Admiral Valdemar wrote:Or did you really think I expected mankind to, literally become the universe? Don't be ridiculous.
Of course not, but my discussion gives a far better understanding of the future to the reader.
Admiral Valdemar wrote:Forget space colonisation. It's not happening this century, so please don't bring in totally unsupported ideas that are nowhere near planning, let alone implementation.
That's a very premature assumption to make with all the uncertainties this early in the century, when it may or may not happen. Readers, if interested, please see the description
here how launch cost reduction to more like airline expense is known to be possible and the methods involved, plus discussion
here of circumstances under which space colonization could potentially occur this century.
Admiral Valdemar wrote:The death of the current capitalist model, which you seemed to confuse yourself over here, by the way, is something supported by a great many people who actually saw that the current trend is totally unsustainable, with a few others who even account for resource depletion on top of it.
Winston Churchill once said of democracy:
"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
The same might be said of capitalism, or, more precisely, the capitalism-socialism mixed economy that is dominating in actual implementation in two hundred countries. That's the real world, despite predictions of the death of capitalism for generations by various ideologists.
Admiral Valdemar wrote:Just like we're not replacing oil with nuclear or solar.
The current trend is the total of substitutes for crude oil (NGL, coal-to-liquids, oil sands, biofuels, etc) increasing from 20% of the total in 2007 to 25% in 2012, according to the IEA as described
here. Production of substitutes is increasing at about a 6% annual rate, from ~ 18.5 million barrels per day in 2007 to ~ 24.5 million barrels per day in 2012.
Of course, most of the preceding is just substitution of other fossil fuels that give more time but get depleted eventually. But in the long-term, the physically rather limited supply of resources like fossil fuels is precisely what guarantees mankind will switch. For example, one doesn't have to worry about fourth-millennia mankind being dependent on fossil fuel, as, rather, dominant usage of a method like nuclear or solar energy will be unavoidable before then. There may be hiccups on the way, but the end result is visible.
For all their faults, most science-fiction productions do tend to get one thing right: distant-future civilization won't be running on fossil fuels.
Current progress in nuclear and solar energy implementation is slow, but expansion occurs, especially as more countries build reactors, a tendency which adds up over generations, particularly later when incentives increase:
Admiral Valdemar wrote:As you pointed out, population growth levelling off and becoming neutral is, shock horror, the end of growth.
The end of population growth on earth is approaching, but, even before or aside from expansion into space, there are other types of growth, e.g. economic growth. There's a long, long ways to rise for a lot of people currently dirt-poor, in addition to further technological advancement in general.
Admiral Valdemar wrote:For everyone to live with Western lifestyles today, it would be unsupportable. The best you'd get is one billion lives, so right now, we're way over carrying capacity for the current lifestyles if all those Asians want to live like we do.
If those one billion people used oil or other fossil fuels, they'd run out sooner or later.
But if they used solar collectors, a rather limited part of the 170000 terawatts of sunlight intersected by earth amounts to technically more than enough, for that population or for the greater world population actually existing. (Human power generation needs are so much less, e.g.
currently 2 TWe). Nuclear power also works.
If those one billion people burned coal for their electricity, they would eventually put out enough cumulative pollution to take atmospheric CO2 to extreme levels.
But if they or even a greater number didn't operate coal power plants, instead generated electricity from nuclear energy & renewables, and funded removal of a little CO2 from the atmosphere annually, they would be better off.
Likewise, with food, primitive hunter-gatherers can support at most a handful of people per square kilometer. A food supply like the 1 ton/hectare yield of wheat with poor methods in some impoverished countries today would also require the usage of relatively vast areas of land.
But more advanced agriculture can provide 9 tons per hectare yield
of wheat, allowing more people to be supported per area of cropland or reducing crop area requirements per person, sparing more land for nature, and so on.
In practice, in the real world, nobody can (nor should) stop the drive of the billions of people in developing countries towards higher quality of life and the increased consumption involved in obtaining it rather than frequently living on as little as a dollar a day. Other things are possible, though. It is possible to help encourage emulation of the societal changes experienced in richer, industrialized countries that affect the freedom of women, attitudes towards reproduction, and indirectly result in lower fertility rates, after the transition from poverty to wealth (discussed
here).
And, particularly, it is possible for the already industrialized countries to pioneer more implementation of nuclear and renewable power rather than fossil fuels, to improve crop yields through genetic engineering and other means, and to otherwise provide a more environmentally-friendly path for developing countries to copy, along with incentives for them to do so.
Of course, the real world is no utopia, so that isn't happening as much as it should, but here's a limited example:
Exportation of more advanced agricultural methods to India allowed wheat farmers to spare much land compared to the extra amount that would have been consumed to meet desired demand if efficiency per acre remained at 1961-1966 yields:
In any case, though, like it or not, realistically the future world is going to continue to exist with a lot more than one billion people. It might within generations switch away from oil; indeed, it might be forced to do so, as may other fossil fuels eventually go the way of the dino. But even any realistic decline in fertility rates will not drop the world population to one billion anytime soon, so that's not a relevant scenario for the natural lifespans of those alive today, nor the next generation, nor the next, etc.
