Earth Doomed by 2050?

[Dauphin]

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991778

[Sava]

I tell you.... American conservatives are turning the world to sh!t...

[Saint Marcus]

DUH

[Shi Huangdi]

The USA has is actually not very densely populated and is big enough to sustain alot more people. If we really needed more food, we could stop paying farmers to burn crops, have people plant food items in their yards, etc.

[chequita guevara]

The New Scientist seems to believe that wars for plunder are something new. In the mean time, it ignores that one of the causes of continuing strife in Palestine/Israel is control over limited water supplies.

As for the Guardian article, I should simply point out that Malthus said the same thing 200 years ago. There is plenty of room for agricultural growth. It will come at a great cost to the environment, however. Build enough desalination plants, and even the Sahara can be made to bloom.

[Vanguard]

If this were true, I'm sure the pre-cogs would have forseen it.

Joking aside, there is some cause to be concerned. Earth's resources are not infinite and human population continues to grow fairly rapidly. Overfishing is already a serious problem. A some point advances in agriculture are going to fall behind advances in population. And then, um, bad things happen.

It is difficult, however, to see a policy prescription that solves the problem. Doom! Doom!

[Blisterz]

Human race=Parasites.

par·a·site

An organism that grows, feeds, and is sheltered on or in a different organism while contributing nothing to the survival of its host.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
As for the Guardian article, I should simply point out that Malthus said the same thing 200 years ago. There is plenty of room for agricultural growth. It will come at a great cost to the environment, however.

That's like drinking hemlock to quench your thirst.

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
Build enough desalination plants, and even the Sahara can be made to bloom.

Hi, global warming, here we come

Unless we somehow find a way to build feasible fusion reactors before we get there.

[DinoDoc]

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=718860

[chequita guevara]

I didn't say those were good alternatives, merely that they exist. I'm merely disproving the thesis that the Earth will run out of resources in 48 years.

[Lemmy]

but it will still be doomed, right?

[DinoDoc]

Once more for good measure.

Profits of Doom
by Charles Platt


Doomsayers have always been in plentiful supply.
"Resources are scarcely adequate to us," wrote the Roman scholar Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullianus, "while already nature does not sustain us. Truly, pestilence and hunger and war and flood must be considered as a remedy for nations, like a pruning back of the human race becoming excessive in numbers."[1] This was around 200 AD, when world population was under 300 million.[2]

Tertullianus was wrong, Malthus was wrong, and modern academics have been wrong--most spectacularly when an MIT study team deduced from a massive computer simulation that all reserves of lead, tin, zinc, and petroleum would be exhausted within 20 years. (This was back in 1972.)[3] Still, the abysmal track record of pessimistic pundits has never impaired their popularity--which explains Jeremy Rifkin's lucrative career as a gene-splicing alarmist, even though
none of his horror scenarios has come close to reality, while research continues safely under severe restraints and promises huge benefits ranging from cancer cures to new crops that will fight third-world hunger.

Of course, recombinant DNA raises ethical issues and has frightening military applications. But in _The Biotech
Century_ (Tarcher/Putnam, $24.95) Rifkin goes far beyond these specifics. With Old Testament hyperbole he warns of an impending "second genesis" threatening "a biological Tower of Babel spreading chaos throughout the biological world and, in
the process, drowning out the ancient language of evolution." (page 68)

In fact nature already is a chaotic system, and the
"ancient language of evolution" is a risky process of random mutations. The AIDS virus emerged from one such mutation; likewise, numerous hereditary birth defects that cause untold misery. We'd be wise to learn how to inhibit these "natural" processes merely for our own self-defense.

Rifkin, though, warns that the power to cure defects can
also be used to create superchildren. "'Customized' babies could pave the way for the rise of a eugenic civilization in the twenty-first century," he says (page 3). Yet no one complains, today, if a woman chooses a husband for his intelligence or his good looks, hoping that her children will inherit those traits. Shouldn't individuals be allowed to control this process with less uncertainty?

In March, 1996, UNESCO denied this right,[4] claiming
that "the human genome is the common heritage of humanity." Thus, women should be forbidden to modify their ova, or men their sperm, because germ plasm belongs to future generations of our species, not the person in whom it resides.

