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.

Who will be the most hated person in history?

Tags

Collapse of society, Survival of civilization, The EarthArk Project

Looking back to now from 1000 years in the future

The intent of this post is to look back at the present year 2010 CE  from 1000 years in the future at 3010 CE. We will try and estimate who will be the most hated person in history at that future time. That procedure will include everyone now living and all of those people as yet unborn who will do despicable deeds as judged by those people of the distant future. The starting point is with a Google search – most hated person in history –  which finds the current favorites but they are almost entirely about the current media-hyped people of recent killers and surprisingly of the Octomom: The Most Hated Person In American History

Top 10 most Evil Men Google search gets a much better list for the purpose of a future search being more historical in orientation. During 1974, visitors to Madame Tussaud’s internationally famous wax museum in London were handed questionnaires that asked, “What person do you most hate and fear?” Results of that and a check of similar internet polls are approximately as shown in the list below. It was made by simply mashing together of several other lists to made up the following composite one:

1. Adolf Hitler – Germany – Started WWII, genocide Jews
2. Jack the Ripper – London – Most infamous serial killer
3. Moshe Dayan – Israel – Administered a difficult area
4. Muammar al-Gaddafi – Libia – Lockerbie airliner crash
5. Osama bin Laden – Arabia – Destroyed World Trade Center
6. Pol Pot – Cambodia – Civilian genocide
7. Saddam Hussein – Iraq – Genocide Kurds
8. Timothy McVeigh – USA – Terrorist bomber
9. Vlad Tepes – Dracula – Rumania – Exemplary homicides
10. Ivan The Terrible – Russia – Founder Russia
11. Alexander The Great – Greece – Captured Near East
12. Attila The Hun – Russia – Terrorized Europe
13. Napoleon – France – Successful tyrant
14. Josef Stalin – USSR -Ukrainian genocide, gulags
15. Leopold II – Belgium – Genocide Congo
16. Idi Amin Dada – Uganda – Genocide
17. Ruholla Khomeini – Persia – Islamic revivalist
18. Maximilien Robespierre – France – Organized Terror
19. Ramesses the Great – Egypt – Enslaved people
20. Henry VIII – England – Legaly murdering wives
21. Nero – Rome – Extravagant and tyranical
22. Tomas de Torquemada – Spain – Inquisitor
23. Adolph Eichmann –  Germany – Genocide
24. Mao Zedong – China – Genocide China
25. Genghis Khan –  Mongolia – Genocide Asia
26. H. H. Holmes – Chicago USA – Serial killer
27. Gilles de Rais –  France – Child murder
28. Micolae Ceausescu – Romania – Ethnic strife
29. Basil the Bulgar Slayer – Central Europe – Emperor
30. Heinrich Himmler – German – Genocide Jews
31. Talat Pasha – Turkey – Genocide of Armenians
32. Christopher Columbus – Spain – Genocide America
33. Oliver Cromwell – English – Genocide Ireland
34. Fransico Pizarro – Span – Genocide South America
35. Julius Ceasar – Roman – Genocide Europe
36. Hernan Cortes – Spanish – Genocide Mexico
37. Lyndon Johnson – USA – Genocide Viet Nam
38. Harry S Truman – USA – Genocide Japan
39. Richard M. Nixon – USA – Genocide Viet Nam
40. Nadia Suleiman – ( Octomom ) – USA – Genocide Earth

This is an interesting list and many of the people are truly evil but many where great heroes in their native country. It is difficult to put a patriot attempting to fulfill the needs of his native land as a person worthy of hate from the stand point of 1000 years in the future. Under that venue a lot of people who did really horrible things recently might slip past my postulated future hatred.

When observed from the distant future we would be looking through the eyes of people who were living in the remnants of a world subjected to repeated Doomsday wars. Those H-bomb wars are far beyond the levels which we presently consider really horrible. Those future wars will be where billions of people are killed in a short time by Hydrogen bombs and the immediate after effects such as famine. These are wars which will degrade the whole planet . They are much worse events than the destruction of some nationality because not only will it do that, but it will worsen the vital health of the whole planet forevermore.

The people a thousand years from now will see the most evil people as those responsible for bringing about the Doomsday disasters. The individuals seen as creating those weapons and those whose judgements brought about their use will be most hated.

