it's a good argument overall - in fact, similar arguments are used to justify building arcologies, such as the proposed Sky City or the X-Seed 4000. Super skyscrapers like the Taipei 101 are not surprisingly most prevalent in teh far technoEast, though there is a mile-high project quite close to being greenlighted in Chicago.
However, one thing that these arguments do is underestimate the amount of land required to support a population. It is not true that to feed 1000 people, you need X acres, regardless of whether those 1000 people live on 100 acres, or 10,000 acres. The denser the population, the higher the infrastructure required to support the density. New York City's support-infrastructure footprint is vastly larger than the state of North Carolina even though both have about 8 million in population - New York couldn't exist without resources drawn in from essentially the entire region. The footprint is not just food growing, but also includes things like electricity, water, fuel, economic investment, entrepeneurship, foreign markets, skilled workers, professional classes, labor classes, intellectual capital, and of course mountains of cash.
Compressing the whole of human population into Alberta sounds great on paper - but the footprint would grow exponentially to make it possible. I mean, heres just some examples of the logistical nightmares: how are you going to get teh trash out from each house and into the dump? what if a water main breaks? what happens if someone gets the flu?
I agree that we are not overcrowded, generally speaking, but its equally wrong to suggest that human population levels in certain patrs of teh world are indeed unsustainable. Not that we will literally run out of food (though we CAN literally run out of water!). But that the basic standard of living degrades very quickly - and this is true on a broader societal level as well. India is severely burdened by its population in ways that China is not - because India is much more dense. These population pressures manifest in as diverse ways as endemic corruption in government, massive educational industry fraud, and sectarian violence that threatens the democratic order. China has these problems too but India is overall worse (aside from eth democracy part). Anytime you put a lot of people close together you get all these competitive efects on resources - intellectual, material, all types - and that is a severe drain on society's fabric.
Ultimately, spreading out is good for the human psych, and technology provides solutions to resource limitations. And liberty provides solutions to human limitations. But lets not try to claim that there is zero problem whatsoever with population loads.
I believe Alberta has nice wildlife, including the majestic møøse. A Møøse once bit my sister ... No realli! She was Karving her initials on the møøse with the sharpened end of an interspace tøøthbrush ...
I'm against people who trash others for having "too many" children. I'm also against people who trash others for having "too few" children or none at all. Let the people who like children have as many as they want. Let the people who don't like children not have any*. It'll all even out if people just mind their own business.
While I agree overpopulation is over-hyped as a problem, the world as a whole will be better off if it shoots for a birth rate right around the replacement rate (not below, as Western Europe has been flirting with recently). Isaac Asimov once noted that if population growth rates from the early seventies (about 2% worldwide) continued unabated over the centuries, the combined mass of the human population would be equivalent to that of the entire Earth in about 3600 A.D. Clearly, at some point things are going to have to stabilize--but I'm not anxious about it. Plenty of time to adjust and slow overall growth to a crawl.
6 billion people in Canada. That's what, 1 billion hockey teams? Have you considered how many rinks that would require? And what about their names? They would all have to be named "The Alberta ____" where "____" would have to be a unique name.
Then there's the problem with playoffs. Just how in the world are you going to have a progressive playoff series with a billion teams? It would take 500 years just for the first round.
M. Scott highlights part of the (conceptual) problem: that society needs to "do" something about the situation.
The reality is that -according to the historical record- one of the marks of a prosperous modern society is that population growth approaches (or reaches) zero. Dean touched upon this when he mentioned how immigration has kept America's population growing.
On the other hand, a century ago the self-adjusting mechanisms weren't nearly so apparent. :)
There seems to be a very strong conceptual lag between actual events and common wisdom. Many liberal/Democrats, for example, see big business in turn-of-the-century terms, just before the courts started enforcing anti-trust and pro-union laws. Many conservative/Republicans, on the other hand, tend to see liberals through a 1950s glass, with a newly-reformed (vis Ann Coulter) "Tail-gunner Joe" sniffing out traitorous commies everywhere.
As for themes such as overpopulation, pollution, etc., conventional wisdom hasn't passed 1969 yet. We are all metaphorically still watching that old TV commercial with people littering all over the place, closing with a closeup of an American Indian (a single tear running down his face) mourning what's happened to his land. A lot's happened since then.
