Urban nightmares

“The future is a high-rise world”, The Age, 22/12/2010. I have come to detest architects in general; most seem to be enraptured by the idea of cramming millions of humans into futuristic hi-tech cities, and rendering utopian artwork of such. One of the most extreme examples is that of housing up to one million people in a single tower in London (architect’s webpage) to accomodate its growing population. To me that sounds like a nightmarish way to live, crammed into a small space with that many people – “battery-hen living” is my name for it. The architect in the first article, Thom Mayne, seems to be one of those arrogant types who think city living is sophisticated and sneers at suburbs – I just want to slap him!

“What future for intelligent life in space?”, The Space Review, 7/11. This opinion piece by Stephen Ashworth asserts that colonizing space (as opposed to other planets) and exploiting its resources will enable humanity to keep expanding almost indefinitely. This comes across to me as “Space Cadet” thinking – an overly-optimistic view that going into space will magically solve humanity’s problems. Somewhat alarmingly, he notes that such expansion will supposedly allow the human population to expand hugely:

In this way, very large future human populations are conceivable. For example, John S. Lewis has reckoned that the material resources of the main asteroid belt, together with large-scale use of solar power, would allow at least 10 million billion people to support themselves (Mining the Sky, p.196). When one adds in the Jupiter trojans and the opportunities presented by the outer solar system, even larger populations become possible. Frank Drake and Dava Sobel have put the overall carrying capacity of our system at “more than a hundred billion billion human beings” (Is Anyone Out There?, p.128), while Marshall Savage suggests an even larger figure (The Millennial Project, p.303). We do not need to quibble over orders of magnitude in order to make the point that the propensity for economic and population growth characteristic of industrial civilization is well matched with the opportunities offered by its local environment, provided that the 21st century sees a shift of the focus of industrial and population growth away from Earth and onto large-scale development of the natural resources of near-Earth space.

It’s the same old infinite growth mentality that is causing so much damage to humanity and the enviroment on Earth. Realistically, I can’t see space colonies happening before mid- or late-century – if ever. And most people would want to stay on Earth, on which humans have evolved and are intensely adapted to.

China’s population reached 1.34 billion last year – attributed mainly to people living longer rather than more births. But now the furphy of the “ageing population” is being raised:

Cai Yong said allowing more births now would help the country cope with looking after its large and growing elderly population. “To have a stable society, you better start now, to think ahead of time because it takes 20 to 30 years to have another generation come down the line,” he said.

And then they will be back to square one, because the increased number of young people born will grow old, and require yet more young people born to look after them… *Sigh*

Dwindling supplies

An alarming article about our water supplies from The Age, 1/7:

Drought runs into 13th year

Melbourne has endured its driest first half year on record, with less than 50 per cent of the long-term average falling up until late yesterday afternoon.

The year’s rainfall up until 9am yesterday was 126.2 millimetres, 8 millimetres below the previous half-year record low of 134.5 millimetres set in 1967. The rain that fell later yesterday was not included in the half-year total, as the bureau applies a 9 a.m. cut-off time on the last day of the month when recording rainfall.

The bureau’s Victorian climate services manager, Harvey Stern, said Melbourne had not recorded above-average annual rainfall since 1996. “It is going to take many years of good rainfall to remove these deficiencies,” Dr Stern said.

Melbourne Water said the city’s dams had received about half the average inflow since the start of the year, with the reconnection of the Tarago reservoir last week providing the only real boost to water supplies this year.

I believe this “drought” is more climate change, and permanent – with dire implications for a city with an unsustainably-growing population. Reservoir storage reserves are at 26.5%, the lowest they have ever been.

“Melbourne suburbs are the best and the future’s in the west”, Herald-Sun, 7/7. A baffling opinion piece from Bernard Salt, who seems to think that Melbourne should keep expanding indefinitely and that population growth is a good thing.

