Re: population sizes for colonising a planet

On Thu, 20 Oct 2005 19:00:10 +0000 (UTC), phoenix@xxxxxxx (Damien
Sullivan) seems to have said:

>David Friedman <ddfr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>In article <6sidl1tmjtf0hvmke455dgl6mu8l9qg3qu@xxxxxxx>,
>> Lucy Kemnitzer <ritaxis@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>>> The increase in yield is transient. It lasts a good generation or
>>> two, but productivity of the land drops (sometimes precipitously)
>>> after that, because of buildups in the soil of the byproducts of the
>>> fertilizers and pesticides.
>
>>I'm curious--are you willing to make some testable predictions coming
>>out of this view of what is happening? I'm thinking of predictions, such

Personally, I'm only willing to make predictions in large batches.
"This might happen, or this, or this, or this." Fortunately for me,
even when I write fairly near-future stuff, I'm not predicting, I'm
playing with ideas, to see how they fit and what they seem to mean to
me.

I can tell you some things I hope for. I hope for the widespread
application of really effective GM to be slowed down enough to be
coupled with some really crucial reforms in the structure of the
global agricultural industry and a rethinking of the concepts involved
in intellectual property. I'm hoping for the system of agricultural
research to be beefed up and broadened in scope so that by the time
something is widely adopted we have a better understanding of what its
implications are and a better chance of implementing fixes for the
scary bits.

Notice here I'm not talking about *less* science: I'm talking about
*more* science.

I'm hoping for the global economics and politics of agriculture to
change comepletely out of recognition -- I'm not even sure what all
that means in the long run, though I have some ideas about components
to that change.

>
>If one believes both that current trends are unsustainable and that humans are
>adaptable then it's hard to make specific predictions beyond "things will be
>different". "Oil will run out but we'll switch to something so oil won't go
>to $200 a barrel. But I don't know what we'll switch to. And we won't switch
>if no one worries about it at all."

Oh, we'll switch.

>
>So instead of Global Warming Disaster one might predict that the US would have
>adopted a carbon tax. But there are more ways to adapt to something than for
>a single trend to run out into disaster.
>
>>the logic of your picture. Are you? Are you bothered by the fact that
>>the U.S. shifted away from traditional farming a very long time ago,
>>there were predictions about our running out of topsoil and output
>>dropping sharply--yet it hasn't happened?

What do you mean by switching away from traditional farming and a long
time ago? The US has had a large number of different "traditional"
farming systems to switch away from. One thing that really comes to
light when you pay attention to the history of agriculture is that
agrioculture changes really markedly in much shorter intervals than
people think who are not involved (and much more so than a lot of
people think who are involved).

For example. Commercial agriculture is about four hundred years old
in California. That's not a mistake, that's how old it is. There are
certain continuities in that time -- imported slave or nearly slave
labor, the need for irrigation. But Spanish wheat cultivation (on
ranchos or missions) was not Americano wheat cultivation, and once the
combines started arriving it was different again (later in California
than the midwest because, I think, of the cheap labort here). Land
ownership patterns change methods, and methods change ownership
patterns, and distribution patterns change too. Railroads changed
everything all over the US, more than once and in more than one way.

Where was I? Okay, yes. We did have some drastic changes in
Midwestern grain farming in the early 20th century and we did lose all
of the topsoil in vast tracts of the Midwest -- the sky was so full of
dirt that you could barely see the sun -- nothing could be raised on
that ground for a log time and if you look at production figures
(wait, let me see if I can, I'll be right back -- no, damnit, I can';t
seem to hit on the right search terms) you could probably, though I
can't verify, see that it took years for parts of the Midwest to
return to productivity.

But this thing you said never happened, did, in fact, happen, and
people starved, lost everything they had, abandoned their land, and
many died. Dust bowls continue to happen on a smaller scale, in the
Midwest and in other parts of the world. And while we are certainly
capable of producing much more food than ever before, so much more
that our government thinks it's better all around to destroy vast
quantities of it every year, there are places where bad farming
devastates the land. Still.

>
>When were the predictions for? We could be running out of topsoil but not
>have actually run out yet. I've heard the US has done a good job of reducing
>the rates of loss, which would be one of those adaptations I mentioned, though
>also still an ongoing loss.

I don't know what a good job is. Part of what continues to happen in
the US as it happens in other frontier places is that new land goes
under production still. We don't lose land to wind erosion as much as
we used to, but we've been losing the incredibly high yields we had in
a lot of places, and in a lot of other places yields are sustained
only by treating the land as a vast hydroponics lab, and as I said
before, the cost of that approach is very high and very widespread.
>
>>There is only one known solution to that problem that works reasonably
>>well on a large scale--decentralized control coordinated by markets and
>>prices. There are, however, conditions needed for that solution to
>>work--roughly speaking, that we can divide up the world in such a way
>>that each person's actions mostly affect him and his bit of the world
>>and other people who have agreed to interact with him.

I've lost some context. One known solution to what problem? I can't
think of any agricultural problem I'd be willing to say had only one
solution. In fact I think "one solution" is part of the problem. One
best strain of rice, one best potato, one way to own land, one way to
assign rights . . .

As for "decentralized control coordinated by markets and prices," I'm
afraid that, even if I believed in that as a central principle, I'd
have a really, really hard time seeing how that's going to get people
to use an integrated pest management system, or set their plows at the
right depth, or run their furrows the right direction, or moderate
their water use. Or any of a dozen kajillion other things which come
into play here and there.

>>
>>Under some circumstances--global warming is the current obvious example,
>>but there are others--those conditions almost certainly cannot be met.
>>We are then left with zero workable solutions to the coordination
>>problem.

What? What does this mean? Are you saying that unless it's something
that can be regulated by prices, it's a hopeless problem?

My first reaction is: tell that to Salk and Sabin.

>
>Nonsense. Governments can shape the markets and price incentives to push
>people in the right direction, e.g. a carbon tax. Or they can ban
>sufficiently noxious things, such as CFCs.

You know, there are entirely other categories of behavior too, some
involving governments, other s involving other organizations of
people, beyond market economics and prohibition of the noxious, which
also make things happen.

It's interesting. My participation in the conversation started with
giving a moderate defense for the doomsayers of times past, on the
grounds that they brought our attention to bear on things which we
ought to think about, and that they weren't really stupid even when
they were wrong. Now -- four? five? posts later, I'm the one pushing
possibility and an open, optimistic view of the future (though with
trepidation, with actual trepidating), and responding to "we are then
left with zero workable solutoions" and stuff like that.

This used to happen kind of a lot, when I got drawn in like this more
often than I do now.

Lucy Kemnitzer, still
chapter 14 is up:
http://www.baymoon.com/~ritaxis/donor/donorweb/donorindex
also, see Frank's hurricane relief mail:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/franksmail/
.

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