Hell, too many people (such as Al Gore) still take that idiot Paul Erlich seriously, even though he's been wrong on every major prediction he's ever written.
One nit to pick: unless they finally changed the rent laws, I don't know that New York is a good choice to compare apartment prices... :)
I've read one novel, one of those nasty "I'm not sympathizing with terrorists, but lets let them get their whole speech out while nodding at their wisdom" books which has the wise woman killing off most of Earth's pop. with a bioweapon.
The writer was at least familiar with your arguement which is more than most overpopulation advocates. However, he suggested a different measure than land space...carrying capacity.
Of course, the carrying capacity of a free society is a lot larger than a unfree society. And so too, a society with ever growing tech is able to handle ever growing population.
Aziz makes a good point, but he doesn't see far enough. Yes, the costs associated rise geometrically, but the production gained rises a lot faster, I don't want to say exponentially.
Cities are the crossroads of commerce. Physical proximity allows more deals to be made. Two people can make two deals. Three can make six. And it goes up.
This is why in my future SF setting, Starsong Systems, I have a Futures Stockmarket set in microgravity. That way, you can get that scrum of shouting traders you see on teh NY stock exchange floor, but in three-dimensional space.
In order to put everyone into Alberta, we would have to have a much larger, more sophisticated economy. With a more efficient, and more just government.
Right now, it would be a disaster. Because we don't have the capability to organize seven billion people, even using the self-organizing nature of markets. New problems would spring up that we don't foresee now.
But, eh, give us a hundred years, and we could solve it. I don't see any real reason we couldn't have a hundred billion people on Earth, mostly living in comfort.
While I agree overpopulation is not likely to become a major problem in the civilized world, people require significantly more acerage to sustain themselves than just the amount the require to live in plus the amenities you would typically find in Chicago, Paris, or what have you. Most importantly, you need a bunch of farmland. So just saying that we could all live in Alberta is slightly misleading. The planet is a lot bigger than Alberta, of course, and 7 billion doesn't stretch the carrying capacity of Earth, but Alberta alone wouldn't be sufficient to support the entire world's population. You'd need, I'd guess, at least all of Canada, and probably a good portion of the US to actually sustain that many, even at maximum efficiency.
Wake me when we get to 30 billion (I actually doubt we will ever hit this number before going extinct). Then I'll start to worry.
Aziz and Laura: Something akin to Moore's law has been at work in agriculture for some time, because the total amount of land required to feed people has been going down decade after decade for at least a century with no sign of abating. It's not in relative terms either; I didn't say "the amount of land per person has been going down." Although that's true, it would understate the case. The total amount of land needed worldwide to feed the world population has been going down even as the population has been going up, and that has been going on for as long as we've had reliable measurements for it.
Regarding India: since becoming free, they've never experienced a famine. If you look at the Freedom House data on them from the last 30 years, their civil and political freedoms have been improving remarkably, and if you look at their economy it's been growing, with a remarkable acceleration over the last 10 years or so. Their standards of living and average incomes have been increasing for generations and are today at all-time highs.
India's purchasing power parity today marks them as one of the best nations on Earth live in. Yes, the wealthier countries like the US, the UK, etc. can still beat them on that score but given their remarkable rate of growth in standards of living it's not at all clear that that will be true in another generation. They are rapidly developing into one of the world's economic powerhouses--and may one day be one of its military powerhouses too. There is a very good chance that in another 20 or 30 years the US will have comparatively few of the highly valuable Indian immigrants such as we have now because few in India will feel the need to leave for better opportunities.
India's also perilously close to the tipping point where average incomes are high enough that people choose to stop having a lot of children. That point has been noted in nation after nation: once most people's income passes a certain point, they stop having a lot of a lot of kids.
It seems that the higher the population density, the more likely the population will embrace socialistic schemes.
Mmmm, not really. Most of the world's communist nations were and are predominantly agrarian, with comparatively low population densities spread across large areas. You may think of China as having a huge population, but in fact most of its population is spread thinly across a huge land area, with an average population density nationwide of only about 10 people per square kilometer. Most communist revolutions took place in nations like that.
What you see that is typical in large urban areas should probably be called a tendency toward democratic capitalism, with social services paid for through taxes on a predominantly market-based economy.
