From: jdr@starflight.Corp.Sun.COM (Jon Roland)
Newsgroups: alt.planning.urban
Subject: Main Impediment to Survival
Date: 4 Sep 1992 03:22:09 GMT
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Distribution: world
Reply-To: jdr@starflight.Corp.Sun.COM
NNTP-Posting-Host: starflight.corp.sun.com

There is a need to discuss population and its relationship to ecological and
economic problems in somewhat different terms than is usually done. It is
beyond the scope of this posting to try to cover the subject adequately. I am
writing a book that will treat the subject at greater length. However, a few
points should be considered:

(1) We need to distinguish between the natural ecosystem, the geosystem, and
the life-support system for humanity and its civilization. The first two
overlap, but although the third now largely coincides with the first two, it
can in principle be separated from them entirely.

(2) As hunter-gatherers, the world population of humanity was probably between
4 and 100 million, and the latter figure is probably also the carrying capacity
of the natural ecosystem for humanity. During most of that period, not much
more exploitation of the geosystem (minerals) was done than that done by other
lifeforms. With the advent of agriculture and mining, that changed rapidly. The
invention of herding alone was sufficient to eventually enable humanity to
destroy the natural ecosystem, and given only a few thousand years, even a
technology of stone axes would have destroyed all the world's forests after
humanity discovered the rudiments of sanitation, nutrition, and disease
control. The development of political organizations larger than the village was
the most important factor, however, because it led to the breakdown of
traditional population control measures that had held populations well below
carrying capacity.

(3) The present world population of 5.5 billion is sustained only by the
consumption of geosystem resources. If present trends continue, they will
approach exhaustion, and we can expect world population to drop to below the
then carrying-capacity of the natural ecosystem, which, because of the ways we
have and will have degraded it, will be much less than 100 million -- perhaps
less than 1 million -- worldwide. This will not happen overnight. It may take
several hundred years. In the process, humanity will return to the stone age.
Along the way, as civilization collapses in fits of upheaval, tragic events
will occur. Almost all of the social and political turmoil of recent years are
examples of this kind of thing. Earth will be reduced to a barren wasteland.
Space resources are not a solution for Earth. If consumed as terrestrial
resources are now, they will only result in toxic metal contamination on a
scale that will render the surface unhabitable.

(4) The real cost of geosystem and ecosystem resources are already beginning to
impair economic growth, despite new technology. We may have, in fact, already
begun to peak out and may now be beginning a long decline, punctuated by
several rapid collapses along the way. We may have already passed the point
where it is politically possible to adopt the kinds of measures that would
avoid catastrophe.

(5) The main obstacle to avoiding economic and ecological catastrophe is our
commitment to living in scattered cities, towns, suburbs and farms. Such an
infrastructure is fundamentally unsustainable, no matter what conservation
regime may be imposed. The only alternative is to begin to build cities
designed and operated like multigeneration starships, intended to carry their
inhabitants into a distant future using only the resources they carry with them
-- compact, sealed, recycling all resources, even air -- and moving everyone
into them and off the surface of the planet, except perhaps for occasional
visits under strictly controlled circumstances.

(6) We could, in principle, build a million such cities, each holding a million
inhabitants, on Earth, with footprints totaling less than 1 percent of the
Earth's land surface, and maintain humanity in civilized comfort for not only
the 500 million years that the surface of Earth is expected to remain habitable
until increase solar radiation triggers a runaway greenhouse effect, but,
underground, for the entire 5 billion years remaining until an expanding sun
destroys the planet. The natural ecosystem could be restored to some semblance

(7) There is no viable alternative between such starship cities and descent to
a new stone age, except, perhaps, to build such starship cities in space and
later return to Earth to restore it after the humans left behind destroy their
civilization and the natural ecosystem.

(8) Such starship cities can be build with near-term technology, but they will
not be cheap. We can probably not afford to build more than one a year, for
the next hundred years, by which time the political situation outside of them
will become desperate and the cities will need to be self-sufficient and
defensible. They are, therefore, a solution for only a few million people.
There is no solution for most of the present 5.5 billion people on Earth or for
their descendants -- they won't have any.

(9) Present discussions of measures to limit pollution and increase recycling
efforts are exercises in futility, and miss the most important point.
Development, along present lines, is not even an option, even if we totally
dismiss the interests of future generations. The imperatives of our time are
the survival of human civilization and the natural ecosystem. Social, economic,
and political justice are not options for our age. All we can hope to do is lay
the foundation for a distant future in which these values may become
realizable.

(10) It is left as an exercise for the reader to estimate the orders of
magnitude of the numbers of people who may live under each of these
alternatives over the time remaining to Earth, and to reflect on our moral
responsibility to them given that the choice among those alternatives will be
made by our generation.

These points are discussed in more detail in an upcoming article in The
Futurist, a publication of the World Future Society. They are based on rigorous
input-output analyses and computer modeling of the systems involved over
geologic time spans.

---

jdr@starflight.corp.sun.com, starflt@uunet.uu.net
Jon Roland
Starflight Corporation, 1755 E Bayshore Rd #9A,
Redwood City, CA 94063-4142, 415/361-8141