No, Falling Birthrates Are Not a "Serious Threat to Humanity"

 The online magazine Aeon publishes many poorly reasoned essays. Aeon's latest example is an article by an associate professor of philosophy, one entitled "The Vanishing of Youth."  The essay by Victor Kumar attempts to convince us that falling birth rates are a "serious threat to humanity." We get some bad armchair reasoning. The silly title gives us a hint of how far astray the author has gone. Declining birth rates will not produce any such thing as a "vanishing of youth." 

After pointing out that many say that declining birth rates will very much help reduce the problem of global warming, Kumar says, "These hopes are misplaced." He then says this:

"The path forward on climate change is clear: rapid decarbonisation. We must transition as fast as possible from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. If we fail, the future will be disastrous, and population size becomes irrelevant. If we succeed, additional humans won’t impact carbon emissions."

Decarbonization means the replacement of carbon-based energy sources such as coal and oil with alternative energy sources such as solar power, geothermal power, nuclear power, hydroelectric power, and so forth.  Such a thing requires many types of extremely difficult work across the globe, occurring over many decades. Any claim that it can be achieved rapidly is erroneous. The idea that you can make population size irrelevant to global warming by "rapid decarbonisation" is fallacious "silver bullet" reasoning.  The likelihood of successfully replacing oil and coal as energy sources is very much related to population size. The smaller the global population, the greater the chance of success such a decarbonization project has. It is fallacious to claim that in some disastrous future "population size becomes irrelevant."  Population size is always extremely relevant. 

Kumar then gives us this fallacious reasoning:

"Moreover, the timelines don’t match. Climate change demands solutions within the next few decades; population decline won’t materialise until the next century. Having fewer humans arriving then won’t retroactively cool the planet." 

The insinuation here that under a low-birthrate scenario "population decline won't materialise until the next century" is not correct.  Below is a year 2025 global population projection appearing in a scientific paper authored by Harvard scientists (a paper published in The Lancet):

In three or four of the five scenarios, global population peaks around the year 2060, and begins declining after then. So it is not correct that under a low-birthrate scenario, population decline will only occur in the twenty-first century. Under reasonable versions of such a scenario, population decline may begin around the year 2060,  forty years earlier than Kumar claims. If that occurs, such a decline will be a very big help indeed in reaching some goal of global decarbonization. The smaller the population, the easier that goal is to achieve. 

Kumar's next paragraph is this very fallacious bit of armchair reasoning, which seems to be based on the premise that a smaller global population would mean fewer young people. 

"Imagine, however, that population decline accelerates. That would worsen rather than salvage our climate prospects. Young people are more likely to support bold environmental policies, become climate activists, and invent green technologies. A shrinking, ageing population means fewer contributors to these efforts."

This kind of reasoning is fallacious. Whatever global warming reduction/slowing effect might occur by having a larger population and more activist young people, it would not be as nearly as great as the global warming reduction/slowing effect that would occur if the population was smaller and there were fewer people around, resulting in a much smaller carbon footprint for most nations. Kumar's reasoning above is like saying it would be a shame if the death-by-drunk-driving rate fell too low, because in that case there would be fewer activists trying to reduce deaths by drunk driving. 

Kumar illogically depicts the following events in the US:

• "Hospitals will burst at the seams while playgrounds empty." No, playgrounds will not empty, because many young people will still be born. And given an overall decline in population or a flattening of population growth, there is no reason to believe that "hospitals will burst at the seam," something that would be more likely to occur if populations keep rising. 
• Kumar predicts that the Social Security system will crumble if the population declines or population growth flattens.  This is fallacious. The current financial difficulties of the Social Security system are easy to permanently fix by simple measures such as eliminating the current "cap" under which income above $200,000 is not subject to the Social Security tax, or by increasing the retirement age after there occurs a corresponding increase in life span (projected to occur because of medical advances). 
• Kumar says there won't be enough tax revenue if the population decreases or population growth flattens. This is a fallacious argument. Tax revenue problems in the US can easily be fixed by increasing tax rates on the wealthiest or creating a wealth tax applying only to the richest. If the population was slightly declining, there would be less need for tax revenue, because tax revenue needs are proportional to population size. 

We then have from Kumar this paean to youth:

"To thrive, societies need young people. New generations drive economic growth, pioneer technologies, challenge outdated moral views, create art, and advance social change. They’re more likely to take risks, embrace new ideas, and imagine different futures. When we talk about population decline, what we’re really talking about is the gradual dissipation of this vital social force."

There will still be plenty of young people if the population declines or if population growth flattens, so this is not a good argument for keeping the population growing. Kumar's statements here are an example of ageism. People who are between 35 and 60 have done very much to  "pioneer technologies, challenge outdated moral views, create art, and advance social change," and they also often "take risks, embrace new ideas, and imagine different futures." In fact, a person over 60 may be more likely to embrace new ideas than someone who is 25. 

Let us consider a young person who studies to get a PhD at a university. Can we expect that this person will be particularly likely to take risks and embrace new ideas?  Often the exact opposite is true.  In many fields such as neuroscience, psychology, evolutionary biology, philosophy and cosmology, we have belief communities that are dominated by old dogmas and old taboos that have been hanging around for decades or centuries. The career path of someone in such fields is a path of conformity. In such fields a person's chance of progression from PhD candidate to PhD to  "post doc" to assistant professor to full professor will be totally dependent upon how much that person parrots the "party line" of some academia belief community. This is the opposite of a situation where the most thought innovation comes from the youngest. 

