily effort. We can easily think back to Roman times when the world population at the year 1AD was about one hundred million people. They were living solely on sustainable energy sources created mostly through humanly mediated farming. It was dependent upon their own human muscular effort aided by some draft animals.

Unfortunately, because of the present permanent degradation of  natural resources if those ancient people were forced to live that same life style here and now on our present planet the new complications would probably reduced them to half of what the population number was during their lifetime. The situation might be even worse than that because not only has the soil been striped of its nutrients much of it has been washed away into the sea. The best farmland soil in the world is now under salt water at the mouths of rivers. The situation might be a little better in some ways because modern technology has created new ways to get permanently available energy from the sun using photo-voltaics and from more sophisticated windmills. This electrical energy can be made to run a high tech societies toys but it can also be converted into food. The process is similar to the fossil energy of oil being pumped from wells which is being used to run tractors which ultimately gets a lot more food out of a plot of farmable ground. The day may come when wind and solar energy are used to charge batteries which power the tractors of the future. Or perhaps there could be power lines like trolley lines strung over fields to power the electric tractors. This is obviously doable at present but while we still have gasoline it isn’t economically practicable. It would be interesting if the people at Tesla automotive would build a farm tractor instead of just sports cars to demonstrate that it could be done.

I don’t like the idea of lowering the Earth’s human population to a sustainable number but if we don’t do it voluntarily using human intelligence and ingenuity, with some consideration for human feelings, nature will do it for us. Nature will supply the “responsibility” perhaps with a human war but in a way which will be very brutal. We could be much kinder than unfeeling and uncaring nature but it is doubtful that humans could muster the political courage to take responsibility.

I have no interest in making any particular group relatively larger or more powerful than any other my ambition with this is human population proposal is only that a substantial number of humans survive for a very long time and in what we would presently consider descent living conditions. I want to maximize human happiness.

Click here for a population option but you aren’t going to like it much – I don’t.

Human population viewed in reverse as zero growth.

Tags

100 million happy people, Human happiness, Overpopulation, Stable population, Zero Population Growth

World Population from BC 400 – 2000

World population chart from BC 400 – 2000

Above we see the human population graphed for the last 2,400 years. (?Originally from: Atlas of World Population History – Colin McEvedy?) What if instead of a population explosion for the last 600 years we had a population stasis – no growth whatsoever – what would that look like? How much overshoot would we now be experiencing compared to any given year? Or, perhaps, how would the population appear at the end of a normal person’s life expectancy of 70 years compared to when they were born? These are some questions I was asking myself this morning.

This afternoon I was talking to a couple of my 85-year-old friends and asked them, “Were there too many or too few people when you were born?” They said they had never thought about it, but the population seemed about right. Most people had jobs most of the time and no one actually starved. A quick computation from memory: In 1925 there were about 2 billion people on Earth and now in 2010 there are about 7 billion people. That means there are 3½ times as many people now as when my friends were born. That is a population explosion!

Let’s try a slightly different approach to show the growth using the chart above and assuming a 50-year life expectancy period for ease of using the chart. At the beginning date of 400 BC there were about 100 million people, and in 1600 there were 545 million, or roughly a growth of 445 million living people in 2000 years. That is a 4½ times growth in 2,000 years.  That would be an increase of about 111,000 for each of the 20 hundred-year periods, or 1,110 per year world-wide. Or about 5½ million per 50-year lifetime. Or very roughly, 1% more people living when a middle-aged person died than when they were born, at any time during that very long 2000-year period. (Sorry that got messy!)

My old buddies were seeing 350% more people. Can that simple calculation be right? It is wildly beyond crazy speculation. That the number of people alive, at the end of a typical human lifetime, has gone from an nearly invisible 1% to people heaped everywhere, 350%. Okay, the age was changed from 50 years old at the end of life to 85 years old at the end.

Let me recalculate for someone 50 years old in the year 2000 so the base is the same. The population numbers go from 2,500 in 1950 to 5750 in 2000. Then dividing 5750/2500=2.3. Whew, only an increase to 230% in a 50-year lifetime.

But wait – all species must in the long run be in balance with their environment, and even back 2000 years ago people were doing quite well compared to other species at a sustained 1% growth rate. If we look at human population growth since our species developed all of our modern physical qualities visible in the archeological record, say 100,000 years ago, we would get a growth number well under 1%. Or perhaps defining human beings starting from when the first unequivocally symbolic artifacts were found, say 40,000 years ago with some art objects beyond a bored hole in a shell, it would still be well under 1% global change.