Rifkin extends this dubious principle even further,
opposing private ownership even of plant genes, especially by pharmaceutical companies that extract useful DNA sequences in third-world countries. He doesn't explain who will pay to turn these sequences into drugs, test them, and market them if no one is allowed ownership rights. He simply rejects the idea. "Life patents strike at the core of our beliefs about
the very nature of life," he writes (page 62).

His view of life, however, is somewhat inaccurate. He
complains that gene splicing alters "our concept of nature and our relationship to it, reducing all of life to
manipulatable chemical materials" (page 14). But life cannot be _reduced_ to chemistry; it _is_ chemistry, as was proved almost a century ago when sea urchins were fertilized with inert chemicals in a famous experiment at the Woods Hole marine biological laboratory.[5] Since then we've established
that every cell contains its own DNA program, and currently we are learning how to modify that program with greater precision. To Jeremy Rifkin, this seems a threat and an insult, possibly for religious reasons, though he avoids mentioning his own faith.

_The Biotech Century_ purports to be an objective guide, but this is a deliberate deception. Mr. Rifkin makes no attempt at a fair or balanced assessment, and does not reveal to the reader his long record of anti-science activism. His "survey" of the next century is an endless catalogue of horrors, real or imagined, and he offers no suggestions for solutions.

If genetic research is impeded, millions of people will
remain hungry or will die unnecessarily. If scare tactics by doomsayers encourage legislation that outlaws some activities (such as cloning), the work will move offshore to nations where fewer safeguards may exist, thus creating greater risk. Since _The Biotech Century_ encourages these outcomes, it raises an intriguing question: who is more dangerous, the scientist seeking to enhance our lives, or the pundit who promotes unreasoning fear?

Mr. Rifkin would like tighter controls on risky research
conducted by greedy pharmaceutical companies. By the same logic, he should favor restrictions on reckless doomsayers, who work without regulatory supervision and profit handsomely while accepting no responsibility for the social consequences of their scaremongering.

References

[1] Quoted in Joel E. Cohen, "How Many People Can the World
Support?" (page 6). W. W. Norton and Company, New York, 1995.

[2] Same source as [1] (page 77).

[3] Donella H. Meadows et. al., _The Limits to Growth_ (pages
56-61). Universe Books, New York, 1972.

[4] In "Declaration on Protection of the Human Genome," from
UNESCO web page; quoted in "The Evolution Revolution" by
Charles Platt, _Wired_ magazine, January 1997.

[5] Boyce Rensberger, _Life Itself_ (page 9). Oxford
University Press, New York, 1996.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
http://www.economist.com/opinion/dis...tory_ID=718860

Not a big fan of applying risk/cost analysis to human lives. Do you want to be one of those sacrificed for profitability?

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Lemmy
but it will still be doomed, right?

Yes, in 4-5 billion years, the sun will expand into a red giant and envelope the Earth. There's nothing we can do to stop it. Earth is doomed. Party now.

However, more likely we will be destroyed by an asteroid strike in the next few dozen million years. Humanity is doomed. Party now.

All indications are that our species will have evolved into something different in about 3 million years. Homo sapiens sapiens is doomed. Party now.

Within the next few thousand years, our star system will travel through a dust cloud. The amount of life giving sunlight will be greatly diminished, and food production and energy production will collapse. Civilization is doomed. Party now.

Don't sweat the small stuff.

[DanS]

Even though The Economist is the spawn of the devil, I read the article and found it funny. I particularly liked the following...

"The fourth factor is poor individual perception. People worry that the endless rise in the amount of stuff everyone throws away will cause the world to run out of places to dispose of waste. Yet, even if America's trash output continues to rise as it has done in the past, and even if the American population doubles by 2100, all the rubbish America produces through the entire 21st century will still take up only the area of a square, each of whose sides measures 28km (18 miles). That is just one-12,000th of the area of the entire United States.

This was one of the things I always worried about, considering the amount of stuff we all throw away (and we throw away a lot).

Goes to show you that perceptions, while valuable, need to be informed by reason.