Population growth supports job growth and business opportunity. Melbourne is growing at a record rate of 74,000 residents every year. Every 10,000 new residents expand the retail spending pie by $9 million and create demand for about 4000 new households. More jobs and rising business confidence are good for the future prosperity of this city and its residents.

Such growth puts pressure on resources, transport and utilities, and makes life increasingly stressful for residents. It can’t continue indefinitely.

Melbourne, and indeed Australia, must expand its population for two fundamental reasons. Developed nations have a humanitarian responsibility to accommodate a greater share of the world’s rising population. And with the imminent retirement of the baby-boomer generation (who first reach pensionable age in July 2011) we need to shore up the tax base by drawing young, fit, skilled migrants who can go straight into the workforce. Someone else has paid for these migrants’ education, health and defence: they arrive here, go to work and export tax to the rest of us. This is how we will fund the retirement of the baby-boomer generation.

We have no such responsibility – if other countries can’t or won’t contain their expanding populations, why should we have to cope with the fallout? The young migrants will eventually age and add to the strain on resources. And the baby-boomers will just have to look after themselves (or be euthanized!) – they have messed up the world for my generation and those following.

I sent in a rather snippy letter, don’t know if it will be published:

No, Bernard Salt, there are no positives in Melbourne’s population growth, just increasing strain on resources and utilities, as well as stress for residents. Australia has no responsibility to other countries who can’t or won’t contain their expanding populations – why should we have to cope with the fallout? And the baby-boomers will just have to look after themselves – they have messed up the world for my generation (Gen-X) and those following.

“Keep baby hope alive with IVF”, Herald-Sun, 7/7. Another entitlement whinge about how IVF is a “right” and should continue to be government-funded.

Surely having a baby is a basic right worth fighting for? Why, then, would we ever think of restricting access to IVF just to those who can afford it?

[…]

And so we must fight for the right of 11,000 babies to be born every year to parents who desperately want to have kids, but can’t for medical reasons.

Reproduction is not a “right”, and IVF certainly isn’t! People who can’t have children can find other means of fulfilment, and infertility is not in the same category as a life-threatening or disabling illness. IVF should not be taxpayer-funded! The world is overpopulated as it is.

A collection of letters from The Age, which often express opinions on various issues better than I can:

6/6:

A lottery no one wants to win

Mark Davis (Comment, 4/7) argues that Australia should triple its intake of refugees. Presumably, so should every other developed country. Irrespective of whether resettlement is doubled or quadrupled, the few who win the resettlement lottery hardly make a dent in the overall numbers of at least 35 million displaced persons/refugees in the world, with the numbers increasing.

Uprooting these people from their own culture and resettling them into an alien one is not the answer. In desperation they cling to their own communities and form a culture within a culture, which makes neither them nor the host country happy.

The problem requires an in-situ solution. Almost all conflict arises from an excess demand for the planet’s scarce resources – in other words: too many people crowding each other out on a planet that is fixed in size.

Time is overdue for global leaders to recognise this population explosion issue, take it seriously and afford it highest priority. The Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December would be a good starting point.

– Margit Alm, Eltham

30/6:

Wild about the west

I support Justin Madden in shifting the growth boundary in the west. I, like a lot of other people, do not want to be forced into living in overpriced, small high-rise living, where you can hear and smell what your neighbours are cooking.

The do-gooders, who usually live in the east, are trying to force their ideals on the working class; these snobs do not even know how to get to the west.

The land in the west is infertile and useless for farming. The so-called native grasslands are scattered and you cannot tell the difference between native grass and weeds. Native grasses will be catered for in the proposed growth extension in a more controlled way.

Some also want to stop population growth. Next they’ll want to limit families to one child. What comes first, the greenies’ ideals, or affordable land for hard-working families who want to build affordable housing on their own little block? The west is a great place to live; bring it on, Mr Madden.

– Lance Hughes, Melton

[Totally clueless. The “do-gooders” want to preserve liveability and open space – and stopping population growth is the only way to ensure Melbourne has a sustainable future, and that people don’t have to live crammed together in high-density apartments.]