If the line between 500,000 and 10,000 were drawn to scale it would be 50 times longer and really flat. Various population experts show different population histories for the world, usually based on reasonable but general assumptions like the kind of economy people in a given area were using for their livelihood. From that guesstimate they compare known populations living that style of existence and extrapolate a logical and reasonable if not absolutely perfect population figure. The point is that we are currently in an ongoing population explosion which is unlikely to carry on for 100 years. Doomsday repeats itself until a stable population is agreed upon and enforced.

Doomsday repeats itself until a stable population is agreed upon and enforced.

Either population levels off and stabilizes or it collapses. My guess is that if you could graph this out for another 10,000 years the population would drop back to 100 million (0.1 billion), the population of the 500 AD period. Then one of two possibilities. Either there would be an enforced world-wide population policy maintaining a stable population with a very good standard of living for everyone. Or alternatively there would be no population policy and the population would go through boom and bust cycles with lots of conflict and many wars. There would be massive squalor for most of the people most of the time. To attain the healthier outcome there would not have to be regulation of anything except population and communities of people could live as they choose. With a smallish human population existing well within nature’s ability to furnish us with necessities, everyone could live the very long and happy life they chose for themselves. I love my sexual freedoms but a two-child family seems just fine. I knew the founders of the Sexual Freedom League and was paid real money for designing their logo back in 1967. There are some movies of me romping in Aquatic Park Beach with Jeff and Ina before the newspapers picked up on Jeff and his quest. I am not exactly your typical old dude prude.

(( I just had a computer crash. COMMENT about my website provider WORDPRESS’s word processor) I just spent two hours creating a beautiful html chart showing in considerable detail a much better proof for the above speculative assertions. Before updating I did a ctrl-a, ctrl-c and then hit update. I do this temporary backup because several times in the past all my work was lost when I clicked the “post” button. Perhaps this time I hit ctrl-a, ctrl-v and that inadvertently replaced all my work with blank because nothing was in temporary memory. In any case everything that was part of my new stuff was lost. This is a serious flaw with Windows and with word processors! It could be easily fixed by having the temporary ctrl-c have several layers deep of backup. I will now redo that chart but in a safer way by posting the blank chart to the internet and then filling it in. Thus for a while there will be a work chart in progress. Possibly my problem was created by my moving my cursor-mouse-pointer off of the UPDATE button between clicking it and releasing it. I don’t know what actually happened.))

Before Present	World Population	% growth 100 yr	Doubling time
100,000	10,000	–	–
30,000	500,000	0.56	12,403
10,000	6,000,000	1.25	5,580
5,000	50,000,000	4.33	1,635
3,000	120,000,000	4.47	1,583
2,000	250,000,000	7.62	944
1,000	250,000,000	0.00	–
800	400,000,000	26.49	295
600	375,000,000	-3.18	slight shrinkage
400	578,000,000	24.15	320
300	680,000,000	17.65	427
200	954,000,000	40.29	205
100	1,634,000,000	71.28	129
50	2,530,000,000	139.74	79
0	6,000,000,000	462,42	40

This is chart is copied by hand from Maps of Time, page 143, by David Christian. This chart is much more carefully compiled than my quick estimates done above, and it shows even more clearly the idea that until very recently no one would notice a population growth. When the first pyramids of Egypt were built 5000 years ago, the % growth was 4.33 per 100 years and so with a life expectancy of 25 years a person living in a town of 100 people would have seen 101 people at their death. With infant mortality being high a single extra person in a small town would be invisible even to a modern statistician. Whereas at present, with a life expectancy of 80 years for women and a doubling time of 40 years, the community of 100 people would have doubled twice and be about 400 people. People living to old age will have seen extraordinary growth! It has been tolerated in the modern world because there was an abundance of everything for everyone. Such growth is what’s happening now, and not to a just a single small village, but to our entire Earth. Our current pattern of population growth is a temporary phenomenon.

Things are much better now than they have ever been.

What is the ideal human population for maximizing happiness?

Tags

12000 years of civilization, Survival of civil society, Survival of Earth, Survival of humanity

If there were no humans there would be no human happiness to be had but if the Earth had seventy billion people there wouldn’t be any happiness either. With that enormous population there would be more than ten times as many people everywhere and nobody would have space to move about without tripping over another body. The pollution problems would be terrific from human waste alone and very few people could have energy consuming gadgets like refrigerators, stoves or computers, and travel would have to be considered criminally wasteful of natural resources.