Imagine someone is part of such an academia belief community for decades.  If he is a neuroscientist, he writes like his academia overlords and peer reviewers expect a neuroscientist to write.  If he is an evolutionary biologist, he writes like his academia overlords and peer reviewers expect an evolutionary biologist to write. It's a "publish or perish" situation in which the person is expected to meet some quota of papers written. And to get papers published, conformity is required, because peer reviewers tend to reject papers advancing contrarian ideas or heretical claims

But then let's imagine such a person retires from academia. Now he might feel a greater freedom to speak his mind. So the 60-year-old or the 65-year-old might actually be more likely to "embrace new ideas" and "take risks." He might now think that for the first time in his life he can stick his neck out, without suffering dire consequences. My point here is that there is a large reason for doubting the  generalization that young people think in daring, innovative ways, and older people stick to the old way of thinking. Often the main people to realize the stupidity of bad old dogmas are those who have had decades to ponder the failures of such dogmas and how they fail as explanations for very deep complexities of reality that take many years of study to appreciate. 

Kumar makes some fallacious claims about economic growth:

" More importantly, degrowth would devastate developing nations. Economic growth dramatically reduced global poverty. Reverse that growth, and poverty will resurge."

No, poverty will not increase if global population growth reverses or flattens. Degrowth in population is not the same as a shrinking economy.   Statistics about economic growth can be very misleading. An economy can be counted as growing when there occurs many different things that people do not need, such as the building of too-large houses and the building of weapon systems and the manufacture of unnecessary cars. 

An economist says this:

"It’s a false assumption to say that growth is increasing the standard of living in the present world because we measure growth as growth in G.D.P.  If it goes up, does that mean we’re increasing standard of living? We’ve said that it does, but we’ve left out all the costs of increasing G.D.P. We really don’t know that the standard is going up. If you subtract for the deaths and injuries caused by automobile accidents, chemical pollution, wildfires and many other costs induced by excessive growth, it’s not clear at all."

Birthrates below replacement levels are not even happening in developing countries, making Kumar's point here particularly weak. Here is some data from this page:

The "developing nations" do not even have birthrates below replacement levels, and it is a fallacy to assume that if the global population begins to decline, that this will mean there will be birthrates below replacement levels in developing nations. Such developing nations will still be able to grow economically, and their population will still grow. The dip in population growth will come mainly from dips in birthrates of developed countries. 

Kumar states this:

"A smaller population will thus shrink what the evolutionary theorist Joseph Henrich in The Secret of Our Success (2015) calls our ‘collective brain’. We’ll forgo not just particular innovations but entire fields of enquiry, impacting everything from basic research to practical applications in engineering and medicine."

No, there will not occur the disappearing of "entire fields of enquiry" if population growth flattens or if the world's population size slightly declines.  A global population of seven billion working smarter can do just as much intellectually as a global population of ten billion not working so smartly. 

Kumar is speaking erroneously when he says this:

"Young people have always been the main source of art, fashion, music, literature and film. As their numbers diminish, the future will become a cultural wasteland. Imagine the 1960s without rock-and-roll, the 1970s without Hollywood auteurs, the 1980s without street art, or the 1990s without hip-hop." 

Nonsense. There will still be billions of young people in a world of seven billion people with a slowly declining (or not increasing) number of total humans.  And it is not true that "young people have always been the main source of art, fashion, music, literature and film." Middle-aged people have contributed just as much to such areas as young people. 

Kumar seems to have his face twisted into agony over some prospect that he should not be worried about at all: the prospect that the global population may stop rising and slightly decline. Kumar suggests desperate measures we can do to increase the birth rate, and make it more affordable to have children. Kumar suggests the nonsensical solution of "artificial wombs," stating this: "Perhaps the most effective solutions, ultimately, will relieve the costs of childrearing through artificial wombs or AI nannies." This would not actually do anything to reduce the expense of having children. Pregnancy is not expensive, but having your child be grown by an artificial womb would be gigantically expensive.  And the progression from a speck-sized zygote to a full-sized human baby is a miracle of organization that could never be reproduced by some artificial womb. 

Part of the reason why someone at a university might be suggesting artificial wombs is that places like Boston University (where Kumar works) do a really bad job at educating people about the vast levels of hierarchical organization and fine-tuned functional complexity and component interdependence and purposeful molecular machinery choreography everywhere in human bodies, because the proper teaching of such realities conflicts with the preservation of accidental origins dogma that is prioritized at such churches of materialism. 

6 Drawbacks of a 125-Year Lifespan

Scientists are working on extending the human lifespan. It is entirely possible that within a few decades the human lifespan might be fifty years longer. Most people think that such an outcome would be extremely fortunate. But there are some serious downsides and disadvantages that might arise from a human lifespan that long. Below is a list of six drawbacks.

Wealth inequality might increase. The United States has a grave problem with excessive wealth being concentrated in the hands of the few. In this year's State of the Union Address, President Obama reported that the wealthiest 1% own 40% of the wealth in he United States, and the bottom 80% own only 7% of America's wealth. 

If people live to be 125, the wealth inequality problem would probably increase very significantly. The main reason is that death is a major factor that helps to limit wealth inequality. When very rich people die, the government gets a large share through inheritance taxes, and usually the person's fortune is divided up among several people. If the very rich are living to the age of 125, that end-of-life wealth redistribution is delayed for several decades.

Unemployment might increase. In many fields it is very hard for young people to find a job, partially because of all of the older people holding on to their jobs. If people live to be 125, people might hold on to their jobs until they are 90 or 100. One can only imagine how negative an effect that might have on the unemployment rate.