My list of the people most hated in the future say the year 3010 CE would then include:

First – Those who helped create the A-bombs and H-bombs:

1. Albert Einstein – Father of Modern Physics
2. Einstein–Szilárd – Their letter forced USA to build A-bombs
3. Franklin D. Roosevelt – Ordered first A-bombs construction
4. J. Robert Oppenheimer – Built the first A-bombs
5. Glenn Seaborg – Furnished Plutonium for A-bombs
6. Edward Teller – Created first H-bombs – a thousand times bigger
7. Alfred Nobel – Encouraged the development weapons with prizes

Second – Those people who deployed the 1st bombs:

1. Harry Truman – First to use A-bombs & ordered H-bombs
2. Curtis LeMay – Demanded H-bomb attacks, Kennedy said NO

Third – The people who are now responsible for these Weapons Of Extermination (WOEs). They are still only at high risk of becoming the most hated people in history. Those presently threatening to use these weapons may set off an unstoppable chain reaction precipitating massive weapons use.

1. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – Claims he will bomb Israel
2. Benjamin Netanyahu – Preventive strike against Iran
3. Barak Obama – Support of the preventative strike
4. Overpopulation – Supporters of unlimited fecundity
5. Nadia Suleiman – The population bomb exploding

From the distant future most those people who found their way to the top 40 list will be historical figures remembered fondly like Alexander the Great or totally forgotten. The people from the bottom three lists are now thought of highly by their respective nations but after Doomsday they will hated by the survivors. My take home message is to follow the Black Swan’s advice and prepare to survive the worst possible turn of events:

To believe that H-bombs will never be used is hallucination.

To hope they are never used is overly optimistic.

To plan for their use is pessimistic and morbid.

But, to ignore the problem condemns civilization to extinction.

The builders of EarthArk will be giving humanity a second chance and will be remembered fondly, but the builders of the A-bombs will be reviled.

An outline of risk management and how to survive serious problems.

UPDATE 2011-09-29 – The 50 Most Hated Characters in Literary History

Some “literary perspective” on hatred.

How will the world cope with famine when it comes?

Tags

World food famine, World food supplies

There have been many famines throughout history. However, until the era of modern large scale transportation there was never the possibility of universal famine. But now with supertankers and huge container ships it becomes possible to move enormous quantities of food at very little cost per calorie of food; therefore, now it is a question of who has the money to purchase the food, as that is who will get to eat it rather than the local person who farmed the food. That farmer may not have enough money to purchase the food which he created. The farmers of the world no longer own the farms they work upon but are now largely paid workers and in a poor country they are paid very little. So little in fact that during a true world shortage where prices go very high the worker may not earn enough to feed himself. Seed companies have managed to create super seeds which are sterile and thus they prevent individual farmers from replanting what ever seeds may come their way. The local farmers may be living in small company towns and have no access to land upon which to grow food even if they had the seed, which they don’t.

With the exploding population and the degradation of the unfertilized land there will come a time when there must be a rebalancing of the humans to their resource base. This will be very painful socially and deadly to large numbers of people. Famines are nothing new. I came across this interesting quote about one famine on the Rhine river in Germany:

Hatto, in the time of the great famine of 914, when he saw the poor exceedingly oppressed by famine, assembled a great company of them together into a barn at Kaub and burnt them . . . because he thought the famine would sooner cease if those poor folks were despatched out of the world. . . . But God . . . sent against him a plague of mice . . . and the prelate retreated to a tower in the Rhine . . . but the mice chased him continually . . . and at last he was most miserably devoured. — Thomas Coryat: Crudities [1611] from Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations p 426

There have been many other famines! One interesting statement by a Chinese emperor, (I have no idea where I read this) said the worst thing about being emperor was deciding during a famine who was to live and who was to die. There might be whole provinces of perfectly good people but there simply wasn’t enough food to go around and so whole groups of people must perish.

The modern Chinese government is aware of this coming famine and so they are purchasing up valuable farm land and legal rights to the food production of vast areas even here in the United States. Therefore there may come a time when there is famine here in the US even while food is being exported to China. This kind of export happened even during the Irish potato famine where the Ireland was exporting food to England where those people could afford to purchase it.