Point of information: India's total population density is about 25-30 people per square kilometer, just by comparison to China's 10 or so, and India has much higher standards of living, a less socialized economy, and massively more political and civil freedom than China.
John: What you will find to be the hallmark of high population density areas with horrid schools, such as Washington DC, is incompetent governance of those schools. In which case what people in the wealthy areas will do is pay extra to send their kids to high quality private school. You just add that to the premium they pay to be in the high population density zones.
Lousy public schools have no lack of funding by the way. Most of the worst public schools in the United States have the best funding, and schools with less funding routinely outperform them. So again my point about incompetent governance.
By the way: The most "pessimistic" estimates we have by reliable sources have the world population peaking at 11 billion around 2100. More "optimistic" figures have it peaking at 8 or 9 billion around 2050. We will hit that equilibrium at a point where the average world income and daily caloric intake hits a point where most people don't want to have more than 1 or 2 kids. Also most likely by that point humans will take up less land for living and agricultural space than we do now.
I use the scare quotes above since I think a world population of 40 or 50 billion would be quite positive, not negative--both for the human race and for planetary ecology. But assuming we buy into the idea that overpopulation is a threat, then we can stop worrying; by the end of this century, the big question in most of the world is going to be how to talk people into having more kids.
It is really not important if the whole world population can stand on Zanzibar or live in Alberta. When people talk about overpopulation, they are not worried about the earth running out of land for people to stand or live on. Does the earth have enough farmland and oceans to feed everyone? Are there enough natural resources to support the population?
Scott, calm down. The depth of a playoff bracket is only logarithmic in the number of teams. A billion teams has a bracket depth of only 30. If you restrict the playoffs to single-game, single-elimination matchups and play every day, you can do the entire playoff season in one month.
Of course, this means that for the first day of playoffs, you need a half-billion stadiums.
Mike: First off, it's quite relevant how many people we can squeeze into one place, because one of the most frequent claims is that we are "overcrowded," that our cities and such are expanding to destroy all the wilderness and land, with some even wildly speculating that we'll have solid cityscape from coast to coast and such nonsense.
It's true that in some specific areas we're crowding out non-urban land, but on the whole it's false. The trend is toward greater and greater concentrations of people in urban areas, with enormous tracts of non-urban land completely dwarfing the inhabited areas, and an increasing--increasing!--amount of land being given over to forests and such.
As for the separate, and equally valid, question about if we have enough farmland to feed everybody, that's already been answered. Yes, we do have enough already to feed more than the current world population, and even as the amount of people has been going up, the total amount of land we need to feed them has been going down.
And further, we have no reason to believe the world population will ever get much more than twice what it is now unless we start taking extreme measures to encourage people to have more kids.
In other words, fears of crushing overpopulation destroying the planet, mass starvation, etc., are simply groundless in free societies.
There seems to be a very strong conceptual lag between actual events and common wisdom. Many liberal/Democrats, for example, see big business in turn-of-the-century terms, just before the courts started enforcing anti-trust and pro-union laws. Many conservative/Republicans, on the other hand, tend to see liberals through a 1950s glass, with a newly-reformed (vis Ann Coulter) "Tail-gunner Joe" sniffing out traitorous commies everywhere.
As for themes such as overpopulation, pollution, etc., conventional wisdom hasn't passed 1969 yet. We are all metaphorically still watching that old TV commercial with people littering all over the place, closing with a closeup of an American Indian (a single tear running down his face) mourning what's happened to his land. A lot's happened since then.
I figures it this way. If the current world population is 6.9 billion and they all moved to Alberta, it would mean Alberta would need 100,000 Superdomes (New Orleans capacity of 69,000) so everyone could go to a football, baseball or a hockey game. Now they could built less but that would be against any affirmative action policy that read that everyone has the right to go to a football game. But being realistic, not all the citizens will go to a sporting event. Like they would run out of hotdogs really fast. Not to mention the number of cattle needed for the Calgary Stampede. So now Alberta only has to build 50,000 Superdomes. Just figuring…
However, one thing that these arguments do is underestimate the amount of land required to support a population. It is not true that to feed 1000 people, you need X acres, regardless of whether those 1000 people live on 100 acres, or 10,000 acres. The denser the population, the higher the infrastructure required to support the density. New York City's support-infrastructure footprint is vastly larger than the state of North Carolina even though both have about 8 million in population - New York couldn't exist without resources drawn in from essentially the entire region. The footprint is not just food growing, but also includes things like electricity, water, fuel, economic investment, entrepeneurship, foreign markets, skilled workers, professional classes, labor classes, intellectual capital, and of course mountains of cash.
