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People frequently discuss exponential population growth, but rarely mention the terrestial confines of such thinking. Then they say, oh but technology will con
by T0T0R0 10y ago
People frequently discuss exponential population growth, but rarely mention the terrestial confines of such thinking.
Then they say, oh but technology will continue to advance, and yet never mention pioneering space travel.
I feel like economists that extrapolate numbers into the future, but fail to consider space travel are like holy men, refusing to consider that the earth is round, and rather than the imaginary center of a flat universe; doomsayers, warning that we'll sail over the edge, if we venture too far out to sea.
- aidenn0 10y agoSpace colonization doesn't help much with exponential growth. Lets say the population grows at 1.4% per year, and that, on average, there is one earth's worth of habitable space per star in the galaxy. That buys less than two millenia of time to figure out how to colonize the next galaxy, and doing so would only buy us 50 years of time to colonize another. Going by energy rather than space, you need to move up a level of the Kardashev scale every 2000 years to sustain a 1.4% growth in energy usage. In the real world, if you think you have an exponential curve, you just haven't looked far enough to the right yet.
- johnnyhillbilly 10y agoWho are these holy men, of which you speak, that refused to consider Earth round?
- Nzen 10y agoHe or she is probably conflating the Catholic inquisitors who convicted Galileo for a heliocentric heresy and the popular myth that the experts who dissuaded King Ferdinand from supporting Columbus thought the earth flat, rather than too wide to cross with contemporary technology. It's just a rhetorical device intended to diminish the otherwise learned. <edit for wording>
- rayiner 10y agoIt's highly unlikely that space colonization will happen soon enough to matter to demographers.