Ideas might stagnate. It has been said many times that some inappropriate or weakly supported theories never die until their advocates finally grow old and die. This problem of conceptual stagnation might became worse if people have 125-year lifespans. One can imagine people saying things such as this: “I've been advocating string theory at this university for the past 90 years, and I'm sure not going to change my mind now.”

Retirement programs might bankrupt. A program such as Social Security was designed under the assumption that people would typically die around the age of 70 or 75. What happens when people start living to be 125? It might be enough to send many a retirement program into bankruptcy.

Overpopulation might get worse. The world's population was 6 billion in 1999, but grew to 7 billion in 2011. It is predicted to grow to 7.7 billion by 2020. By the time we develop science for 125-year lifespans, the world might be groaning under a terrible overpopulation crisis (exacerbated by global warming and resource depletion). Much longer lifespans may make the problem significantly worse. The extent of this difficulty will depend on how expensive lifespan extension is. If scientists develop a fairly inexpensive youth pill, and billions start living beyond the age of 100, this might make overpopulation much worse. But if life extension depends on very expensive techniques that only the rich can afford (as depicted in the visual below), the effect on overpopulation might be fairly small.

An ad of the future

Dementia might proliferate. Longer lifespans might be produced by the introduction of some general technique or medicine that slows aging in all parts of the body. But it is just as likely that longer lifespans will be produced through techniques that allow people to replace or rejuvenate particular parts of the body. In the latter case, there will be a very great risk that people will get younger hearts, younger livers, younger lungs, and younger arteries before they get younger brains.

The reason for this risk is that the brain is much more complicated than any other organ in the body. Compared to the brain, the heart and the lungs and the liver are ridiculously simple (and might well be produced by sophisticated 3D printers). So probably decades before there is anything like a technique for rejuvenating the brain (or stopping the aging in the brain), there will be techniques for replacing the heart or the lungs or the liver.

Why is this a problem? It's because people will be tempted to make organ replacements that give them much longer lifespans, but leave them with the same old brains, brains that will tend to become demented when people reach an age of 85, 90, or 95 (because of Alzheimer's disease, strokes, and normal brain aging).

One can only imagine what a cruel twist of fate this might end up being. An 80-year-old might have an operation giving him a new heart, followed by an operation giving him new lungs. He might then rejoice after being told he can look forward to forty more years of life. But then five or ten years later, he might become demented and senile. His extra decades might be spent in a state of vacant senility in a nursing home, at tremendous cost to society.

So you may be saying: no problem; before getting a new heart or lungs, I'll just ask my doctor whether he's sure this won't end up being an expensive ticket to a decade or two in a nursing home. But it's as likely as not that if you ask your doctor, “Are you sure I won't get senile when I'm 100 or 110?” he will simply say: “I don't know.”

So people now about 50 or 60 may be faced with a very tough choice in a few decades. You may be told that some fancy high-tech operation may give you 30 years of additional life, with the risk that you may be spending half of that time as a senile, demented person in a nursing home. Which choice will you make?

Let us hope that they come up with huge breakthroughs in preventing dementia and strokes, medical science that you will be able to afford, so that you will never face such a choice.

Will Extreme Longevity Cause an Ecological Hell?

Over at the very entertaining web site io9.com we had yesterday a facile and naive example of excessive technological optimism, written by George Dvorsky. The piece was entitled No,Extreme Longevity Won't Destroy the Planet.

I don't object to the title: we can overheat and pollute Earth to our maximum ability, and the planet will still be around, and habitable to many forms of life. I do object to the reasoning in this piece that we need not worry about environmental problems that would be caused if the human lifespan were to vastly increase.

Dvorsky claims, “Over the course of the next several decades, and as we eventually (and hopefully) cross into the next century, humanity will progressively shrink its global footprint on the planet — a footprint that, for each of us, is impossibly large right now.” But he does nothing to support this amazing claim that man's footprint on the environment will shrink in the next few decades. We have every reason to believe that this claim is false. Our footprint on the planet is getting worse every decade, as population grows, as consumption increases and as the global warming pollution and other types of pollution get worse. A large part of the problem is that more and more people in Asian and Third World countries are developing Western patterns of consumption, such as all of those Chinese who are buying cars.

Dvorksy asks, “How are we going to feed everybody?” He notes that “we are way off track if we are going to feed everybody by 2050,” citing this study. Besides mentioned genetically engineered crops, all he can do to support the idea of food abundance is to cite the theoretical arguments of Eric Drexler about nanotechnology, and to note that a Star Trek type replicator would help the problem. Not a very compelling case. Drexler claims that precise atomic manufacturing will allow for an age of superabundance, but his claims were extensively criticized by Nobel Prize winner Richard E. Smalley.

Dvorksy then asks,”Where are we going to get all that energy?” He mentions only two technologies: concentrated solar power and space-based solar power. But concentrated solar power is feasible only in places such as Spain and Nevada where there is a very high amount of daily sunlight. Space-based solar power is a speculative system, and no one knows if it will work. 

Dvorksy then finishes up his case by saying that we really have enough room for everyone, since we can build mega-pyramids to house people, and if necessary we can move people into outer space. That's pretty lame reasoning, given the huge costs (both financial and environmental) of doing either of these options.

Overall, I find that Dvorksy has made a very weak case for what he seems to be arguing for, that we can have super-prolonged lifespans without worrying much about the environmental effects. At least Dvorsky's piece is not quite as naïve as a similar recent piece at the SeriousWonder.com web site, which can be summarized as: “Google is working now on age extension. Next stop:utopia.” (The piece now comes up as a blank page, so I won't link to it.)