Periods of political unrest are likely to precipitate famines. This problem will become acute when the world consumption gets very close to the world production so there is little buffer. In that condition a little extra stress could trigger a lot of response which could and possibly would develop into a positive feedback situation. When that happened all sorts of protectionist things would happen and probably some of that would develop into high seas piracy and open warfare. At present cargo ships with hugely valuable cargoes traverse the seas unprotected, at least in a local way. They are presently protected by laws and by a sprinkling of combat ships to enforce the laws. However, when the true short supply comes to pass things will suddenly become much more difficult and world trade will suffer. Those localities which cannot defend themselves and produce sufficient food will suffer greatly. See Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET). At present, while there is food available, the quickest way to ease a famine is to give people money and let them allocate it to maximize their access to food. This is obviously a very short term local policy and will quickly lead to political corruption. That policy probably can’t be implemented on a worldwide scale.

Perhaps a guess as to when the serious worldwide famine will hit is when about half of the money spent by the world’s population is spent on food. When food prices reach about that level many people will be unable to compete in the open market for food and serious food battles will ensue. I suspect that there will be little reduction in population or the fertility of humanity as a whole until that occurs. And when food becomes available again, if it does, there will be an immediate restoration of fertility to make up for lost lives.

With great power comes great responsibility—and YOU have the power to save the world.

Tags

EarthArk, Survival of the ecology

With great power comes great responsibility—and YOU have the power to save the world.

The statement of the idea for personal responsibility is adapted from the comic Spider-Man. Peter Parker, alias Spider-Man considered himself morally responsible for his Uncle Ben‘s murder by a burglar. That murder Peter believes he could have prevented. Because of this failure of inaction he resolved to fight crime with the all the powers ever to come into his possession. He realized that with great power comes great responsibility and he vowed never to let another innocent person come to harm if he could help it.

The people of the future are innocent of all wrongdoing and they will be injured by the behavior of people now over-exploiting the environment. You have the power to help prevent those people’s suffering and help found the EarthArk—you can save the lives of many of those innocent people. If you choose not to act you will be responsible for their deaths. This problem has been brought about by the absoluteness of human technical success which resulted in a huge human population.

The wonderful discoveries of the last two hundred years have permitted humans to live lives far beyond the wildest dreams of ancient people but the way the ancient people lived came up to times not really that long ago. Some  currently living old people, when in their youth, have spoken personally to at that time an old person who in his youth lived in that ancient world. He would have lived in a world powered almost wholly by human physical effort. That single jump, in time, of personal overlap is like talking to someone who has had a single jump in space. It is like talking to someone who has been to New York who talked to someone living on Long Island—it’s not a big jump off into ancient history or distant place. To that  person living in the world of 1825 access to a horse gave them a huge advantage of power over his competitors. Another comparison is with distant communication. At that time the fastest communication was by horse. Napolean tried to build a primitive internet semaphore system across France but that communication was so very slow, only about a symbol a minute. A long message could be carried by horseback a hundred miles faster that semaphore system could transmit it. Messages could travel through the system at about a symbol per minute so they had to be very short and very important. That article linked above is interesting reading because it shows just how primitive the very best Internet in the world was at that not very distant time.

To give some more time perspective, Julius Cesar lived ten times that long ago as our older friend mentioned above and Imhotep who was the architect of the Egyptian pyramids lived 25 times as long ago. They were people, genetically just like us and lived out their lives immersed in a civilization much like us, just a long time ago. During that long stretch of human civilization, from Imhotep’s pyramids up to Napoleon, there was very little impact on the stability of the earth’s environment. However that has totally changed and within your lifetime, if your are of college age, there will be massive changes to the ecology of this planet. All of that earlier human civilization went by without effecting the planet one bit until about 1825. But now because of the success of our technology we as a species are destroying our home planet.

