World Population
The yearly increase in population of the world has been slowing since about 1970, so it will probably at this rate peak in 50 years. Fertility is also steadily falling and may add to the problem. Most people are worrying and showing concerns about population based on learned 1950’s projections, not anything modern or recently, so a lot of proposed changes are being planned based on obsolete data and obsolete modelling. The problem of population is one of logistics, hoarding and distribution. It’s always been this. A rough calculation of the efficient food production suggests that we only have about 2% of the population the world can support if things were done efficiently and stuff was distributed evenly, so it’s a bit like multi-millionaires suggesting it’s the homeless’ avarice that is the root of the problem and needing to cut back. We now have about 4% of the world controlling 96% of the wealth, the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer each year. Even in the UK, one of the highest urban countries in the world, built up areas account for less than 10%, but gardens, waste tracts and many parks are included in this figure, so actually built on may only be around 3%.
The Venus end to Earth is likely fanciful nonsense, both Mars and Venus probably being never similar to Earth and probably never will be.
But we are getting climate change and things like CO2 production rising every year even given 20 years of planning and changes made to reduce it. What has been achieved; nothing probably. Just a lot of talk and fake environmental accounting. That is, if CO2 is the only driver. It’s undoubtedly more complicated that, and slowly scientists are realising this, methane, water and volcanic action being important, even though it was obvious from the start. If you take the proportion of time the earth was capable of being inhabitable by us and how long glaciation or poles were present it amounts to maybe 8% of that time, less than 1% of the age of the planet. Today’s or yesterday’s conditions hardly being a good basis for predicting the next 10,000 years.
We are almost sure to get something like a 20-foot rise in sea levels now, but this is still only a major probability, the world still being capable of dropping to an ice world or the poles becoming tropical. Think Mount St. Helens, 1 cubic mile of eruption, Siberian Traps, 3 million cubic miles of eruption, with massive heating and cooling effects, 5% of the worlds age ago, or the Deccan Traps, 600,000 cubic miles, 1.5% of the worlds age ago.
It’s likely that the resources will run out long before we have this problem, or we unleash devices thinking we can benefit in any way.
With trying to save the planet we are now using up resources faster than at any time in history, creating non-resilient and imaginary and theoretical plans and systems based on everything working exactly the way we think it should, nobody running the numbers, and if they do, tailoring them so their ideology wins, concealing any problems, miscalculations or imperfections. ‘After all, the idea is to help the world, even if it’s not going to work and make the problem worse.’
We have a consumer, marketing, and hype controlled society, fractionally above apes in our motivations in our zoo. This needs to change. That’s about it. Change it, there is a future; don’t change it, there is none until one without those characteristics develop. We are one target in space, with the target painted on our backs, waiting for a passing hunter to notice, so returning back to the caves just means it’s a matter of time before everything goes extinct, what are little more than space tourists, maybe being able to watch their own extinction.