My new conception is to maximize the total amount of human happiness in the long run but limit some parts of it in the short run. I have discussed this before in terms of total years of human life because without that there is no possibility for happiness. But now it is necessary to present the things which would permit 12,000 more years of civilization. I state that exact number because it is clearer to be specific than to use the more common generalized word like sustainable. Numerical statements can then be made which helps to make the things being discussed much clearer. For example, the current government often talks about sustainable energy and oil consumption at the same time but if you replace the word sustainable with 12,000 years it instantly becomes obvious that what the politicians mean by sustainable is just until the next election or two. Sustainable to politicians apparently means a couple of years. If you think in the longer terms and are presently a student in university and you can reasonably hope to live for another sixty years. When thought of in that period of time these politicians’ words about sustainable are clearly hopelessly shortsighted and foolish. The world will run short of oil in fifteen years according to the pessimists but the optimists say it will be thirty years. The word sustainable should mean in dynamic balance with natural processes and not until the next election. What I might ask are you going to do for the last thirty years of your life without oil? Thirty years without personal cars like you see everywhere now days is endurable. They probably won’t exist, at least not in large numbers and there may be large numbers of battery driven automobiles to replace them. But when oil becomes too expensive to burn it will be used for farming to make food but the price of food will go way up.Why should you concern yourself with other people or with the future when you can’t even be sure there will be a future? For the very simple reason, you have no choice. It is your future. Some things are fixed and they won’t be changing. The past isn’t going to change although your relationship to it will change. The past and future of the Universe in the grander scheme isn’t going to be influenced much by anything you do or what all of humanity does, for that matter. That’s okay, it’s the universe we live in and the world we live in. But our personal happiness is greatly influenced by our personal behavior and humanity’s happiness is greatly influenced by our species’ group behavior. If humanity could think about itself, in total way in the long run, it would first want to survive, second to maximize its existence and third to be happy. For people to have a chance at happiness there are some minimal conditions which must be met.

First survival must mean the environment is unpolluted with things which injure health. Such things as air, water and food are obvious necessities for life itself and when considering the long run, 12,000 years, the input of our needs and the output of waste must be provided for and cleaned up by the Earth. We can not keep dumping garbage into the atmosphere and ocean forever. With the overburden of the last 200 years of human pollution there would have to be about 200 years for the environment to return to where it was at the beginning of the industrial revolution. That is if there was absolutely no further input of human pollution and the burning of fossil fuels, which is impossible. As beautiful as the world is today it was probably much more beautiful back then but we will never be able to experience that.

The second point before we can maximize total human happiness is to maximize the total number of years of human life. It might be possible to have ten times as many people as we have today, although highly unlikely, and therefore ten times the potential for human happiness but it would be clearly unsustainable even for a single lifetime before some total collapse of the Earth’s ability to sustain that number. Thus a 12,000 year life expectancy of civilization with a peak of 70 billion followed by near total collapse would not yield much potential of total years of human life and little happiness. The pollution problems would be a limit to healthy survival and probably limit the lives of most people in that situation. It seems there could be more people live in the flow of 12,000 years if we had 100,000,000 people living 100 years each (for easy calculation) 12,000 years / 100 years = 120 life cycles. Then 120 life cycles times the number of people living at any given time  of 100,000,000 = 12,000,000,000. That gives approximately the same number of people who will have lived during the next thirty years. So rather than burning up the planet in thirty years of frenzy we would have the same number of people-years to have been lived, it is just stretched out over a much longer period of time. These  distant future people of a smaller population would be living in a much better environment and at least have the opportunity to be much happier and healthier than near future people living in squalor.

The third point is human happiness which is dependent upon survival and then time of survival  and now the quality of life. Happiness, pleasure and contentment are personal things and hard to measure but I like the definitions on the Happiness Scale: “Happiness is a belief that a hoped-for state of affairs is coming into existence. Pleasure is limited to the positive feelings of the moment. and Contentment is the feeling that a hoped for state actually exists.” No one can make another person happy but we can do quite a lot to set up the basic conditions where they might be happy. Basically, that is to provide a place where there are good laws fairly enforced which produces a reliable physical and social environment where everyone can pursue their own interests without harming others.