In 1825 there were about one billion humans living mostly in balance with the environment as farmers tilling the soil by hand. But now there are about 6.8 billion people living and most of them are moving into cities. These city dwellers consume about the same amount of food per person as those ancient people but the consume vastly more energy dependent products. Transportation of the food and transportation of the people themselves use a lot of mined energy as does the affluent life style to which we have all grown accustomed. That mined coal and oil energy gets consumed one time. When it is gone it is gone forever and can never power future peoples needs. And the air that is polluted with the burning of the fossil fuels is polluted forever in terms of our lifetimes. The way modern city people live consumes so much fossil fuel that only 100 million could live the way we currently do and remain in balance with a healthy earth. By that simple comparison we have 67 times too many people.

It is obvious that the way we live cannot be supported by the Earth for very much longer. Something will happen which will bring humans back to well below the balance point with nature. It won’t be pleasant! And civilization as we know it will go through a period where little we value will survive. That is why you must help create an EarthArk so that those people who do survive can rebuild the beautiful Earth that was given to that old man mentioned above who lived in Napolean’s time. Hopefully, the people who do survive and rebuild the world will see the errors which we made and create a world that humans will be able to live permanently in balanced harmony with the Earth.

PLAN B 3.0 won’t save the world.

PLAN B 3.0: Mobilizing to save civilization by Lester R. Brown doesn’t look at the real problems and so it isn’t going to save civilization or the planet Earth or the people on it. Go to Amazon for Plan B 3.0 and click contents or index to see what is written about.

The failure of this book to address the real problems of the modern world is an easy assessment to make because a simple check of the index page 391 reveals not a single reference to nuclear weapons or even to major war in general and only a little attention is given even to the possibilities of minor wars. There is some discussion of food supply but it doesn’t link it firmly to population explosion or population control. Any feeding of a current population has to be a temporary solution to famine unless there is a firm linkage to birth control. Population control will occur by some route, be it naturally with starvation or unnaturally with human intervention. Human intervention seems to be invasive of the personal rights and liberties of people but it is much less so than nature’s methods.  Starving is very unpleasant no doubt and dying is the extreme of invasive of one’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness but that is nature’s way of maintaining population balance. There are several references to livestock and meat production on index page 383 but food is given surprisingly short shrift for a book that purports to be about survival of civilization.

Plan B 3.0’s index boils down to: budget, 5 pages, carbon emissions 7 pages, climate stabilization 3 pages, earth restoration 6 pages, education 1 page, energy year 2020 3 pages, failed states 2 pages, poverty 4 pages, shifting taxes and subsidies 5 pages. There is no mention of population explosion control, nuclear weapons, major war and little about creating more food and yet if there is anything to be learned from history it is that population and war are major factors in human well-being and food is an absolute necessity. How can a book be taken seriously if it barely mentions these most basic factors impacting the future?

Using the cool look inside function provided by Amazon to search the text of the book and checking out the number of references, we find: birth control – 0, nuclear war – 0, nuclear weapons – 0, population control ( 13 hits on those individual words but none were about population control).

I am tired of wasting time with this book, so I am going to stop now.

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.

Population control – The most unpopular solution of all.

Tags

birth control, famine, philosophical good, population, population control, RFID, survival, war

There are three basic paths to world population control: famine, homicide and birth control. All of these are unpleasant, and unpopular, but birth control seems to be the most politically unpopular, followed by war with famine being the most accepted as it seems to be within the natural order of things. But, very few modern people have experienced famine as a way of life, even if the process has been with humanity from the beginning. Food hasn’t been a major issue in the Americas for hundreds of years for the immigrant populations, at least, although the displaced native populations have suffered, and withered. There have been a few famines in the world in more recent times, but most of these have been local, and politically motivated genocidal campaigns. That is population control of the worst kind. It is the most vicious, and it is to be avoided by any means possible because, aside from the suffering, it creates massive stresses for the rest of the world which may trigger a worldwide military conflagration. My goal in all of these Probaway – Lifehaven Strategies has been to help humanity survive for a long, long time in as healthy a condition as possible, but to survive even if some Doomsday disaster occurs or some unpalatable personal sacrifices must be endured.