Compressing the whole of human population into Alberta sounds great on paper - but the footprint would grow exponentially to make it possible. I mean, heres just some examples of the logistical nightmares: how are you going to get teh trash out from each house and into the dump? what if a water main breaks? what happens if someone gets the flu?
I agree that we are not overcrowded, generally speaking, but its equally wrong to suggest that human population levels in certain patrs of teh world are indeed unsustainable. Not that we will literally run out of food (though we CAN literally run out of water!). But that the basic standard of living degrades very quickly - and this is true on a broader societal level as well. India is severely burdened by its population in ways that China is not - because India is much more dense. These population pressures manifest in as diverse ways as endemic corruption in government, massive educational industry fraud, and sectarian violence that threatens the democratic order. China has these problems too but India is overall worse (aside from eth democracy part). Anytime you put a lot of people close together you get all these competitive efects on resources - intellectual, material, all types - and that is a severe drain on society's fabric.
Ultimately, spreading out is good for the human psych, and technology provides solutions to resource limitations. And liberty provides solutions to human limitations. But lets not try to claim that there is zero problem whatsoever with population loads.
(and I didnt even mention heat profiles!)
But that's the genius of putting everyone in Alberta!
It also makes the entire population much easier to wipe out with a single nuke. Or actually, more vulnerable to any kind of warfare.
I’m not saying that either is necessarily a good thing or a bad thing. Just saying....
*I'm talking about contraception, not abortion.
Then there's the problem with playoffs. Just how in the world are you going to have a progressive playoff series with a billion teams? It would take 500 years just for the first round.
The reality is that -according to the historical record- one of the marks of a prosperous modern society is that population growth approaches (or reaches) zero. Dean touched upon this when he mentioned how immigration has kept America's population growing.
On the other hand, a century ago the self-adjusting mechanisms weren't nearly so apparent. :)
There seems to be a very strong conceptual lag between actual events and common wisdom. Many liberal/Democrats, for example, see big business in turn-of-the-century terms, just before the courts started enforcing anti-trust and pro-union laws. Many conservative/Republicans, on the other hand, tend to see liberals through a 1950s glass, with a newly-reformed (vis Ann Coulter) "Tail-gunner Joe" sniffing out traitorous commies everywhere.
As for themes such as overpopulation, pollution, etc., conventional wisdom hasn't passed 1969 yet. We are all metaphorically still watching that old TV commercial with people littering all over the place, closing with a closeup of an American Indian (a single tear running down his face) mourning what's happened to his land. A lot's happened since then.
Hell, too many people (such as Al Gore) still take that idiot Paul Erlich seriously, even though he's been wrong on every major prediction he's ever written.
One nit to pick: unless they finally changed the rent laws, I don't know that New York is a good choice to compare apartment prices... :)
I've read one novel, one of those nasty "I'm not sympathizing with terrorists, but lets let them get their whole speech out while nodding at their wisdom" books which has the wise woman killing off most of Earth's pop. with a bioweapon.
The writer was at least familiar with your arguement which is more than most overpopulation advocates. However, he suggested a different measure than land space...carrying capacity.
Of course, the carrying capacity of a free society is a lot larger than a unfree society. And so too, a society with ever growing tech is able to handle ever growing population.
Aziz makes a good point, but he doesn't see far enough. Yes, the costs associated rise geometrically, but the production gained rises a lot faster, I don't want to say exponentially.
Cities are the crossroads of commerce. Physical proximity allows more deals to be made. Two people can make two deals. Three can make six. And it goes up.
This is why in my future SF setting, Starsong Systems, I have a Futures Stockmarket set in microgravity. That way, you can get that scrum of shouting traders you see on teh NY stock exchange floor, but in three-dimensional space.
In order to put everyone into Alberta, we would have to have a much larger, more sophisticated economy. With a more efficient, and more just government.
