X-Message-Number: 23789 References: <> From: Peter Merel <> Subject: Carrying Capacity Date: Thu, 1 Apr 2004 07:33:17 +1000 Charles is quite right to take me to task over carrying capacity. I mentioned it in my "selfish" response as a strawman to provoke thought about whether cryonics or medicine really have anything to do at all with population concerns. I dare say we've had this debate here sufficient times for most of us here to be catholic on the subject. http://www.overpopulation.org/solutions.html and many related pages try to take a statistical approach to the thing. That's to say, if what we've experienced of population and ecological trends now can be regarded as normal, what can we say about bounds on the behavior of the whole ecosystem over time. But what's going on now isn't normal, and this kind of prediction is hopelessly projective. The whole ecosystem is a much more complicated critter than we understand, and what we're doing now is likely making it skitter over its massively dimensional phase space like a skipped stone. That said, of course there are some extremely worrying developments about the sustainability of human civilization. The mass extinctions of birds, butterflies, and amphibians, extreme weather events all over the planet, and the overall stagnation of our industrial technological development over the last 30 years all give the sensation of riding for a fall. But in reality we're far more likely to do ourselves in directly than indirectly so it doesn't seem worth worrying about ecological projections. If we can't master ourselves en masse we can scarcely expect to master our planet. While our social systems are so badly broken on such scales we shouldn't worry very much about impacts we're powerless to affect. Peter Merel. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=23789