Consider a few points relating to what man is currently doing to the planet. Today there is a news report saying Health of Oceans Declining Fast.  The International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) warns that the oceans are being warmed by global warming, facing an acidification threat. Stocks of fish are rapidly declining because of overfishing. NASA just released an air pollution map showing huge air pollution levels in India, Europe, and China. The IPCC just released a new report warning about how global warming is imperiling our planet. We are rapidly depleting the fertility of our planet's top soil as discussed here,

with one professor saying that we have only 60 years of usable top soil left. There is a huge risk of future water shortages. Currently nearly one in ten US watersheds are stressed as discussed here, with China, India, and the Middle East facing worse water supply problems. 

Schematic Depiction of Future Environment Problems

It would seem that all of these problems will get much worse if suddenly the human life span increased by several decades. So a cavalier attitude of “no problem, new technology will handle it” seems doubtful.

I think that in the short term there is not much risk of environmental degradation caused by extreme lifespans, because probably for a good long time it will only be rich people who can afford the medical treatments needed for such lifespans. But if we ever get to the point where a large fraction of the people can afford 120 year lifespans, we would then need to introduce new laws or social sanctions to prevent an increase in environmental degradation caused by longer human lifespans.

I can think of two possibilities. One stern possibility is to introduce legislation requiring sterilization (whenever necessary) for anyone who has his lifespan extended way beyond the current limit. This would prevent situations such as a 160 year old man becoming a father at ages 20,22, 45,47,49, 55,57, 65, 75, 77, 85, 87, 95,97,99, 105,108,111, 120, 122, 131,133, and 141. Of course, just mentioning required sterilization brings up all kinds of unpleasant memories and associations, but this might be a rare case when it might be morally justified. 

Another possibility would be to introduce legislation that would tend to make it extremely difficult for any person with a super-extended lifespan to consume at a very high rate in his later years. One can imagine an age-adjusted tax code which slaps very high consumption taxes on people who try to live in great luxury (with a high carbon footprint) after achieving a lifespan greater than 90 years.

In effect, society would then be saying to an 80-year old: You want to live fifty more years? Those years have got to be green years.

An Elysium Future?

This week I saw the new science fiction film Elysium starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster. I thought the movie was fairly plausible and realistic, with the exception of one laughable scene in which a computer expert looks at a few screens of hexadecimal code for a few seconds, and then deduces the extremely complicated task the program was designed for. (This scene is utterly unrealistic because no programmers can read hexadecimal, and even if the program had been written in a more high level language, it takes programmers hours or days to figure out what any complicated program is doing just by reading programming code.)

Credit: Sony Pictures

The movie is set in the year 2154, and depicts a vast gulf between the poor and the rich. The poor are living on an overcrowded, run-down, over-polluted Earth. The rich are living in a huge luxurious rotating space station orbiting Earth. The space station rotates to produce artificial gravity, and those on the space station have an almost suburban lifestyle, with lovely houses and lawns, in addition to medical devices which can cure any health problem. But those left on Earth live in conditions like the filthy shanty towns of third world nations.

There is actually a plausible Malthusian case to be made that the future may resemble the future shown in this movie, although the movie does nothing to explain what caused the world to reach the state the movie depicts. Let us look at some of the factors that might end up producing a world rather like the world depicted in Elysium, not in the next century but in this century. When I refer to a world like the world in Elysium, I don't specifically mean a world in which the rich are living in outer space. I mean instead a world in which the many live in squalid, run-down, overpopulated conditions, and the lucky few live in wonderful high-tech splendor, isolated from the unlucky rabble. The isolation is more likely to occur by the rich fleeing to gated communities, fenced mansions, or high-rise buildings.

Here are factors that may lead to a future like the movie Elysium.

Peak Oil and Peak Coal

Our civilization is centered around cheap oil, but in the future oil may be very expensive, and the global demand for oil may soon far exceed the amount of oil we are producing. In the United States, the production of oil peaked in the early 1970's, and oil production has also peaked in many other countries. Oil is a nonrenewable resource, and we probably only have decades left of crude, easy to get oil. Although there is significant disagreement among experts, many predict that before long the global production of oil will peak, and then begin declining at a rate such as 2 percent per year. This will be at the same time that the world's demand for oil will be growing, as more and more people in countries such as China and India start to drive.

The situation regarding coal is a little brighter, as coal production is expected to increase for a few decades. But many experts predict that coal production will peak around 2040 or 2050, and then begin to sharply decline, because of the depletion of limited fossil fuel resources. This is exactly what happened locally in Pennsylvania, which was once a center of coal mining, until it mined itself out. If coal production plunges, it will be good for the environment, but a potential disaster for civilization. Imagine a time around 2040 when more and more internet-loving people are using ever more electricity, to power their digital devices and to cool their homes (increasingly necessary because of global warming). Then imagine coal production starts plunging because of resource limits. After a few decades of dwindling electricity, the result would be grim. Solar power and wind power will help to bridge the gap, but many are worried that there will still be a huge energy crisis in this century that degrades our civilization.

Overpopulation and Overconsumption

The world population is growing at a rate of about 74 million per year, and experts predict that the population will grow to about 9 billion by the year 2050. Perhaps more worrying than the growth in population is the growth of consumption, with increasing numbers in countries such as India and China
adopting Western lifestyles that include driving, heavy use of electronic gadgets, or heavy meat eating. Increasing levels of consumption and population are straining the Earth's resources and causing environmental harm. For an example, we only need look at the air pollution levels in China.

