Re: population sizes for colonising a planet

In article <1129327894.080679.18470@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Kristopher" <eoslives@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

....

> 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.

I can't speak for him, but my view is not that more people is a core
priority but that it isn't a bad thing--and you seem to treat it, in
your rhetoric, as a very bad thing.

> For me, leaving some breathing room is more important.

And, apparently, the breathing room has to be outdoors. At 16K/square
kilometer, one can have lots of indoors room after all.

....

> 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".

On the whole, I find different human societies less "more of the same"
than different areas of untouched nature. No doubt one variety of tree,
or one ecology, is radically different from another from the standpoint
of one sufficiently well informed on the subject--but for the ordinary
person, one tree is more like another than one person is.

....

> _Nature Must Be Conquered!_, I suppose.

What strikes me about this note in your arguments is that you are
expressing a passionate emotion feeling--more humans bad, more unspoiled
nature good--as if it were obvious. Every time someone disagrees, you
attribute to him a similar intensely felt belief--on no evidence. Nobody
here has been arguing that nature must be conquered--merely that
conquering it isn't a horrible thing.

....

> > 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?

You are making strong claims about possible futures. Any future with a
trillion people on earth or 10^20 in the solar system is only going to
occur if we make very substantial scientific and technological
progress--so it doesn't make much sense to assume those futures and then
object to assuming corresponding progress.

> > 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.

More precisely, so far the conditions of life have improved for human
beings, and continue to improve--in the past century at a rate that is
staggering compared to any period in the past. You have been persuaded
by plausible, but in large part mistaken, theoretical arguments that
what is actually happening is experimental error and what is really
happening is onrushing catastrophe that just happens, by accident, to
have been postponed so far.

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