From: dietz@cs.rochester.edu (Paul Dietz)
Subject: Re: Justification for the Space Program
Organization: University of Rochester
Distribution: usa, world
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 1992 19:18:37 GMT

In article <1992Dec18.182222.20471@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> mrw9e@kelvin.seas.Virginia.EDU (Michael Robert Williams) writes:

>I read an article in the British Interplanetary Society Journal about
>a guy named Forrester (or was it Fisher?) at MIT who had done some
>predictive world modelli, tracking several variables like population,
>pollution, natural resource usage, standard of living, etc. Some of
>his assumptions may have been...incorrect, buI didn't see anything
>that looked grossly unreasonable. He projected the world 500 years 
>into the future toee what trends we could expect (yeah yeah, I know
>don't trust computer numbers at first glance, especially extrapolations
>that far in the future, but even with that caveat, the numbers are
>scary).
>
>Assuming we do nothing to change our ways, and do not expand into space,
>in about 100 years society will start to decline, as pollution, over-
>population and dwindling natural resources take their toll. In 300
>years we will have entered a new Dark Age from which it is extermely 
>unlikely that we will escape. Our resources will be so scant that they
>will not be able to support our technology base, and the environment
>will be so poisoned that we'll have a hard time feeding ourselves.
>Forrester's model projected a world population of just under a billion
>(stable) and a standard of living worse than during the middle ages.
>
>Assuming we recycle everything we can, drastically cut our birth rate,
>conserve natural resources and enact stiff environmental protection
>laws, all we can do is forstall the inevitable. I think, though, that
>we can last another 1500 years or so before The Crash.



This is all *so* ludicrous.  You are refering to results from the
infamous "Limits To Growth" study.  It's been widely disparaged as so
simplified as to be useless (for example, aggregating all "pollution"
into a single variable.)  It's propaganda masquerading behind computer
models.

Much more believable results have been obtained by actually studying
specific resources here on earth.  When you do that, and when you take
into account technological improvements, the idea that things are
going to necessarily go to hell just evaporates.

The 1500 year figure you present is a figment of your imagination.
Come on -- technology is going to be rather different by the time the
year 3500 rolls around, space exploration or not.  You can't possibly
have any idea what technology will be like even 100 years down the
road, let alone 1500.

The fundamental limit to resource exploitation is imposed by
availability of energy, and space exploitation is *not* needed to get
essentially inexhaustible supplies of that.

The argument *against* spending money on unprofitable space activities
is that our descendants would be better off if we spent the money on
capital formation here on earth, so that they will be more prosperous
(and, if they like, go into space).  We are able to launch rockets now
not because the Victorians wanted to go the moon, or because they sent
explorers to Antarctica, but because they had the industrial revolution.

	Paul F. Dietz
	dietz@cs.rochester.edu
Newsgroups: alt.rush-limbaugh