Global Warming and Soil Depletion


Global warming was not an element in the movie Elysium, but it is easy to imagine global warming playing a part in the sad birth of a planetary landscape like the one depicted in the movie. Global warming may shorten the growing season and may lead to increased droughts in prime agricultural areas. Another severe problem is soil depletion, a process by which soil gradually loses nutrients that it took centuries to acquire. The combination of global warming and soil depletion may mean that we are not able to meet the food demands of the future, possibly resulting in widespread famine.

Water Shortages

Another problem that may lead to a future like that of the movie Elysium is future shortages of fresh water, as described here. For example, the movie is set in Los Angeles, and the California Department of Resources says that if more water supplies aren't found by 2020, the region will face a shortfall nearly as great as the amount consumed today. The Wikipedia article on water scarcity says, "The water tables are falling in scores of countries (including Northern China, the US, and India) due to widespread overpumping using powerful diesel and electric pumps... This will eventually lead to water scarcity and cutbacks in grain harvest.”

Growing Economic Inequality

Another trend that may lead to a future like that of the movie Elysium is the accelerating trend towards wealth inequality , meaning the excessive concentration of wealth in the hands of the few. The graphic below illustrates very vividly the ridiculous excesses of wealth inequality in the United States. As wealth inequality has grown steadily worse over the past twenty years, we have every reason to suspect things will get worse in the future.

Credit: Stephen Ewen

Dystopia or Utopia?

So are we likely to see an earthly dystopia like that depicted in the movie Elysium? I can merely give the same answer given by last year's World Economic Forum's annual report on future risks. The report said that we are now planting the “seeds of dystopia.” If we continue with business as usual, we may well see a grim future like that depicted in the movie, a future of the fortunate few and the miserable many.

We probably won't see the super-rich fleeing to luxurious space stations, as in the movie. But we can expect to see more and more gated communities in which the rich flee to try to live in their own little worlds of comfort, from which the suffering masses are excluded.

One of the ways we can help prevent such a future is by introducing hefty luxury taxes on very expensive items, which will discourage excessive extravagant consumption, and help encourage a more equitable distribution of wealth. Every time a millionaire buys a mansion or a yacht or a jet or a diamond necklace, he or she should be paying a large luxury tax.

The Consumption Bomb

Most of us have heard about the Population Bomb – the thesis that a growing human population will wreak environmental havoc, such as mass starvation. But many think that the real ticking time bomb in our future is not so much a Population Bomb but instead what may be called the Consumption Bomb. The Consumption Bomb is sometimes defined as the threat to our planetary health caused by ever larger numbers of people adopting Western patterns of consumption, causing catastrophic levels of pollution, global warming, and resource depletion.

The following graph compares growth in population and growth in consumption during the period from 1995 to 2005. The blue bars represent increases in population. The orange bars represent growth in consumption.

This graph makes clear: growth in consumption is increasing much more dramatically than growth in population.

Our main environmental problem is not necessarily that the world's population is too high. Our main environmental problem is that the world is consuming too much. Overconsumption is causing the world's carbon dioxide levels to rise to dangerous levels. To support our extravagant consumption levels, we are depleting our limited supplies of fossil fuels, reducing the fertility of our soil, raising the acidity of the oceans, overusing our limited aquifers of water, and engaging in deforestation that reduces the trees we need to soak up the ever-increasing levels of carbon dioxide caused by our wasteful lifestyles.

Now some will look at the above graph and think: so it's all the fault of those Chinese and Indians that have done things such as ditching their bicycles for cars. But it's not just growth in consumption we should consider, but also which countries are consuming the most now.

Below is a graph showing carbon dioxide usage in tons per capita per year. This is more or less equivalent to a graph showing consumption levels per country. 

From this graph we can see that the lion's share of consumption is being done by people in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Saudi Arabia. Even though consumption has been rising in China and India, the per capita consumption in those countries is still less than a third of what it is in the United States.

So we should therefore discard the previous definition of the Consumption Bomb, which was phrased to put the focus on recent adopters of the Western lifestyle. We should instead define the Consumption Bomb simply as the threat to our planetary health caused by high-consumption lifestyles, wherever they may be followed. With this definition we realize that it is not some nouveau riche Chinese who are the main drivers of the Consumption Bomb – it is mainly the citizens of the United States, Canada, Australia, and Saudi Arabia (along with, to a lesser extent, the citizens of ten or fifteen smaller nations).

One of the main catalysts of overconsumption is consumerism. Consumerism is almost a kind of secular religion that is preached to us from birth in a thousand ways, by evangelists such as the pitchmen of Madison Avenue. We are conditioned by television to judge the worthiness of a man by the size or the shininess of his car, or the number of square meters in his house, or how far he traveled for his vacation, rather than what is in the man's heart or mind. Consumerism compels us, in the words of one writer, to borrow money we don't have, to buy things we don't need, to impress people we don't like.

How can you help reduce the devastating ecological blast effects of the Consumption Bomb? Simply consume less. Here are a few things you can do:

1. Eat less meat. According to one study, if a family of four gave up eating steak for just one day a week, it would be the equivalent of taking their car off the road for three months.
2. Drive less, and take public transportation. Stop driving to some place you don't need to go to just to get some photo for a Facebook status update.
3. Stop using Facebook to celebrate frivolous overconsumption. Don't buy some thing you don't need because it would make a nice picture for you to post on Facebook, and don't go to some fancy hotel so you can post a Facebook update to impress your friends. And stop pressing the Like button when you see other people posting photos that document their own frivolous overconsumption. You are only encouraging such people to engage in excessive consumption.
4. Live in the smallest apartment or house you can comfortably live in. When the housing bubble burst, many a family was ruined because it didn't follow this rule.
5. Drop the slogan Bigger is Better, and adopt the slogan Small is Beautiful. Small cars and small homes are beautiful, as are bicycles. Big cars and big homes are (with some exceptions) relics of the past that we should not be building any more.

