[seclorum]

Fixed ideas being challenged is exactly what science - not superstition - is all about.

The point of the article is we wouldn't be here today at all if we hadn't been able to manage our resources. The science demonstrates this, over and over: land re-use is the key to it. The same area of land, supporting increasingly larger and larger populations, demonstrates that in fact we can manage our population growth, and have done so for 200,000 years.

But what does your superstition have to do with this? Malthusian theories super-posit that we will perish, but the archeological record demonstrates that we are capable, as a species of dealing with this.

[lutusp]

> Fixed ideas being challenged is exactly what science - not superstition - is all about.

Science isn't a political movement. Science can produce very reliable results if conducted efficiently, but it cannot get people to listen. That's the divide between science and politics.

> The same area of land, supporting increasingly larger and larger populations, demonstrates that in fact we can manage our population growth ...

Nonsense. It shows how biological colonies adopt increasingly clever ways to squeeze more sustenance out of the environment. All such efforts eventually collide with the real carrying capacity of the environment, a fact that we ignore at our peril.

> But what does your superstition have to do with this?

Biology is science, not superstition. The logistic function is science, not superstition. All these scientific results show the peril of ignoring the role of environment in survival.

> ... but the archeological record demonstrates that we are capable, as a species of dealing with this.

It does nothing of the kind. The archaeological record shows any number of examples of species being wiped out by changes in their environments. In one case, an environmental change wiped out 90% of all species on earth. Apparently those species weren't aware of your blithe dismissal of the role of environment in the equation of life.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/16/science/meteorite-that-kil...

[seclorum]

Remind me, with science: When were we humans last wiped out, again?

[lutusp]

> Remind me, with science: When were we humans last wiped out, again?

I bet you think there's no answer. But in fact, on at least one occasion in the past, human numbers dropped below 10,000 individuals, which means the fact that we still exist as a species can be attributed to chance, not destiny.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck#Humans

Quote: "The Toba catastrophe theory suggests that a bottleneck of the human population occurred c. 70,000 years ago, proposing that the human population was reduced to perhaps 10,000 individuals[3] when the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia erupted and triggered a major environmental change. The theory is based on geological evidences of sudden climate change and on coalescence evidences of some genes (including mitochondrial DNA, Y-chromosome and some nuclear genes)[4] and the relatively low level of genetic variation with humans."

I emphasize this is an example that we can establish by studying the human genome from relatively recent times. Farther in the past, the genetic record is less easy to read, but it's very likely that the Toba near-extinction is only one of many similar events.

[dragonwriter]

There a much longer time when one could have said that about any of large number of other species than there has been when one could have said it about humans.

And its an invalid argument to make for the future prospects of any of them.

[fiter]

I think that neither of the historical trend models are going to be realistic except by chance. Past performance doesn't guarantee future returns. Basically, I'm not sure that the past situations and solutions will be the same as the future situation and non-/solutions.

Also, this misses a big part of what's important to me. The standard of living should also be considered. Given that we can support 9 billion people, will each of them be as well off compared to if we were instead supporting half that?

[seclorum]

> Past performance doesn't guarantee future returns.

You might want to consult the factual record of tens of thousands of years of farmers on that particular point of view. ;) You are right that it doesn't guarantee anything, except to those who carefully apply scientific principles to their management of resources, folks otherwise known as 'farmers'.

>he standard of living should also be considered. Given that we can support 9 billion people, will each of them be as well off compared to if we were instead supporting half that?

For at least the last 200 years, the standard of living of hundreds of millions of people has been raised, again and again, over and over. So I'd say, if we can manage it, this trend will continue. I think thats the point of the article: there are no environmental reasons, at all, why we couldn't manage to sustain life on Earth, indefinitely.

(There are only psychological reasons. A fact proven, nearly, by a lot of the responses in this thread ..)

[fiter]

> You are right that it doesn't guarantee anything, except to those who carefully apply scientific principles to their management of resources, folks otherwise known as 'farmers'.

Wouldn't science suggest we model based on the systems as they are instead of past performance? Let me hypothesize for a moment here to create a situation where the past performance may fail for predicting the future: (1) Assume that plants have traditionally been nutrient limited. (2) We are no longer nutrient limited. (3) We are now insolation to stored energy limited. We don't have a good way to increase insolation, so we'd better come up with a way to increase the efficiency of photosynthesis. (Not to say that there aren't plenty of ways around this. Maybe we'll use solar cells to power chemical sugar making plants.)

> For at least the last 200 years, the standard of living of hundreds of millions of people has been raised, again and again, over and over.

You quoted me, but I'm having a hard time interpreting your response in the context of you understanding me. I was stating that we might be better off with less population, not simply that the standard of living can increase with an increasing population. To state it again, we could have X% increase with double the population, but with our current population we might have Y%. Is Y > X?

[lutusp]

> there are no environmental reasons, at all, why we couldn't manage to sustain life on Earth, indefinitely.

The linked article doesn't say we can sustain our numbers indefinitely, It argues that we can grow our numbers indefinitely. Grow != sustain.

[lutusp]

> I'm not sure that the past situations and solutions will be the same as the future situation and non-/solutions.

The future will be completely different than the past, but in the same way -- consistent with the Logistic function and its description of the relation between species and environment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function

There are any number of unpredictable aspects to how events unfold, but physical laws remain the same.

[seclorum]

We've already demonstrated that we can bend physical laws to our needs, or have you missed that point in your rush to cast away any faith in the human species' ability to manage its resources? Because: managing our resources is what makes the difference, entirely, between extinction and survival, and we've been doing precisely that for 200,000 years so far.

[lutusp]

> We've already demonstrated that we can bend physical laws to our needs ...

Bend doesn't equal break. Obviously a species will adopt more and more ingenious measures to stave off the inevitable, but that doesn't change the inevitable, only its arrival date.

The basic equation collides a finite planet with an infinite capacity for growth. Ultimately the finite planet determines the outcome, not the infinite capacity for growth.

[fiter]

To be fair, we'd both agree that we're bending "natural laws" not physical laws. Right? I mean: we're not getting energy for free, we're just capturing more of it.