The question of what is good for humanity or what is moral, right and all of the rest of those types of philosophical conundrums are easily answered from what is generally considered a Darwinian point of view. Actually, not Darwin — I let him off of that hook, and Wallace too — but rather the point of view that I have developed. Basically, what I consider good, in the abstract, is what maximizes the total number of healthy hours of human life. I like the phrase, “The goal of life is to maximize the healthy, happy, wise and wealthy aspects of life” in that order of importance, sort of Ben Franklinish. Ultimately there isn’t much we can do for the last three (happy, wise and wealthy) for Earth’s people in aggregate, because they have to find those things for themselves through their own personal efforts. However, we do have some leverage on providing a healthy habitat for all living people, and for future people. The concept presented here of maximizing a total number of healthy human hours is intended to included all history — past, present and future. We can’t do anything about the past, and our effect on the present is limited to ourselves, and our immediate surroundings, but in the future we can have some effect on almost everyone to some degree. In this perspective, a living person’s happiness whom I don’t know, and almost certainly never shall know is equivalent to that of a person living a hundred years from now, whom I have essentially no possibility of knowing. Of course those people with whom I have a personal relationship, even a distant one, fall into a more standard relationship of how I treat them. I treat them as appropriately as I can. But, this relationship isn’t an abstract general goodness, it is a specific personally directed goodness, and it involves a very few people indeed. What is discussed here is a general human goodness based on the healthiness of all humanity.

With that definition of good declared, the problem of what to do to bring about the maximum number of hours of human health, becomes more tractable. Project our point of reference to some really distant time in the future when all conceivable trace of humanity has been eroded away by the processes of time. Say five billion years from now; from that distant perspective after there are no more human beings, there will be a definite number of healthy human hours that will have been lived. Perhaps the qualifying term healthy should be dropped as it confuses the discussion, but I don’t like to think about some miserable hours that no one would choose to live, and they only endure them in hopes of getting through to some healthy hours. In any case there is a definite number of human hours, and the argument is the same whether or not the people are happy, wise or wealthy or simply surviving.

So, by this approach a population of a thousand persons living at some particular place for a thousand years equals one hundred people living there for ten thousand years, or ten people living one hundred thousand years or one person living one after another at this location for one million years. It is all the same in this approach. There have been one million human years that have been lived; multiply those years out to hours if you like. At present there are about 6.7 billion people living on planet Earth, but it is abundantly clear that the planet can not support this number of people for millions of years, because there are some critical resources that get used up, and are no longer available. Also, there are pollution problems which can not be sustained indefinitely, because there is only so much atmosphere, and ocean to be filled up with effluvium. Something quite different has to happen, and the way things are going that something is going to be very unpleasant! A few years ago I was thinking in terms of a Billion Happy People, but that is no longer possible, because there is just too much environmental stress. The stress is growing, and even if humans vanished this instant the global warming, and its environmental consequences, would continue for over one hundred years. And, just in case you haven’t noticed, the planets population hasn’t been pulling back toward a sustainable population. Here is the shocker: that sustainable population is only about ten to at most one hundred million people. The calculation is easy. The last time the Earth was able to digest the CO2 produced by humans was in 1825, with a population of one billion farmers. Each of those farmers produced, at most, one tenth of the CO2 that a modern city person produces, and so the maximum sustainable modern population is, at most, one tenth of a billion, or one hundred million, max. One hundred million people divided into the six point seven billion current world population gives sixty seven times too many people. Your driving a Prius, and changing your light bulbs to compact fluorescents isn’t going to save the world. Sorry, I wish it would.

With modern technology there is a technical fix to the problem but no one will support it, and nearly everyone, perhaps even me, will fight against it. That is to tag every single person on earth with a transponder of some sort. Perhaps a passive RFID would be enough in the city, but in the wilderness a powered form would probably be necessary. These are so cheap they could be placed in every person on the planet for a few billion dollars. Cattle are already being tagged, and tracked in the method being discussed to make sure they don’t get diseases, like mad cow disease, and when they do the disease can be tracked to its source. When a person was born they would be given their personal ID, and could go about their life in a totally normal way. The difference becomes, after this is all implemented, that when a person is walking along the street, and they don’t have an RFID they would be brought in and given one. Everyone would be identifiable, and identified. Perhaps with focused beam scanners individual persons could even be monitored from afar perhaps even from space.

Go see the movie of an RFID being implanted.