If we had 100 million people on Earth it would be about the same as the population of 1 AD. That number would be able to live much of the high tech life style which modern humans seem to enjoy but with that number the Earth would be able to recycle all of our waste in a permanently sustainable way. If we were able to discover really low energy ways of doing things we could have more people but that would have to be decided at that future time, after the Earth had recovered from the disruptions of current civilization. The current civilization with its population explosion will almost certainly reach a bursting point within the time of people now living.

I don’t think modern humans are ready for the limitations which would have to be imposed on everyone. And yet, the limitations are few and mild, like limiting your number of children to two and not producing more pollution than some agreed upon limit. Daily life would probably be with fewer restrictions than at present. Part of the reason we now have so many laws and other restrictions is because of the necessity of getting all one can with the minimum expenditure of personal energy. If there were fewer people who each had access to everything they needed there would be far less exploitation of people by other people.

There can be a beautiful Earth with a few people living happily upon it for a very long time.

See also:

Population pendulum will soon swing to well below a billion people

What is the ultimate good for human behavior?

The coming human population crash is an unpopular topic.

Tags

Future of Humanity, Human population crash, The EarhArk Project

People don’t want to die. That seems obvious but when nearly everyone on the street has some morbid condition readily apparent it gives one pause to wonder if that’s really true. There are many people walking down the streets of Berkeley nowadays that could have made a living in a freak show back in the 1930’s when such side-shows were still permitted. There are numerous fat people fatter than the fat lady in the classic movie Freaks; there are Olympic athletes more talented than the strong man; there are beautiful women much lovelier than the leading lady; there are limbless people; massively tattooed people, steroid laden women and much more right here on Telegraph Avenue. Go rent the Freaks movie and see humans in strange bodies all of whom seem to have a more normal human life force than many people I see here in Berkeley on a daily basis.

What is bothersome is the life denying aspect of much of what many of these modern people are doing. Skateboarding between lanes of oncoming cars was absolutely voluntary and without even show off creds. Who saw it other than the oncoming drivers momentarily and me? And another time I saw a guy riding between these same lanes of moving traffic with his girlfriend sitting perched on his shoulders—some people noticed that but not many. While that was transpiring, sensible young adults were sitting on the street curb smoking cigarettes with their legs dangling out into the fast flowing traffic. The city ban against smoking forces them 20 feet away from the front doors and into the street. That city ordinance was intended to protect people from smoking but it subjects them to more immediate and worse dangers which these kids don’t seem to appreciate. And there is no ordinance against self destructive behavior.

Today I talked with my friends about yesterday’s blog and the coming population collapse. It was a difficult topic to keep on the table because at any opportunity the subject would get changed. All the same I pursued it, off and on, with various people for a couple of hours. The problems seem so obvious to everyone. When I lay out the accumulation of various stressors and how they will interact with each other and accelerate the timing of the collapse, everyone agrees. The problem is that once it is generally accepted that population collapse is in the foreseeable future and certainly within the future of the students sitting about with their noses into their computers, that the subject changes to the weather, or some such idle topic. Even when I pushed the topic to the extreme, saying that all of these kids will certainly die before they are as old as we are, it drew a yawn and a so what and, “Is Hillary’s broken arm the reason she is being squeezed out of Obama’s Cabinet?”

My view is that we should look at these converging forces leading to the population collapse and try and figure out what to do about it. It seems that everything being discussed publicly totally ignores the obvious. And when someone approaches the obviously necessary things that need to be done it hits a wall of unconsciousness created by self inflicted blindness. Oblivion is just around the corner!—Who cares?

These things need to be approached in a positive way or people automatically filter them out. That is why it is necessary to focus people’s attention on The EarthArk Project rather than the demise of modern humanity. However, with college students, the best and the brightest of California here at the most exclusive university in the public education system behaving as I see them doing everyday it seems the only conclusion that can be drawn is that Doomsday draws nigh and it is accelerating. . . “The radio said there was an earthquake in New Zealand.”

Population pendulum will soon swing to well below a billion people

Tags

Green Revolution, Natural Law, Species survival, Survival of humanity, Survive and reproduce, The Laws of Life

How many people will there be remaining after the coming population crash? The human population appears to be well past what the Earth’s ecosystem is capable of permanently supporting and natural causes will soon come into play which will reduce it to a much smaller number. How severe will that reduction be and what can we do to alleviate its ill effects?

