I agree that there are limits for how many people we can be on planet earth, but with more advanced technology it can be pretty high. And we can also expand out to the rest of the universe.

There are physical limits to how fast computers can get, but they are not very limit. Exponential growth can continue for a long time.

I´ve just made a Youtube-video explaining why I have so great expectations for the future, and I highly recommend it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUOB4tdFDYM

Best regards,
Tor

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I’m S.S.R Jayatillaka & im a Sri Lankan citizen. I want to buy a alpha Stirling engine which can coupled to a small alternator or a dynamo to get some electricity out of it.And if you have any Stirling engines which can generate large electricity send me the prices with shipping & other values for Sri Lanka to ” cmp6techniqe@sltnet.lk “. If i could have green power science e -mail or phone no it will be very much appreciated.

Thank you

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Would you care to elaborate your story a bit more? There is very little there for others to judge your story by.

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Paul

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linux4all.net/how_…_bro_driver_in_linux

bendzg.com/install…-and-other-linux-os/

deuts.blogspot.com…net-using-smart.html

mail-archive.com/p…org.ph/msg19809.html

knightlust.blogspo…n-ubuntu-jaunty.html

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=750039

https://edge.launchpad.net/~liamgh/+archive/ppa

netbooks.ph/forums…php?f=73&t=1961

stephencuyos.com/h…id-in-ubuntu-jaunty/

livingincebuforums…x.php?showtopic=6018

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu7ZpWecIS8

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Drive gas-guzzling cars?

Live in poorly insulated houses?

Fly around in airplanes?

None of the above!

The answer, I am sure, is:

Have babies!

If you have a child, you are initiating all the environmental damage that will be done by that person during his lifetime. Furthermore, you are causing all the damage that will be done by the descendants of your child, indefinitely into the future. The total environmental impact of having a baby is stupendously greater than that of almost any other action you might take.

And yet it is hardly ever discussed, or even thought about. Last night, many people turned off their lights for an hour to show support for “green” living. So what do you think they did during that hour of darkness? Check the birth statistics nine months from now. The environment will suffer because of “earth hour”.

Why is this never discussed? There are plenty of reasons, but many of them boil down to one thing – religion. Many major religions still actively oppose population control. Even those that don’t oppose it still approve of having children. After all, the more followers a religion has, the more powerful its leaders become.

I often think I don’t belong on this planet.

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First of all I would like to say that I wouldn’t mind if your techno-optimism turned out to be correct. It would be nice if human ingenuity could design us out of every challenge with single sided supply side solutions. I just happen to believe that we need to do something about the demand side as well and in particular with the current growth of the world population. The tragic thing is that we do have access to rather simple and cheap technology to do so. It is called contraceptives. Too bad that a large portion of the world does not use them enough, especially since some of the reluctance towards birth control comes from old religious taboos.

As to professor Bartlett’s lecture. The conclusion he draws from extrapolating the current growth to the point that we will have one square meter of land per person within some 600 years, if it continues, is not that this will happen. He quite clearly states that what this shows is that zero population growth will eventually happen. The question is only how. Mother Earth is notorious for not being very “motherly,” so to speak, when she “interferes” with the unchecked growth of a species through some of her limiting factors.

As a general rule, no phenomenon that grows exponentially for a period in its evolution will continue to grow exponentially in perpetuity. I will illustrate this with a rather simple mathematical example. Well, simple to anyone who has studied calculus anyway.

I will use the spreading of a rumour as the example

The model that describes this and many related phenomena is that the rate of change is proportional to what you already have.

If we assume that N is the number of people that have heard the rumour, then the rate at which it spreads, if we assume that it’s proportional to the number of people that have already heard the rumour, is modelled by the simple differential equation

N’=c*N

Now, the only function that is its own derivative is the exponential function. Hence the result is exponential growth

But, of course, the model will then predict that the number of people that have heard the rumour eventually will surpass the entire population on the planet and that clearly is not going to happen. So, we need to modify the model to take that into account.

Say that P is the entire population

Then a better model is

N’=c*N(P-N)

Which is to say that the rate of change is proportional to the number of people that have heard the rumour and proportional to the number of people that have not yet heard it.

Now, this is a harder differential equation to solve, but it can be solved by the method of partial fractions. And the solution gives a function that can be plotted as an S-shaped curve, that starts out with the familiar exponential growth to begin with, but then eventually flats out and approaches P asymptotically.

This is what happens to real phenomena that grow exponentially for a period of time. The growth is eventually halted by some external limiting factor.

As to the growth of certain technologies. The most prominent example of a technology that grows exponentially and has been doing so for decades is the processing power of computers, that has been following the so called Moore’s law up to now. But that technology will probably eventually also hit a limiting factor. And as a general rule, not all technologies grow exponentially. The speed with which we can travel does not for instance, and neither does the fuel efficiency in motor vehicles, as far as I know.

Optimism is in general something I consider a good thing. But I consider realism even better. There are things that we can do and there are things that we can not do. The big challenge is to know the difference between the two. It would be nice if “nothing was impossible” for man kind to achieve. But this is not quite the way the world works. Actually, we have even devised technical application based on what is, for all practical purposes, impossible. I am thinking about cryptography here, where the basic idea is to construct an algorithm that is easy to do for coding a message, whereas its reveres algorithm, to break the code, is impossible to complete over any practical time span.

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