X-Message-Number: 7354
From: Peter Merel <>
Subject: Mice and Stubble
Date: Wed, 25 Dec 1996 18:14:27 +1100 (EST)

Apologies to Tim, JV and Thomas for not getting back to them sooner - I
spent a few days up in the mountains away from the keyboard, and had my
PDA stolen too. Fate's a bastard. I'll try to get to JV and Thomas's
posts over the next 24 hours, but here's a reply for Tim.

--

Tim Freeman wrote of the up-wing page:

>The central thesis is that the world cannot sustainably support more
>than 2 billion people, and that a lot of chaos will happen between now
>and the stable 2 billion mark.  So I looked at the justficiation for
>the 2 billion number and skipped the rest.

Ah, that's a shame; the 2 billion number, which comes from David
Pimentel's Cornell group, is not an isolated datum; the links on the
first part of the up-wing page refer to a great many different
doomsayers. In fact the Pimentel link is one of the weakest - I've found
very little of his material online, but the figure he conjures is
dramatic and his credentials are impeccable so I plonked in the link.

The central thesis of the malthusian part of the up-wing page is not so
specific as Pimentel's strawman. It's simply that we will not feel the
full effects of our gross mismanagement of the global ecology until we
are past the point where this mismanagement can be remedied - unless we
develop some exponentiating technology soon. The links to Jay Hanson's
neo-malthusian site are probably the best fleshed for support of this
thesis; while I don't agree with everything Hanson has to say, the
amount of data he has available online to support such concerns is
impressive.

Just to make this clear, I'll say it another way: the issue is that, as
human population surpasses the bounds of sustainability with respect to
available technology, it may enter into the realm of supercriticality,
like a mountain covered in heavy snow - eventually some event, even the
snap of a twig, will trigger an avalanche. Such occurances are not
unusual in human history, and there seems no reason to doubt that this
danger exists at present as it has in the past.  My concern is that,
should a supercritical ecological collapse be permitted to occur, the
disruption to the technologies and economies of even technologically
advanced regions may destroy any hope for the rescuscitation of cryonics
patients.

I'm certainly not suggesting that such an occurance is inevitable, nor
that it must certainly be avoided by an exponentiating technology; the
links on the up-wing page only suggest that there is a real danger of a
human supercriticality, and that the period when this is most likely to
occur lies within the next century.

>There is no mention of nuclear energy coming into play when the
>petroleum runs out, including fusion of seawater.  

Frankly I don't believe that energy comes into it at all. When it comes
to "substitutability", there's so many options for energy that I can't
believe we won't have power to burn over the next century. No, it's the
ecological outlook that concerns me.

>At a sufficiently
>high cost of living, we'd have more vegetarians (because meat would be
>expensive) and fewer commuters (because expensive petroleum would make
>telecommuting more attractive).  

You might like to check out -

http://www.igc.apc.org/millennium/g2000r/fig10.html

- one of the up-wing links, to see why changing dietary trends are unlikely 
to do much to improve these odds.

>The sustainable load of people
>depends on assumptions about the amount of resources used up by each
>individual, and those assumptions are not spelled out.  A high enough
>cost of living would reduce population growth, simply because people
>would anticipate that they could not raise kids the way they want to.

Depends on the culture; this holds in North America, certainly; in
India, which is pegged to be the most populous nation on the planet
before 2050, people who anticipate hard times have more children;
parents do this to increase the chance that they will be supported by
their children in their old age.

>The assertion that the population will continue going up no matter the
>consequences unless some organized effort is made to stop it is also
>questionable.  

This assertion forms no part of the up-wing page - in fact it is described
on the up-wing page as "down-wing":

"movements to control global population [cannot] keep pace with the 
fertility of those who will not abide by them."

>The assertion that fresh water is irrevocably used up by agriculture
>seems peculiar, given that it rains.  

It's the quantity of rain that is in question. Obviously, fresh water
can be supplemented via various technological endeavours, but the demand
for water, for agriculture and for domestic use, is presently growing
far faster than the supply. We should not expect that wealthy regions
will feel direct effects from this; but water deprivation increases the
risk of disease and decreases the efficiency of metabolism, so it is not
suprising that the concommitant increase in food demands and decrease in
supplies should be a factor in projections.

But, again, I think the main risk has to do with a supercriticality -
with inadequate reserves of fresh water, a small, localized climactic
change might result in an escalating and irremediable global shortage.

>In parts of the world that have property rights for real
>estate, the free market should preserve the amount of fertile soil;

Unfortunately, this doesn't hold; if all people were economically
enfranchised it might, but obviously that's not the way things work.
Centralization of control of land is a common aspect of state
capitalism, especially with regard to arable land. This centralization
often gives rise to perverse effects; for example, in Thailand, a
growing segment of the population are suffering malnourishment while
most land development activities are centred on the construction of
golf courses. 

As illustrated abundantly on the up-wing links, there is nothing about
the free market that suggests it works to optimise sustainability of
resource use. Free markets are a good way of gauging present supply and
demand, but they're no smarter about future prospects than is popular
opinion.

>declining fertility tends to happen in tragedy-of-the-commons type
>situations, where the fundamental problem is that the commons are
>unowned.  (This assertion is testable; for instance, it is false if
>there is uncontrolled loss of fertile land in the US and other places
>with property rights for real estate.)

Depends on what you mean by "uncontrolled". For example, in Australia,
farmers are faced with a choice between conservative farming techniques,
which keep a minimum cover of stubble over winter to conserve topsoil,
and mouse plagues, which occur because mice populations are happy to
survive on stubble. The economies of farming are dictating that
conservative practices lose out, as it is easier to acquire new land
than it is to deal with recurring mouse plagues.

Now it is certainly true that, eventually, the true economies of the
situation will kick in - undeveloped land will become harder to acquire
and conservative practices will be pursued with a new ardour. But, before
that occurs, vast quantities of arable land will be turned barren, and
the cause of this seems to be nothing but free-market economics.

>If governments begin to act as responsible owners of the commons (true
>commons like the air and the water table, not bogus commons like
>unowned land for grazing cattle) and they figure out that the price of
>water needs to be high enough that the water tables don't fall, and
>the price of the right to produce pollution has to be high enough that
>the ambient pollution levels are under control, then IMO our chances
>are pretty good, even assuming that no radical technological change
>will happen in the next hundred or so years (which is a ridiculous
>assumption).  We may need property rights for CO2 consumption as well.

Ah, so your argument is that we'll be just fine if governments act like
rational creatures? Have you ever heard of any government, anywhere, at
any time, exhibiting anything remotely resembling rationality? I'm
afraid that the prospect of centralized governments developing a
rational faculty en masse seems to me to be so unlikely that I feel it
can be entirely discounted. 

>If the neo-malthusian scenario is worth worrying about, the obvious
>next step is to discover the full citation of the AAAS article cited
>at gopher://gopher.cornell.edu:70/00/.files/AN0694/AN0694D/AN0694D05
>(which allegedly justifies the 2 billion number), and use the science
>citation index to find references to this article.  Reasoned debate on
>this issue is likely to be contained in the articles referencing the
>AAAS article.  If there were a large consensus on the 2 billion number
>I would be more worried.

Certainly worth pursuing, though I should say again that the Pimentel link
is one of a great many sources, and not one I regard as pivotal.

>IMO radical technological change is likely to cause significantly more
>chaos than resource allocation problems.

Perhaps, but judging from the academically qualified ecological opinions
I've been able to find on the net, there seems to be little alternative
but to pursue radical technological change or die. But then that
shouldn't be too hard for a cryonicist to accept :-)

Peter Merel.


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