Right now, it would be a disaster. Because we don't have the capability to organize seven billion people, even using the self-organizing nature of markets. New problems would spring up that we don't foresee now.
But, eh, give us a hundred years, and we could solve it. I don't see any real reason we couldn't have a hundred billion people on Earth, mostly living in comfort.
Tech is not a panacea, but it helps.
Take a look at DC housing prices, then look at the public school system. One is quite high; the other is quite low.
Same with NYC, for that matter.
Wake me when we get to 30 billion (I actually doubt we will ever hit this number before going extinct). Then I'll start to worry.
Regarding India: since becoming free, they've never experienced a famine. If you look at the Freedom House data on them from the last 30 years, their civil and political freedoms have been improving remarkably, and if you look at their economy it's been growing, with a remarkable acceleration over the last 10 years or so. Their standards of living and average incomes have been increasing for generations and are today at all-time highs.
India's purchasing power parity today marks them as one of the best nations on Earth live in. Yes, the wealthier countries like the US, the UK, etc. can still beat them on that score but given their remarkable rate of growth in standards of living it's not at all clear that that will be true in another generation. They are rapidly developing into one of the world's economic powerhouses--and may one day be one of its military powerhouses too. There is a very good chance that in another 20 or 30 years the US will have comparatively few of the highly valuable Indian immigrants such as we have now because few in India will feel the need to leave for better opportunities.
India's also perilously close to the tipping point where average incomes are high enough that people choose to stop having a lot of children. That point has been noted in nation after nation: once most people's income passes a certain point, they stop having a lot of a lot of kids.
Mmmm, not really. Most of the world's communist nations were and are predominantly agrarian, with comparatively low population densities spread across large areas. You may think of China as having a huge population, but in fact most of its population is spread thinly across a huge land area, with an average population density nationwide of only about 10 people per square kilometer. Most communist revolutions took place in nations like that.
What you see that is typical in large urban areas should probably be called a tendency toward democratic capitalism, with social services paid for through taxes on a predominantly market-based economy.
Point of information: India's total population density is about 25-30 people per square kilometer, just by comparison to China's 10 or so, and India has much higher standards of living, a less socialized economy, and massively more political and civil freedom than China.
Lousy public schools have no lack of funding by the way. Most of the worst public schools in the United States have the best funding, and schools with less funding routinely outperform them. So again my point about incompetent governance.
I use the scare quotes above since I think a world population of 40 or 50 billion would be quite positive, not negative--both for the human race and for planetary ecology. But assuming we buy into the idea that overpopulation is a threat, then we can stop worrying; by the end of this century, the big question in most of the world is going to be how to talk people into having more kids.
I think that's roughly the schedule for the NHL now. Or maybe by June it just seems that way.
:(
Of course, this means that for the first day of playoffs, you need a half-billion stadiums.
It's true that in some specific areas we're crowding out non-urban land, but on the whole it's false. The trend is toward greater and greater concentrations of people in urban areas, with enormous tracts of non-urban land completely dwarfing the inhabited areas, and an increasing--increasing!--amount of land being given over to forests and such.
As for the separate, and equally valid, question about if we have enough farmland to feed everybody, that's already been answered. Yes, we do have enough already to feed more than the current world population, and even as the amount of people has been going up, the total amount of land we need to feed them has been going down.
And further, we have no reason to believe the world population will ever get much more than twice what it is now unless we start taking extreme measures to encourage people to have more kids.
In other words, fears of crushing overpopulation destroying the planet, mass starvation, etc., are simply groundless in free societies.
There seems to be a very strong conceptual lag between actual events and common wisdom. Many liberal/Democrats, for example, see big business in turn-of-the-century terms, just before the courts started enforcing anti-trust and pro-union laws. Many conservative/Republicans, on the other hand, tend to see liberals through a 1950s glass, with a newly-reformed (vis Ann Coulter) "Tail-gunner Joe" sniffing out traitorous commies everywhere.
As for themes such as overpopulation, pollution, etc., conventional wisdom hasn't passed 1969 yet. We are all metaphorically still watching that old TV commercial with people littering all over the place, closing with a closeup of an American Indian (a single tear running down his face) mourning what's happened to his land. A lot's happened since then.
To be continued