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I am actually curious about how much land use changes and heat from human activities contributes to climate change. Theoretically the limit to the number of pe
by eloff 7y ago
I am actually curious about how much land use changes and heat from human activities contributes to climate change.
Theoretically the limit to the number of people we could support on earth with unlimited energy (eg cheap fusion) is not limited by space or food or water (the later solved by energy) but by simple thermodynamics. We'd cook ourselves if there were too many of us. Note this happens at many orders of magnitude more population than we currently have.
- semi-extrinsic 7y agoIIRC someone crunched the numbers that even with unlimited fusion power, if you extrapolate the growth in energy use in the 20th century, we could only continue for ~200 years before significantly increasing global temperature due to waste heat. An innocent-seeming 5% growth turns in to four orders of magnitude if it continues for two centuries.
- eloff 7y agoFascinating. Of course any exponential growth tends to come to an end long before the impossible predictions, but it still highlights what a unique time we live in where we take growth of the population and the economy for granted. It has to slow down in the "near" future. Near being probably fifty years or more.
- newvoiceoldphne 7y agoBlack-body absorption, ie : asphalt. Urban heat bubbles are real.