After this monitoring is in place it becomes possible to define who is going to have children. When each person is known, and the desirable number of people in aggregate is determined — hopefully by some fair and honest means — then specified persons could be designated to have a child. Using this method the total number of humans could be adjusted to within the carrying capacity of the Earth at the technological level that people decided that they wanted to live within. With a new and much cleaner super high tech society the population might be a lot more than one hundred million because there might be developed methods for sequestering unsavory detritus. But whatever the technology there is an ultimate number which can be sustained in that life style upon the planet Earth. Ultimately, when this society was fully stabilized there would be very modest limitation on reproduction.

I don’t like this method of controlling people like barnyard animals, but one must consider the alternatives: recurrent famines, and thermonuclear wars which at some point annihilates humanity. I’m sorry, but installing compact fluorescents, and recycling your old pop bottles isn’t going to be enough.

Lifehaven – Pitt Island is a rich tourist’s end-of-the-world destination.

Tags

Lifehaven, remote islands, Southern Ocean, survival

Pitt Island — is near Chatham Island which is a two hour flight from New Zealand -44.295 -176.235 — 62 km² ~ 45 people live there. It is relatively remote as a tourist attraction, but it has a strange attractor — this tree -44.226843 -176.220255 is among the very first ones on the planet Earth to enter into every new day, and every New Year. That is Chatham Island just visible in the distance between the trees branches.

To get to Pitt Island first go to New Zealand, and catch a weekly flight East to Chatham Island. From there where about eight hundred people live by fishing, farming, and tourism you can rent a boat or a light plane for the trip over to Pitt Island. Be careful not to miss the island or you won’t see anything but wind and water for a very long time. As a Lifehaven this one is easily accessible, but still a good choice because it is already inhabited and quite livable, a quality not shared by most of the other possible Lifehaven locations. Click here for a short history of the Chatham Islands, and Pitt Island. There has been an ongoing effort to eliminate introduced predators like cats, and rats and reintroduce the native species which had been endangered. The Pitt Island Robin Returns.

I have marked a potential location at -44.295 -176.235 (load coordinates into Google Earth) for a possible Lifehaven structure near the top of the hill. This Lifehaven might most easily be built by digging a pit and constructing a building in the pit, and then covering the whole thing over with dirt and replanting the roof with native species like the California Academy of Science in San Francisco. A year after completion it might be nearly impossible to identify it, and all of the native wildlife would soon return to its natural state. The goal with all of these Lifehavens is not to disturb the local inhabitants, including the humans. The cost of constructing this structure would be easily calculated by architects, because everything is standard procedure in a known and relatively mild environment.

Assuming that this Lifehaven’s most likely use is to be after a major atomic war there would be some time for people to come to it before the radiation reached sustained high levels. Therefore it need not be fully populated all the time. This one might be set up as a commercial venture — a very expensive atom bomb shelter, complete with large stockpiles of food, for those people willing to pay a great deal of money for the ability to survive a nuclear holocaust. Generally, I much prefer the concept of voting by large groups of people for personal representatives of their group to attend a Lifehaven for a year’s stay, but I realize that there are rich people who would prefer to pay for a retreat shelter. For them “The Pitt” sounds like an ideal location. It could be built with more amenities than other strictly life sustaining, and Earth repopulating havens.

The New Zealand people have been thinking ahead on hazards and climate change. See, — How will climate change affect the Chatham Islands? For more current details go to New Zealand, Ministry for the Environment. These projections are dealing with the hazards that everyone worries about normally, such as Global Warming, but this Lifehaven project is primarily aimed at species survival. Of course I am concerned about other issues, and I am working on them too, such as the energy problem and the population problem, but this is the survival problem. Everyone I have encountered says that I shouldn’t worry, that these things will take care of themselves. I don’t worry so much as try to think out workable solutions.

I’m feeling a transition

Tags

Fossil fuel equals food, It all begins with food, It all ends with food

The world seems to be at some kind of tipping point. A tipping point is usually defined as an ongoing change that at some seemingly gradual change it suddenly moves over into a totally new state of relationships.

