From: dietz@cs.rochester.edu (Paul Dietz)
Subject: Re: Global Sterilization (was Re: The Marching Morons)
Organization: University of Rochester
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 1993 15:44:27 GMT

In article <pete.725984485@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU> pete@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU (Peter Alexander Merel) writes:

> Nevertheless, I think you underestimate the resources required to produce
> a well educated population. Can you point at any non first world country 
> anywhere that has one? Resource richness is imho required for good education.

I disagree completely.  Education is labor intensive, not
natural-resource intensive.  The developing countries have a lot of
labor.  They will get more labor as mechanization makes them more
efficient.

Remember, the country with the most advance education system in the last
century was the United States.  The US was also the country with the
fastest population growth rate.


> there are real problems. Or are you saying that we're not destroying 
> ecosystems, using up non-renewable resources and generally fowling the 
> planet up at an ever increasing rate of knots? It's very easy to call
> people names, friend. Try addressing yourself to the argument.

But I wasn't presented with an argument; I was presented with slogans.
How about this: list a nonrenewable resource, and I'll argue how it
can be extended, substituted for, or be made available in effectively
unlimited amounts.

 >If we were to reduce the world population by a very large percentage in
 >a generation or two it would give us the breathing space we need to set
 >up sustainable ways of living and developing.

The unstated assumption is that this breathing space is necessary.
I disagree.

 > We could provide a first world
 >standard of living for everyone, and save and revive disappearing cultures
 >and ecosystems before they disappear. Are these not laudable goals? Is there
 >some better way of acheiving them?

Sure -- let the world industrialize, let people get rich, and forget
these authoritarian fantasies about sterilizing the untermenschen.

 >>We don't reproduce without limit.  
 >
 >Correct. Eventually famine, war and pestilence provide us with limits

Wrong -- *affluence* provides the limit.  War, for example, tends
to increase population growth.

 >>We are not in imminent danger of running out of food.
 >
 >How do you define imminent? I believe that the last estimate of the
 >number of people the earth could sustainably feed I read was ten
 >billion.  So that's less than fifty years away. But given the
 >enormously disproportionate use of resources by first world economies
 >we can expect real trouble sooner than that, no?

No.  Inform yourself on this history of this debate.  Without fail,
doomsayers have been predicting imminent starvation since Malthus.
Doomsday has been postponed again and again.  Vogt in 1948, Ehrlich in
the late 60's; all ignored the potential to increase food production
through the application of technology and cleverness.

A thread running through these predictions is a hidden agenda.  For
example, scare stories of starvation are used as a bludgeon to advance
an agenda of preserving ecosystems.  This leads to a willful ignorance
about technological alternatives for evading supposed limits, as they
would eliminate the rationale for the particular brand of coercive
social engineering being peddled.

The UN FAO projects we could feed about 50 billion people with
existing agricultural technology.  Other estimates range higher (150
billion is one I've seen).  Technological change can only increase the
limit.  I suspect that the ultimate limits will be set only by the
energy available to produce food.  Agriculture as now practiced is
hideously inefficient, turning only a tiny fraction, less than 1%, of
the sunlight hitting farmland into chemical energy of foodstuffs.

	Paul F. Dietz
	dietz@cs.rochester.edu
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.science,alt.folklore.science