[asa] A Sustainable Future and Exponential growth

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(And as to Dave S.'s skepticism about colonies on Mercury -- well, sure, but
Dave W. was talking a billion years from now. My guess is that if humans
are around in our present creation then, we'll be well beyond this solar
system).
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I just realized that posts by David O are not getting to my gmail web
client now. At first when I changed my email address from a hotmail
account to gmail, his posts got through but not anymore. I got the
above quote from David O from the achieve and can see he made other
posts that never arrived.

I only said a billion years to make the population numbers absurd and
try to force a realistic discussion and not simply dismiss the problem
because it can and has lead to totalitarian solutions. Even with a 1%
growth rate the world population doubles every 74 years approximately.
Choose how many doublings you want but not far in the future the
population would become unsustainable. I think that Thomas Malthus was
essentially correct, he just got some of the scaling factors wrong and
did not sufficiently account for technical progress especially in areas
of low hanging fruit.

A few years back computer speed doubled roughly every 18 months. I
suspect that Intel and AMD strongly wish they could still continue with
that pattern. Sure they still double transistor gates every couple of
years or so, but heat problems seem to have killed the raw speed
doubling or at least have halted it for now.

I tend to agree with David S, that something like the Black plague will
cause population to plummet.

Dave W (ASA member)

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Received on Mon May 19 03:09:02 2008