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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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May 24, 2018 - 07:04pm PT
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My bet is that we don't, and suffer the consequences.
The eschatology of Armageddon. The end has been with us since the beginning of written history. The vestiges of ancient mythology live on. My bet is we solve the population problem and continue to advance as both a society and individually. 7.9 billion human beings living in relative peace inspite of their inclination to the dark side. "The kingdom of god is set upon the earth but men do not see it."
You're right Paul, air travel shows what a marvel of equality human beings have created!
The miracle is you're flying in a tube 500 miles an hour through the sky and you're complaining about your seat not being as good as someone else's. Get over it.
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WBraun
climber
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May 24, 2018 - 07:08pm PT
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7.9 billion strong
This planet can support 10 times that.
But the st00pid gross materialists mismanage everything and turn everything into sh!t.
Thus the planet can't even support half that now.
St00pid gross materialists who masquerade themselves as advanced evolved people.
Even animals have more sense then these fool gross materialists ......
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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May 24, 2018 - 07:11pm PT
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My bet is we solve the population problem
how do you think we'll do this?
This planet can support 10 times that.
where do you get this from, Werner?
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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May 24, 2018 - 07:18pm PT
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The miracle is you're flying in a tube 500 miles an hour through the sky and you're complaining about your seat not being as good as someone else's. Get over it.
Miracle! Ha! You're such a kidder, Paul. I guess you've never studied science, math or engineering. I suppose to someone who doesn't understand these subjects, flying in an airplane might seem miraculous.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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May 24, 2018 - 07:51pm PT
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We've created a remarkable society, a decent society, a society that is a function of higher aspirations that have grown and progressed and perfected over history.
Really? Exactly which society is that?
My bet is we solve the population problem.
I'm guessing the 7.2 billion people with more pedestrian aspirations and who are not currently living the dream may be tough to rope into any solution.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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May 24, 2018 - 08:54pm PT
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Miracle! Ha! You're such a kidder, Paul. I guess you've never studied science, math or engineering. I suppose to someone who doesn't understand these subjects, flying in an airplane might seem miraculous.
The point was you have no idea how good you have it and all you can do is gripe. Get over it.
News to me I never studied science and news to me you knew about it. A miracle perhaps.
Really? Exactly which society is that?
The one you live in where you can go to the Safeway and buy anything you want in the world to eat or go to the doctor and get your body taken care of or get in your car and drive any damn place you want or flip on your tv and watch any kind of entertainment you want or go to the polling place and vote for the rulers you want... I mean what the heck do you people want you have everything and all you can do is complain. Shame.
how do you think we'll do this?
Wealthy countries like Japan and those in Europe have declining birthrates already and as other countries like China become more and more wealthy their birthrates are likely to decline as well. With wealth comes declining birthrates as people realize children are not necessarily an asset. So we shall see.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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May 24, 2018 - 09:06pm PT
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The point was you have no idea how good you have it
Sounds like a cooly objective assessment of the subjective? cc to Largo.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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May 24, 2018 - 09:07pm PT
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Shame
odd, the price at which we have achieved this society is one that we're already having problems coping with, climate change is a consequence of mostly US energy use in the second half of the 20th century, representing a small portion of the world's population.
that energy use is fundamental to all the "good things" in our society.
problem is, as we have found, that the amount of energy that would have to be consumed so that everyone on the planet had our life style would be disastrous to the climate.
and the population still grows.
what is your solution?
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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May 24, 2018 - 09:17pm PT
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what is your solution?
A combination of declining birthrates and improved technology in power generation and agriculture.
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jstan
climber
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May 24, 2018 - 09:52pm PT
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Yesterday I picked up litter on SR62 but found a dozen police cars at the intersection with Yucca Mesa. A woman had agreed to meet her ex-boy friend, they had an argument, and he shot her to death as the police approached the pair. When I got there the officers were concentrating their attention on two little girls, maybe five and eight years old. The possibility is there that they had just become orphans.
I think we are losing it.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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May 24, 2018 - 10:01pm PT
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Whether we can start eating better for the planet and reducing reproduction will largely depend on the empowerment and education of women. I would also point out that all that dark tooth and claw stuff mentioned up thread was perpetrated by men.
If you want to emphasize our animal natures, let us aspire to be Bonobos and not Chimps.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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May 24, 2018 - 10:08pm PT
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The one you live in where you can go to the Safeway and buy anything you want in the world to eat or go to the doctor and get your body taken care of or get in your car and drive any damn place you want or flip on your tv and watch any kind of entertainment you want or go to the polling place and vote for the rulers you want... I mean what the heck do you people want you have everything and all you can do is complain. Shame.
Ah, so this is, in fact, a decent society, good to know. I suppose for some (including myself), but I consider it fairly wide of the mark of decency for a considerable percentage of the U.S. population.
World population to hit 9.8 billion by 2050, despite nearly universal lower fertility rates – UN
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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May 24, 2018 - 10:17pm PT
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A combination of declining birthrates and improved technology in power generation and agriculture
How do you get declining birthrates?
"improved technologies" in power generation are probably insufficient if everyone is to live at the current US standard of living. this means getting off of fossil fuels, and not otherwise fouling the environment with energy production (there is no silver bullet here).
"improved technologies" in agriculture have pretty much hit the maximum productivity, and are not keeping up with the current population growth, and climate change makes it worse.
Whether we can start eating better for the planet and reducing reproduction will largely depend on the empowerment and education of women.
perhaps, but how do you do that? and when?
