Dave (imported) wrote: Wed Aug 11, 2010 6:15 pm
What science course did you take?
The old Eugenics that was discredited nearly 7 decades ago?
The population bomb you read in HS that didn't understand that food could be grown more efficiently.
Well, yeah you can use fertilizers (made from cracking petrochemicals in plants that spew out carbon dioxide in addition to their hydrocarbon emissions) and plough, cultivate, thresh, and harvest with machines that burn oil and spew out more greenhouse gasses to increase food production a bit, but Malthus's basic assertion that unchecked population increases geometrically and food production can only increase arithmetically remains valid, even if we don't want to see what the consequences will be.
Malthus, of course relied on disease, famine, and war to counterbalance the geometrically increasing population because as a clergyman he understood that maiming, mutilating, killing, and starving people was the Christian thing to do to protect people's morals because of the severe adverse consequences of ideas like birth control, but the bottom line is still that this is a closed system; there is only so much land to grow food on, so much sea to fish (the mid oceans are largely wasteland, though sprinkling a little ferrous ion into mid-ocean would stimulate algae growth, provide food for krill and increase the fish, and so much water to drink.
There are only so many people the earth can support. At a quadrillion or so, the heat alone given off by the human bodies would raise the temperature of the planet's atmosphere to lethal levels and kill everyone off anyway.
