Re: population sizes for colonising a planet

James Nicoll wrote:

> Kristopher wrote:
>> James Nicoll wrote:
>>> Kristopher wrote:
>>>> James Nicoll wrote:
>>>>> Kristopher wrote:
>>>>>> Damien Sullivan wrote:
>>>>>>> Kristopher wrote:
>>>>>>>> James Nicoll wrote:
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> And thus, the urbanized sterilized solar system.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> Ah, SF. Where would it be without its unreasoning
>>>>>>>>> hatred of humans?
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Unpack, please?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> James has posted before (maybe not here) about SF works
>>>>>>> typically avoiding cities or treating well-populated planets
>>>>>>> as teeming hellholes. A lot of it is probably the Frontier!
>>>>>>> In! Space! meme, individuals homesteading the asteroids and
>>>>>>> such; another source is the wiping out of most of the human
>>>>>>> race to start the New Society from a clean slate.
>>>>>>> Conversely, fantasy has lots of works where cities are at
>>>>>>> least interesting if not actually desirable places to live.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Your use of 'urbanized' as a bad thing seems to fit into
>>>>>>> James's frame.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I'm not interested in living in the Frontier, nor in the
>>>>>> New Society. But neither am I interested in living in a
>>>>>> festering, soul-crushing, claustrophobic human termite
>>>>>> mound.
>>>>>
>>>>> Except that even with the more modest Trillion Human Earth[1],
>>>>> it's pretty obvious that some advanced technology is involved,
>>>>> so why do you assume that it must be "festering",
>>>>> "soul-crushing" or "claustrophobic"?

Going back to this, the presence of 16k or more human
beings or similarly sized creatures within a square
kilometer is pretty much the definition of "festering,
soul-crushing, and claustrophic".

>>>> Where, exactly, are you going to put the other ~993.5 billion
>>>> people to get your T.H.E?
>>>
>>> Monaco has about 16,000 people per km^2. Assuming the cities
>>> are of roughly equal density, then we need about 63 million
>>> km^2, or something like one half the land area of the Earth.
>>
>> Half the land on earth? This doesn't seem...a bit much?
>
> No.
>
> Do you think the amount of land covered by the grasses
> or the ants is excessive?

This is coming down to a basic matter of core priorities.

For you, getting more and more people seems to be a core
priority, no matter what it takes. I'm not sure why the
idea of more and more human beings is so appealing to
some people. I've heard the drivel about more people =
more ideas and more exchange and blah blah blah, but I
don't buy that for an instant.

For me, leaving some breathing room is more important.

>>> That's assuming we can do no better than Monaco at creating
>>> pleasant, high-density places for people to live on Earth.
>>
>> And assuming that there aren't planty of people who find
>> "pleasant, high-density" to be an oxymoron.
>
> I expect in this situation, people who cannot stand
> the company of others

There's "others", and then there's "millions of others for
miles and miles and miles on end, with nowhere in a day's
travel that isn't more and more of the same".

> would be at some disadvantage in reproducing but I am more
> than willing to set aside Antarctica or perhaps Mars for
> them to use it its pristine, unmodified glory.

As I said, human expansion and growth seems to be your most
basic priority, and it seems to trump any consideration for
what gets bulldozed in the process.

_Nature Must Be Conquered!_, I suppose.

>>>>> Because in SF, Crowds Are Bad and Cities Are Bad,
>>>>> Especially the Big Ones. Basically, the Dogbert Model
>>>>> of human demographics ("I'm in favour of anything that
>>>>> get rid of you guys) is the ruling one.
>>>>>
>>>>> 1: About the highest reasonable population for Earth: it
>>>>> leaves most of the living biomass for other species -and-
>>>>> it avoids the main problem of the Sixty Trillion Person
>>>>> Earth, that there's enough human body heat to alter
>>>>> weather patterns.
>>>>
>>>> We're already way past the highest reasonable population for
>>>> Earth, and that has nothing to do with ideas that come out
>>>> of SF. The environmental impact of 6 billion people is
>>>> already unsustainable.
>>>
>>> Except we know up to about 4x10^15 kg of living matter can
>>> occupy the Earth, because it does. If a mere 3x10^11 kg in
>>> one species is causing problems, then that species must be
>>> overlooking something.
>>>
>>> One obvious place to look for improvement is in how we
>>> feed ourselves. 6 billion people at about 100 watts each
>>> are using about the same amount of power as the Earth
>>> intercepts from the sun in an (averaged) area of 21,000
>>> km^2 or a patch about 145 km on an edge. Toss in a power
>>> of ten for losses and that becomes 210,000 km^2 or a patch
>>> 460 km^2 on an edge. Actual farming takes up vastly more
>>> land, which says to me that farming is a very inefficient
>>> way to make the chemicals we use for fuel and that we
>>> should very seriously look for alternative methods.
>>
>> And what might those be, and how far are we from figuring
>> them out?
>
> If I had a particular method in mind, I'd patent it.

Then let's not make plans based on technologies we're only
dreaming about, hmmm?

> I do know that the laws of physics and chemistry do
> not seem to forbid it and that in the past, we have been
> rather cunning about coming up with more efficient ways
> to feed ourselves. I also know that predictions "we're
> doomed! Doomed, I say!" on the basis of population have
> been popular for quite some time and have yet to be
> correct.

_So far_, we've been able to outrun the boulder.

Look at what agriculture is doing to the rivers and the
areas of the ocean they flow into. Not pretty, and not
something that can go on forever.

> Remember the food riots of the 1980s? The way American
> lifespan dropped to about 40? Or the way the world human
> population began to plummet in the Reagan years? Me
> neither.

See the boulder comment above.

--
Kristopher

.

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