Four Basic Theories of the Future

There are many different opinions about the likely future of mankind, some optimistic and some pessimistic. Let us classify these views into four different theories. Each theory will be represented as a simple line graph, which will make it easy to understand the main assumption behind the theory.

The Straight-line Theory of Progress

Perhaps the simplest theory about the future is what can be called the straight-line theory of progress. This is the theory that technological and scientific advances are producing a fairly steady rate of progress for mankind. The theory can be represented by the following line graph.



The numbers on the left of the graph represent some level of progress such as knowledge, power, or standards of living. This straight-line theory of progress has been held by many millions of people throughout the past 150 years or earlier (although belief in it took a hit during the dark years of World War I and World War II). The basic idea is that progress in medicine, electronics, education, and other areas is proceeding at a nice, steady clip, leading to a gradually improving human lot.

The Theory of Accelerating Progress

Fairly recently there has come into prominence a theory of the future that is even more optimistic than the straight-line theory of progress. This is the theory of Accelerating Progress. A prominent advocate of such a theory is Ray Kurzweil, who has said that there is a Law of Accelerating Returns, which causes technological growth to occur at an exponential rate. The Theory of Accelerating Progress can be illustrated by the following line graph. Again, the numbers on the left of the graph represent some level of progress such as knowledge, power, or standards of living.

The Theory of Overshoot and Collapse

Despite the optimism of the Theory of Accelerating Progress, there are many reasons for being pessimistic about the future. One of the main concerns of ecological observers is that man's activities are causing a host of ecological problems such as global warming, deforestation, soil depletion, clean water depletion, and ocean acidification. Many are worried that man may be on track for an ecological phenomenon called overshoot and collapse.

Overshoot and collapse is what is observed when a population of living organisms increases in number, until it greatly exceeds what is known as the carrying capacity of the environment – the maximum population that can be supported for an indefinite period. At some point after this, the population can then plummet. An example occurred on St Matthew's Island in Alaska, where 29 reindeer were introduced in 1944, to an island that could support perhaps 1000 reindeer indefinitely. The reindeer population increased to about 6000 by 1963, which was a tremendous overshoot beyond the carrying capacity. At that point there was a dramatic “die-off.” Almost all the reindeer died, and there were only about 42 left by the next summer.

The Overshoot and Collapse theory is that something like this may happen to the human population. It has been estimated that the carrying capacity of our planet is only about 2 billion people, meaning that is the highest population the Earth could support for an indefinite time period such as thousands of years. We have now greatly exceeded that carrying capacity. The result may be global warming, deforestation, a sharp decline in fresh water, a very dangerous depletion in soil fertility, famine, and various other ecological curses that one day cause man's population to plummet.

Here is a graph illustrating the Overshoot and Collapse theory. The numbers are rather arbitrary, but the shape of the curve illustrates the basic idea. The numbers on the left of the graph represent some level of progress such as knowledge, power, population, or standards of living.

The Theory of Collapse and Rebirth

Historians know that the collapse of civilizations is very common. But they also know that when one civilization collapses, it is very common for some new civilization to arise from its ashes. When one civilization collapses, it may leave behind seeds of thought and learning and science that are replanted by some later civilization. One of the great examples is the civilization of Renaissance Italy, which came into being to a large extent from the learning and literature left behind by the ancient Greeks and Romans.

So even if we gloomily imagine some future collapse of human living standards or population, or both, we are entitled to suppose that after that occurs some successor civilization may carry human progress to even higher levels than they were at before the collapse. We can develop such an assumption into a theory of Collapse and Rebirth. This is the theory that our civilization will undergo a collapse, but will later be succeeded by another civilization that scales even greater heights. Here is a graphical depiction of such a theory.



This theory is a kind of marriage of pessimism and optimism. We can flesh out this theory by imagining that after our civilization has paid for its follies, some successor civilization will learn the lessons taught by our mistakes, and will forge forward in a sustainable fashion, avoiding our mistakes.

Can Robot Children Help Save the Earth?

Our planet is in trouble because of the environmental impact of the world's growing population. Carbon dioxide levels will soon hit the level of 400 parts per million. Scientists predict that the average global temperature may rise between 2 and 5 degrees centigrade (as much as 9 degrees fahrenheit) by the year 2100. Fish stocks are declining, and the world's oceans are getting warmer and more acidic, which might one day cause a catastrophic mass extinction event. The global supply of fresh water is declining, and large aquifers in the US and other countries are being drained to dangerous levels. Soil fertility levels are declining, and more and more forests are shrinking because of the global pressure to turn forests into farmland or grazing land.

These problems are all related to the environmental footprint of human beings. As population grows, man's effect on the environment grows. As people consume more and more to mimic the lifestyle of the Affluent Society of western countries, man's ecological footprint gets worse. The average American's carbon footprint exceeds 20 tons of carbon per year. Over a 80 year lifespan, that adds up to 1600 tons of carbon being dumped into the atmosphere.

