On Sat, 17 May 2008, David Opderbeck wrote:
> Dave W. -- if the eschaton is delayed a billion years into the future, I
> doubt we'll have to worry about overcrowding the earth. We'd have colonized
> other planets by then and we'd probably have learned how to upload our minds
> into computers. I'm getting old and cranky though, so I don't think the
> Lord will tarry a billion years.
Populating the rest of the universe will not cause the problem to go away
forever. Given that there is a limit to how fast we can travel through
space, the volume of space that we can reach increases at a polynomial
rate, but if we don't slow down our rate of population increase, that rate
will be exponential, and exponential growth will ultimately win out over
polynomial growth.
Gordon Brown (ASA member)
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Received on Tue May 20 18:16:06 2008
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