The Green Revolution of agriculture using various forms of genetic manipulation has amplified the ability of plants to convert their bodily mass into human usable  foods. Wild plants produce only enough seeds to maximize their species long term survival and not as a food source for humans. But by genetic manipulation plants can be forced to convert half of their living force into seed production.

Clearly the current human population pendulum is in full swing to some higher point. Some think the rate of growth may be slowing down even though the absolute numbers of humans growth per year is greater than any year in the first half of the century. Some say that population can be reduced and point to education of women as being the best method of lowering population. This does have an impact although it will be very slow but it also has a long term negative impact. The problem is that the most intelligent and healthy women are the ones who become most educated and thus have the fewest children. It is the desperately poor and appalling stupid women who go to fertility clinics and have multiple births. Last year the Octopussy mom already with six children on welfare with the aid of a fertility clinic had eight more unwanted children. Those fourteen children will over their lifetimes consume as much natural resources as is being saved by everyone in a whole cities worth of responsible changing from incandescent electric light bulbs to compact florescent ones. She is in an abstract sense murdering people in the not too distant future when her American born children are eating food that is being denied to people in poorer countries. The next time you see a picture of a starving child think of impact of this one woman’s and her fertility clinics doctors ugly voluntary behavior. The point is that reasonable and rational behavior by many people can be totally undone by a few stupid people. Perhaps you have noticed there are lots of stupid people around.

There are many Laws of Nature. The Law of Gravity for example but when it comes to living species there are two laws. Perhaps they should be called the Laws of Life. 1. Survive! and 2. Reproduce! Our genetic heritage has been evolved to support those goals. Even our human intelligence was evolved for that reason. Your brain’s purpose is to help our species survive and reproduce and the rest of the uses you put your brain to is for entertainment. It’s okay to have some fun. But, don’t have fun that brings about a Darwin Award for our species. But that is what is happening. In most present human societies people are permitted to have as many children as they want and in some developed countries the public will pick up the expense raising the children. The belief is that the children are innocent of all wrong doing and they should be given all the opportunities that other luckier children, the ones born to responsible parents, are given. Unfortunately in this approach there is a disconnect of behavior from responsibility. The irresponsibly people are being paid by the responsible ones to be irresponsible and have children which they can not raise properly. Thus after a few generations of this relationship there develops a class of irresponsible people preying on the responsible ones and living a style which has no hope of contributing to the overall functioning of the society or the health of the species.

The Laws of Life and the current morality of the responsible people paying for raising all of the children that irresponsible can create means that the population will continue to grow until a crisis is reached. That crisis can come in many forms and from many causes but ultimately it will resolve itself with the total human population dropping back to a level which the Earth can support. Because the population reckoning will come at a period of maximum population size and those maximum numbers will be exploring every possible way to get food all food will be scoured from every resource and a general famine will be precipitated and the return to smaller population numbers will be precipitous. Because the people will consume everything available the famine will become sharper and the population will drop well below the maximum sustainable number for a while. But how far will the population fall?

The population pendulum concept isn’t a simple swinging past the center point of equilibrium like a clock’s pendulum because in that mechanical form of a balance system the forces on both sides of the pendulums swing are equal. With a population type of pendulum the swings are between a potential for very large numbers on one side and very small ones on the other side. It is an asymmetrical type of swinging about the quantity of food that can be produced. At the moment there are about 6.8 billion humans and one would think that it is obvious that the Earth can support that many people because it is obviously doing so at the moment. However, that huge quantity food is being created by artificial means which our unsustainable because they are dependent on fertilizers, insecticides and farm equipment and transportation systems that require petroleum. It is difficult to predict how long the recoverable petroleum will last or the farm-able soil or the healthy air. But that there may be a serious shortfall of some critical item in as little as ten years seems possible and it seems impossible that there won’t be one or several within fifty years. Usually those the future predictions about oil consumption are based on current the current rate of consumption. But the human population is doubling in about thirty nine years so it is obvious the resources will be used up even quicker. No one is able to predict what will happen or when. It is like you have fallen out of an airplane at night. You know you are falling and you know you are going to hit botter soon but you don’t know just when.