One way to reduce the bad effect of human society on the environment is to reduce population growth. But other than just sexuality itself, there is a major factor that tends to lead to population growth: the simple fact that having children around is lots of fun. When I am on my deathbed and want to think back on my best times on this planet, I will probably remember playing with my children in the park, or playing with my kids in my back yard, or reading a story book to my children. Quite a few parents may think that teenagers can be trouble, but almost all parents love having around the house a child of 6 or 7.

But what if there was some way to give couples the fun of having a small child around the house, without the heavy environmental impact of having a child? Before long, there may well be a way of doing that. The solution: robot children.

Robot children would be huggable humanoid machines designed to simulate small children. For a married couple the rationale behind obtaining a robot child would be to experience some of the joys of parenthood, with lots of nice companionship, but without the environmental cost of adding a new human being to the planet.

For such an invention to make sense from an environmental standpoint, we should not imagine a child robot that is moving around 14 hours a day. The best type of child robot would be one that would be designed to move around only a few hours on weekdays, after their parents returned from work. That would save a lot of energy. There are several ways in which that might be handled. The crudest way might simply be to equip the child robot with an on/off switch. Parents could then turn on the robot when they came home from work, and turn it off when they went to bed.

The only problem with that approach is that the parents would then be reminded every day that their child robot is not a real child. It might be best to avoid such reminders. One can imagine various ways of limiting the robot's energy use without reminding the parents that the robot child is just a robot. One way would be for the child robot to be programmed to take itself to bed every night. After saying good night to its parents, the robot could then plug itself into a recharging unit, lie on a bed, and pretend to be sleeping. It could then wake up when the parents returned from work the next evening.

Another approach might be for parents to drop their robot children off every morning to a kind of pretend school. Inside the school the robots would do nothing but silently recharge their batteries. The parents could then pick up their robot children from the school.

How soon could such robot children be available? As early as the year 2040. Creating a robot that simulates a small child is vastly easier than creating a robot that could pass for a full grown human being. The robot child would not need to be able to read, write, or do math, as it would not actually attend school. The robot child would merely need to be able to engage in simple conversations with the wedded couple that obtained the robot, and would also need to be able to play a few simple games such as catch and tag. The ELISA computer program created during the 1960's showed that a fairly simple computer program can fool people into thinking they are talking to a real adult person. It is presumably even easier to write a program that can fool you into thinking you are talking to a child.

Robot children could have additional programming allowing them to do chores around the house (or even look after very aged people). The average person would probably greatly prefer to have a household chore robot that simulated a real family member, than to have some big metallic robot helper like the robot maid in the Jetsons TV show.

We can imagine a government offering free robot children to married couples, to reduce the nation's carbon footprint. But the government might need to be selective about who qualified for getting the robot children. The rule should presumably be: the less intelligent the married couple, the more likely they should be to qualify for free robot children.

The rationale behind such an approach is rather obvious. When a very smart man and a very smart woman mate to have a child, it is good for the overall gene pool of the planet, because the child will probably be pretty smart. But when a stupid man and a stupid woman mate to have a child, it is not good for the overall gene pool of the planet. So imagine if a government offered free robot children to newly married couples with lesser intelligence (as determined by their grades, SAT scores, and college record). And imagine that the couples were told they would need to tearfully return their robot children to a government office (never to see them again) if the couple ever had a real child. This would help to increase the quality of the gene pool, by discouraging reproduction by couples with below average intelligence.

This might result in a “win/win” situation: a win for the planet (because it would help to curb overpopulation), and also a win for the human gene pool.

Can We Feed the World in the 21st Century? (Part II)

In the previous blog post we looked at some of the reasons for being pessimistic about the ability of mankind to meet all its food needs in the 21^st century. Now let's look at some reasons for being optimistic that mankind will be able to meet its food needs.

The Optimistic Case

Over the past ten thousand years the number of persons fed per acre of food has grown by a factor of perhaps a thousand times. Back around 6000 BC it would take perhaps 100 acres to feed a single person, because both the planting of crops and the picking of crops was very inefficient. These days a single person can be fed by only a single acre. Modern day tractors are many times more efficient than the horse-drawn plows used long ago, and modern day reapers are many times more efficient than a single person using a scythe or cycle to cut and gather crops.

We can assume that with the growth of technology this trend will continue. Given that Google is making fantastic strides in developing self-driving cars, we can imagine there will be soon be robotized tractors and planting machines that will be able to plant crops more efficiently than we can do today. We will presumably also have robotized crop reaping and crop picking machines that will allow grown food to be reaped far more efficiently than today.

Moore's law is the law that processor power roughly doubles every two years. Because of factors such as Moore's law, you can now buy a computer a hundred times more powerful than was available a few years back, and you can also buy it at a much cheaper price. If we assume that Moore's law will continue in the next decades, it may well be that within a few decades super-efficient agricultural machines become available at a low price throughout the world.

If that happens, the food production per acre for the rest of the world (currently about 1.5 tons of grain per acre) may catch up to the current US food production per acre (currently a little less than 3 tons of grain per acre). If that happens it would probably be enough to meet the world's food needs. It is estimated that we will need a productivity of 2.5 tons of grain per acre to feed the world by 2050.

Another factor that may increase the productivity per acre is the development of new genetically engineered crops. Scientists are working on new genetically engineered crops that will require less water, produce more food, require less fertilizer, and require less pesticide. A single breakthrough in this area could produce a huge increase in global food production.

The concept of eating insects is unattractive to most US citizens, but the United Nations recently stated there is a huge potential for increasing global food production by supplementing food with insects, which can be an excellent source of protein. Such a possibility is at least something that could be used as a last resort to stop famine.

