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Quote by: SteveA I think (s)he's just saying that it needs to be an object of attention. |
That's well and good. It is certainly a subject that needs attention. Until now we have been able to continue to increase the carrying capacity of the earth by increasing crops, reducing pests, putting marginal land into production, etc. Not to be a doomsayer or anything, but it won't be too long and the earth will reach its carrying capacity. Unless we can plan on an endemic of some sort to kill off a significant portion of the population. Could the next avian flu be our salvation?
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Quote by: SteveA If we expect the population to grow, at some point it's likely that growth will need to occur outside Earth (either that or we've got a lot of likely impossible engineering challenges in store). |
Let's do some back of the envelope arithmetic. Estimates of population growth in the next 50 years from some of the sites already referenced are right around 3 billion. Just assume that that increase will be spread out evenly - I know that's not true. The increase in the later years will be more than in the early years. But this is just to get an average. That means that the population will grow by 60 million every year, or 164,383 people every day. Perhaps I'm just a pessimist, but I just can't imagine building enough rockets to send enough people off to colonies in space to make a difference. I realize that population growth is an increasing problem, but imagining that you can send enough people off into space to shift population growth outside the earth just isn't realistic.