The last time the planet was in balance with the human population was about 1825 with one billion people living as farmers working the land with human physical labor. However after the two centuries of human depredations upon the soil and the rest of the environment it probably wouldn’t support half that many. So for easy calculation lets say 2/3rds of that number of about .68 billion. Furthermore even going from 6.8 billion to one tenth that number .68 billion would not happen without major wars using all of the weapons available which according to TIME magazine is currently some 15,000 atomic bombs. And those major wars would further degrade the soil, the environment and everything else by a multiple of ten or so. Thus even in this nominal population collapse there would be only 100 million people left. It might not be that bad but it might be worse. There is no way to know and quite frankly no one would want to know because it would be so tragic. However, I do believe there will be human survivors because people do have sense enough to lay up some supplies, even at the last moment. Surviving for a year on stored supplies would probably get you through to the Straightened New World. But those survivors will need help to reestablish a healthy Earth. It cannot be as wonderful and diverse as the one we now inhabit but it could be quite nice.

Make a new world possible—support The EarthArk Project.

Population control and politics

Tags

Human stupidity, Modern insanity, population control, Population growth, Population policy, Unnatural selection

Unnatural Selection: Population Control and the Struggle to Remake Humanity was today’s lecture by Professor Matthew Connelly of Columbia University’s History Department (author of Fatal Misconception) here at UC Berkeley’s History Department.The announcement:

In the past century, the population of the world has grown more than four times as much as in the previous two thousand centuries. By controlling migration, manipulating birthrates, and sterilizing the “unfit,” scientists and activists struggled to prevent the meek from inheriting the earth. For the first time in the history of life on earth, the future of a species – not only its numbers, but its very nature – became the object of its own design. But in seeking to remake humanity, the population control movement caused untold suffering, culminating in the sterilization camps of India and the horrors of China’s one-child policy. It also provoked a pro-natalist backlash that continues to this day. The talk will describe how these opposing forms of population control first developed, how they diverged, and how the cause of reproductive rights was finally redeemed.

A lot of historical material relevant to population control was covered in this lecture but the thing which struck me was how all of the high ranking population activists, theorists and historians present seemed oblivious to what appears to me an obvious ongoing population crisis which has already overpopulated the Earth. By my lights there is going to be a natural population collapse in the not too distant future—almost certainly within the lifetimes of some people now living. From the everything is okay point of view, Connelly actually quoted the UN population projections as if they were meaningful. The so called predictions can give any number whatsoever as plausible and so are totally worthless for making any sort of meaningful forecast or reasonable decisions based upon them. The one thing the UN predictions don’t do is to admit the possibility that there may be a population crash. When I brought up the Malthusian problem Connelly’s all too glib answer was that Malthus has been proven wrong for over two hundred years and things were looking very good at the moment on a global scale and the current problem was just a question of food distribution.

This attitude of an author who has spent some ten years collecting data and writing this population book and the other fully informed historians and population activists present makes it seem implausible to me that there is any hope of a global population control policy. Therefore, as population limitation is probably impossible on any meaningful scale there will have to be other ways of bringing population back to a balance with the long term natural supply of food. Natural processes will take care of it! It matters little if these historians believe in natural Malthusian like processes or not Nature will prevail.

One of the most bizarre things ever produced was discussed a while by Connelly—it was the racial map of the world created by a Harvard cum laude graduate Lothrop Stoddard showing the threats to the White Race by the other inferior races.

Lothrop Stoddard Rising Tide of Color Against White World 1920.

Lothrop Stoddard 1883-1950

If Stoddard hadn’t given his talents to academic racism he certainly could have done well as a leading actor in Hollywood films.

I was bothered not only by the short-sighted views of Connelly but also by that of everyone present. They seemed to be chuckling at all the wrong jokes and innuendos. It reminded me of some sort of weird radical-left Austin Powers skit. What was so worrisome about this was that these are high level academics and if they are consistently discussing the problems in terms of nationalism, racism, sexism, ideology and religious biases then they are totally missing the point that world population isn’t some specific localized political problem but because of efficient transportation it is a global problem.

There was never any mention of the natural biological effects of geometric growth or of Malthus like ideas without disparaging them. With explosive animal population growth, and there certainly is an ongoing explosive human population growth, the living group as a unit hits some limit, usually a food limit, and then collapses nearly to zero because all of the food has been sought out by overabundant and desperate individuals, with no thought other than to find food and eat it.

At this scholarly event, all of the lecture and all of the after conversations were quite limited and locked into what the political response of the various politically definable groups ought to be. No mention was made as to what humanity as a unified species should be doing.

The population party is nearly over but even the informed humans are still tooting their happy horns.