For the last two hundred years, every living adult existed in a new world that was in hindsight clearly changing. It began so slowly that even a keen observer like Thomas Malthus missed its importance in 1803 when he was in the throes of population theory. Behind his mathematical theory, which was faulty, was a principle that was clearly true. Populations of living things reproduce to the carrying capacity of their food supply. The food supply is variable, and as the population is always approaching the carrying capacity, occasionally the population will exceed the food supply and some will starve to death. When the population goes below the carrying capacity, there is apparent abundance for everyone and happy times return and babies are adored as gifts rather than burdens. We have been in that blissful state for over two centuries, actually since about 1625, when the population swooped past half a billion humans.

World population history estimates from the United Nations, Hyde, McEvedy, and Probaway (in black line).

In 1803 Malthus saw the rapid increase in population but couldn’t believe it would last very long and thought there would soon be a collapse. What he didn’t foresee was the fabulous power that fossil fuel would grant to humanity to grow more food. Without fossil fuel to support agriculture, the population would fall back to the level that human-powered and animal-powered farming could supply. That was approximately the population that humanity lived with from 1,000 AD to 1500 AD, and it is the population that humanity will live with again after the end of the fossil-fuel economy. It will probably fall much lower for a while because of the degradation of the soil caused by overuse and by war.

The fossil-fuel economy as we know it will slump over soon. When that soon will be is impossible to predict because it could end today if there is a major war; it could dwindle more slowly as fuel prices slowly rise and supplies become scarcer and people haven’t the means to consume; it could end even more slowly if people somehow break out of nature’s policy of quickly reproducing to the limits of the food supply.

Only when the world population is in stable libration with the food supply will the natural struggle end.

The next hundred years as C G Darwin might see it.

In the book The Next Million Years, Charles Galton Darwin explores the basic drivers of the species we know as Homo sapiens … us. On page 151 there are three principles listed: 1. Our species obeys the laws of natural selection and thus we will change slowly in a million years. 2. We are not domesticated animals but obey the laws of wild animals. 3. We do not inherit the wisdom of our forefathers but must learn our own wisdom. In 1952 there wasn’t any directed genetic manipulation but now we have GMO (genetically modified organisms). Thus, #1 is no longer applicable even in the short run. And regarding #2, as the human DNA becomes manipulated, the possibility and long term likelihood is that our species will become as domesticated as our tame animals have been. #3, We may not inherit our ancestors’ wisdom, but because of high tech information transfer, it becomes possible to have deep wisdom much more easily if we choose to that. We already live in the early stages of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and once that is stabilized for a few decades people will love it. Well, not people as we know them, but people who have been genetically perfected.

However, before basic drivers become operable, there are changes in our current human world that in many ways will revert to earlier conditions. A primary change will be in our access to physical energy. We presently get almost all the energy supplies that make our way of life possible directly, or indirectly, from coal and oil. Human population has grown from about half a billion people in 1625 to about eight billion in 2025. That is sixteen times more people alive today than when public buildings like the Vatican in Rome were already a hundred years old. When humans learned how to gather energy from natural sources like wind, then coal, and then oil, falling water, and uranium, it became possible to grow more food. A large proportion of all those forms of energy ends up being transformed into the energy in our food. That is fine and works quite well for us, but it is being consumed, there is a limited supply of it, and when it runs out it is gone forever. We will have vast amounts of energy from wind farms and solar panels, but not nearly as much as we now get in a usable form from coal and oil. We can create energy to run cars, airplanes, and tractors, and create fertilizers, but it will cost a lot more money and human effort. Much of that will be supplied by artificial means such as robots; all the same, we humans will continue to need food.

C G Darwin maintains that ultimately human population will expand to the limits of its food supply. When that limit is reached there will be a starving margin of people who because of excess reproduction will consist of a class of people who are just barely surviving when society is thriving but who actually starve to death when there is some kind of problem. When there is bad weather creating a bad harvest, or a war, or a popular new creedal system coming into being, the marginal people will starve to death. That is the natural state of all species in the long run, but in the short run that applies nearly all the time, these people will get by living at a subsistence level.

Notice in the population chart below that the world population usually took a thousand years to double, even though the total number of people was quite small. However, the massive world population present today is doubling in fifty years because we have learned to exploit the one-time-use fossil fuels. Because the land has been so overused, when the fossil energy runs out, the population may quickly drop back to 1CE levels.

World Population history estimates from 70,000 years ago until 2025.

The world population took off when the stored power of the earth became available for creating food but that fossil energy is almost gone.