There is also a huge potential for increasing food supplies by decreasing global consumption of meat, and using more land to directly grow crops rather than using the land for raising livestock. Raising livestock such as cows and pigs is a very inefficient way to produce food. The amount of land and energy needed to produce a single kilogram of beef would produce ten kilograms of grain. The production of livestock is a major cause of global warming. It could well be that in the future more and more people will become vegetarians to help reduce global warming. If that happens (and grazing land is converted to grow grain), global food productivity may increase sharply.

Another reason for hope is the possibility that 3D printing technology will be harnessed to help improve global food supplies. We are currently seeing explosive growth in this technology, which uses a “layer by layer” approach to manufacture items entirely different from the factory production technique. Some scientists think that in the future people will have 3D printers that allow them to create food items from raw nutrients, in a very efficient way that bypasses the whole traditional agricultural process.

Despite all these reasons for optimism, there is still a significant risk that in this century there will be a huge shortfall between the amount of food we need and the amount of food we produce. You can do your part to help minimize this risk by sharply reducing (or ideally even stopping) your consumption of meat, particularly red meat. If you don't have the willpower to be a vegetarian, try skipping meat every day or 5 days a week. You will help decrease global warming, and decrease the chance of starvation in the future (not to mention decrease your chance of getting cancer and heart disease).

Can We Feed the World in the 21st Century? (Part I)

One of the great clouds hanging over this century is whether we will be able to feed the rising human population.  Already millions go to bed hungry every night, but what will happen when the human population grows much greater? Will there perhaps be mass starvation? Let's look at the issue from a pessimistic standpoint and an optimistic standpoint. Today's post will look at the pessimistic case.  Tomorrow's post will look at the optimistic case.

The Pessimistic Case

We don't know how much population will grow in the coming decades,
but the United Nations has three projections  shown below:

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

According to the first projection the population will grow to 16 billion. According to
the second projection, the population will grow to 10 billion. According to the third projection, the population will grow to 8 billion, and then begin to decline. Most likely, there will be a much greater need for food supplies as the population grows.

However, the production of food is critically related to the availability of fossil fuel energy supplies, particularly oil. Oil is used throughout the process of producing and transporting food, most notably in the production of fertilizers and in shipping and trucking food products. But global oil production may have peaked, or may be near to peaking.

Below is a graph from the International Energy Agency predicting future oil production:

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IEA_2010UnknownSources2.jpg

Now upon first looking at this graph, you might say: it doesn't look too bad, because the prediction is that production will slightly increase. But notice the dark blue portion of the graph above. That represents how known developed oil fields will decline in the next few decades. The other 2 blue parts of the graph basically fall under the category of “what we may get if we are incredibly lucky.” We have every reason to be skeptical that all this huge amount of oil production from “fields yet to be found” and “fields yet to be developed” will actually come about. Many say that the International Energy Agency prediction shown above is guilty of a gigantic degree of wishful thinking. They could have just as easily made a graph predicting vastly less future production from “fields yet to be found” and “fields yet to be developed.”

Here is a graph from a few years back showing future oil production from various estimates:

Source: http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/11/13/225447/79

As we can see from this graph, many experts predict that global oil production will soon begin to decline very substantially. Such predictions shouldn't be surprising. Oil is a non-renewable resource created from biological and geological processes that occurred millions of years ago, over the course of millions of years. We know that oil production in the United States followed a bell-shaped curve, reaching its peak around 1970. The US's current oil production is only a little more than half of what it was in 1970.  Many countries around the world have experienced the same bell-shaped curve, and have  oil production much lower than it once was.

Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/US_Oil_Production_and_Imports_1920_to_2005.png


So what will happen to our food production if oil production declines sharply? With a rising population, the most likely result may be mass starvation. There would seem to be a high chance of mass starvation involving many millions of people.  Since modern food production is so dependent upon oil, it seems that to adequately feed a growing population, we need a sharp increase in oil production, but the exact opposite may be in store.

Another reason to worry about the future food supply is soil erosion.  Some 40% of the soil used for agriculture is classified as depleted.  It is estimated that soil is being used at a rate that is ten times greater than the rate at which the soil is naturally replenished. Some think that we have only about 60 years of topsoil left.  (http://world.time.com/2012/12/14/what-if-the-worlds-soil-runs-out/)

Much of the world's food comes from fishing, but fish stocks are being stressed around the world.  All too efficient methods such as bottom trawling are leading to situations where some areas now have few of the fish they have provided for food in the past.  The UN Food and Agricultural Organization estimates that coastal fisheries have declined by 50% in the past 30 years.

Another factor to consider is global warming. As the temperature rises in the decades ahead, it may have a negative effect on global agricultural production. Temperature rises lead to more droughts. Temperature rises increase the need for irrigation. Warmer winters will mean that fewer insects will be killed off during the winter, leading to an increase in some insect populations that may threaten crops.

In fact, as population grows, more and more of the world's forests are being turned into farmland, which may itself increase global warming (since forests soak up the carbon dioxide that is causing global warming). There is also the fact that fresh water supplies are becoming more and more stressed, which may have a very negative effect on our ability to irrigate farmland.

Below is a graph based on predictions of a computer model called World3, popularized by the famous “Limits to Growth” books:

Source: http://www.fraw.org.uk/mei/ecolonomics/00/ecolonomics-20090912.shtml

In this model food production hits a peak a little into the 21st century, and then starts to decline, partially because of declines in resources (which include oil and also fertile soil). After a lag of a decade or so, population starts to plummet, presumably because of mass starvation.

So is this what the future has in store? Perhaps not, because there are some optimistic factors to consider. We will examine those in the next blog post.