If you want to emphasize our animal natures, let us aspire to be Bonobos and not Chimps.
but with birth-control...
What are you doing about it?
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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May 24, 2018 - 10:22pm PT
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The point was you have no idea how good you have it and all you can do is gripe.
I am grateful to science, and the spirit of inventors, for the capacity to fly. The "gripe" was about the lack of equality in society. I catch the opposite grove in your posts: forever whining about science and then praising the equality that people have in society
News to me I never studied science and news to me you knew about it. A miracle perhaps.
OK. I can hardly believe I'm doing this, but here's the news, in case you haven't picked up on my background, I have a doctorate in mathematics from U of U. Before that, I took a lot of physics classes (and thought about obtaining a doctorate in physics, but it seemed easier in math to obtain scholarships and jobs). I've taught engineering math classes at U of U and directed a masters thesis in applied mathematics in Argentina, as well as taught classes in the full spectrum of undergraduate and graduate mathematics. I have maybe 20 publications (so I'm lazy!), mostly in representation theory (we've seen that subject mentioned in this thread when Ed talks about the geometry of the universe) although a few publications are directly related to neural networks. I also edited (as a favor to some colleagues) a text on fast algorithms for machine learning. I also know something about Bernoulli's principle and aerodynamic force and the difficulties, in general, of modeling the lift force on a wing. Maybe you know something about the existence and smoothness problem for the Navier-Stokes equation? If you publish a complete solution, you can win $1,000,000 from the Clay Mathematics Institute
I would be interested to know what are your contributions to math and/or science?
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Flip Flop
climber
Earth Planet, Universe
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May 24, 2018 - 10:23pm PT
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Ed,
What's the math if every woman decides to have one kid? Population -50 % in 100 years? (Is that right?)
What if every woman decides to have 2 or fewer kids?
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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May 25, 2018 - 12:42am PT
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Habitat destruction and ocean degradation will eventually combine to see many land and sea species collapse as part of the current mass extinction event. Then, at some point of criticality in that decline, the pathogen loads inhabiting those vanishing species will attempt to jump ship and we're going to be their best bet. The results will be a series of pandemics which, due to increasing urban agglomeration and air travel, will likely result in a substantial thinning of the herd. The spanish flu took out 3% of the world population, the black plague 30-60% of Europe's population. I should think a correction on the order 15-45% of today's world population isn't out of the question depending on the kind of pathogen involved. And that's just a direct assault on our species as opposed to pandemics of our food stocks and crops let alone a combination of the two.
I check these sources periodically just to see what's new and trending...
Emerging Infectious Diseases Journal
WHO | Emergencies | Disease outbreaks
Eurosurveillance
The Disease Daily
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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May 25, 2018 - 06:20am PT
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Ed,
What's the math if every woman decides to have one kid? Population -50 % in 100 years? (Is that right?)
Barring catastrophic events (like the plague or a cure for death) this is close to correct since the death rates today are about 1% each year (roughly, the entire original population dies off in a hundred years). Playing around with simplified assumptions, it seems to me the remaining population would be a bit larger than half the original size but the medium age would be higher (so the death rates would probably grow a little).
With higher death rates, the population would drop off more rapidly and with lower death rates, more slowly.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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May 25, 2018 - 06:26am PT
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perhaps, but how do you do that? and when?
If you want to emphasize our animal natures, let us aspire to be Bonobos and not Chimps.
but with birth-control...
What are you doing about it?
Yes indeed, Bonobos with birth control.
As for the education and empowerment of women, that's been going on since the end of WWII through bilateral, multilateral, and UN development programs. Granted, they were slow to catch on to the fact that if you want to reduce population, you have to work with the women. All of those aid agencies were run by men so they pushed vasectomies which are not popular anywhere in the world.
I worked for 3 years with Swiss Development Aid in Nepal and wrote anthropological recommendations for their next Five year Plan, including the advice that they should start sponsoring adult literacy classes for women and their children during daylight hours and separate ones for the men in the evening and that a large component should be family planning. I also recommended what was then being pioneered in India and Thailand - mobile laparoscopy sterilization clinics for the women. And of course a larger child vaccination program since the chief reason given for wanting large families was the high mortality rate.
I was told the birth control efforts could not be implemented because it was" too politically delicate" in a conservative society like Nepal. In reality, it was only politically delicate in Switzerland with the conservative Catholic half of the country. Then the Nepal government labeled the efforts, including abortion, as "menstrual regulation" and the Swiss decided to sponsor a mobile camp. Illiterate women walked for three days to the camps, had fallopian tube cauterization procedures with local anesthetic, got off the operating tables and started walking home.
Five years later, I was told on a return visit that female literacy and sterilization were two of their most successful programs. By that time, every international aid agency had a "woman's section" and today it is widely recognized that money spent on women's education has the best multiplier effect because women then teach their children, whereas men tend to keep the information to themselves.
My favorite quote from a ten year follow-up study that I did was from a middle aged conservative high caste Hindu woman who told me, "I always suspected women were as smart as men, but after I learned to read and write, then I knew it".
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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May 25, 2018 - 07:47am PT
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I am sitting IN A CHAIR.... IN THE SKY! I should be marveling at the notion, and thrilled by it, and not so consumed by my petty grievances.
40 years ago I was doing that.
Like a wealthy person who becomes poor we may more keenly feel hardship and regret the loss of better times. But we should still be glad for what we have. Up to a point.
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