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seclorum | 12 years ago
The point of the article is we wouldn't be here today at all if we hadn't been able to manage our resources. The science demonstrates this, over and over: land re-use is the key to it. The same area of land, supporting increasingly larger and larger populations, demonstrates that in fact we can manage our population growth, and have done so for 200,000 years.
But what does your superstition have to do with this? Malthusian theories super-posit that we will perish, but the archeological record demonstrates that we are capable, as a species of dealing with this.
lutusp|12 years ago
Science isn't a political movement. Science can produce very reliable results if conducted efficiently, but it cannot get people to listen. That's the divide between science and politics.
> The same area of land, supporting increasingly larger and larger populations, demonstrates that in fact we can manage our population growth ...
Nonsense. It shows how biological colonies adopt increasingly clever ways to squeeze more sustenance out of the environment. All such efforts eventually collide with the real carrying capacity of the environment, a fact that we ignore at our peril.
> But what does your superstition have to do with this?
Biology is science, not superstition. The logistic function is science, not superstition. All these scientific results show the peril of ignoring the role of environment in survival.
> ... but the archeological record demonstrates that we are capable, as a species of dealing with this.
It does nothing of the kind. The archaeological record shows any number of examples of species being wiped out by changes in their environments. In one case, an environmental change wiped out 90% of all species on earth. Apparently those species weren't aware of your blithe dismissal of the role of environment in the equation of life.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/16/science/meteorite-that-kil...
seclorum|12 years ago
fiter|12 years ago
Also, this misses a big part of what's important to me. The standard of living should also be considered. Given that we can support 9 billion people, will each of them be as well off compared to if we were instead supporting half that?
seclorum|12 years ago
You might want to consult the factual record of tens of thousands of years of farmers on that particular point of view. ;) You are right that it doesn't guarantee anything, except to those who carefully apply scientific principles to their management of resources, folks otherwise known as 'farmers'.
>he standard of living should also be considered. Given that we can support 9 billion people, will each of them be as well off compared to if we were instead supporting half that?
For at least the last 200 years, the standard of living of hundreds of millions of people has been raised, again and again, over and over. So I'd say, if we can manage it, this trend will continue. I think thats the point of the article: there are no environmental reasons, at all, why we couldn't manage to sustain life on Earth, indefinitely.
(There are only psychological reasons. A fact proven, nearly, by a lot of the responses in this thread ..)
lutusp|12 years ago
The future will be completely different than the past, but in the same way -- consistent with the Logistic function and its description of the relation between species and environment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function
There are any number of unpredictable aspects to how events unfold, but physical laws remain the same.