Only way is up

Let me get this straight. High population growth encouraged by the Government is causing high levels of greenhouse gas emissions, price rises for water and power as we run low on supplies, rate rises up to three times the inflation rate to pay for new infrastructure, loss of productive farm land due to urban expansion, and loss of open space and tree cover in or near urban areas as they are infilled. Could someone remind me again how this is benefiting us?

– Jennie Epstein, Little River

1/7:

Disaster in waiting

Reports that 10,000 people are in Malaysia and planning to “migrate” to Australia using people smugglers are a cause for concern. The debate about whether the Government’s softened stance is causing this problem is irrelevant. The reality is that it is happening.

Refugee advocates who would throw open the doors to all comers need to recognise that even more will follow by example, regardless of whether these potential immigrants are “refugees” or not.

The world recession and continuing political unrest will further exacerbate the situation to the point of impossibility.

Like Grocery Watch and FuelWatch, the Rudd Government will soon have to abandon another election undertaking and further tighten immigration controls to avoid this potential catastrophe.

– Greg Angelo, Balwyn North

2/7 – a sarcastic letter about rising house prices, which are almost always reported positively, but in reality these only benefit greedy investors, developers and speculators:

Great, let’s party

Attention students, pensioners, the unemployed and low-income workers. It is time to celebrate the “housing recovery” (The Age, 1/7). Rental “yields” will continue to “climb”, the “damage” of cheaper housing is undone, and Melbourne prices have “soared” the fastest, “eclipsing” everywhere else in the country to reach “record highs”.

– Scott Fisher, Kiama, NSW

4/7:

Ask tough questions

Will extending Melbourne’s population solve the water shortage imposed by climate change? Will extending housing onto dwindling arable land feed those who live there?

Will exploding global population create the resources to support it? Won’t Government funding for first home buyers merely force up house prices?

Isn’t it time our politicians, and those who vote for them, think about the real questions we must confront? Answers are easy; it’s the questions we don’t ask that matter.

– Eric Mack, Eltham

A site called Hard SF has an opinion page, Can Space Colonization End Overpopulation? I have griped before (12/5/2009 entry) about Conservative/Libertarian “Space Cadets” who think humanity can solve all its problems by expanding into space and continuing as before with its destructive and wasteful behavior, as there are supposedly unlimited resources in the solar system and beyond. The article makes clear the absurdity of transporting large numbers of people off-world.

Suppose, in order to accomplish all of these necessary projects it took 75 years rather than 50. At a 1% population growth rate, the Earth’s population in 2083 would be 13.8 billion with 138 million more each year. Suppose, all of this took 100 years. At a 1% rate, by 2108, the population would be 17.7 billion. It would be necessary to take 177 million people off-planet every year just to maintain Earth at 17.7 billion. If we consider 17.7 billion too many and want to reduce Earth’s population, it would be necessary to transport even more millions to other habitats.

I do not believe our current population growth will permit us enough time for this to be a practical solution. It seems that by the time we may be able to accomplish the technological marvels that would be required, the Earth’s population would already be at too great a state of crisis. Other means are needed that can help us avoid such a huge population which can be implemented in a shorter period of time.

Space cadet growthists

Spaceflight is one of my interests, but I get very irritated by the growthists who seem endemic in the space community (many are of a Libertarian or Conservative political outlook, which tends to encourage such a mentality). They believe the human population can (and should!) keep growing indefinitely if humanity can access resources in the Solar System (via asteroid mining, etc.). Of course, the technology to enable this is nowhere near developed (perhaps not before the end of this century, if ever), but they continue espousing their deluded fantasies. This article, “The Philosophy of Space” by Dennis Wingo is an example of such thinking.

The reason for human spaceflight beyond the pure adventure is as old as mankind, moving outward to build a better life and make money. Obtaining riches for God and country as well.

The mentality that has got humans into trouble before (the current economic crisis being one): greed and hubris.

I use the New Scientist issue as a foil as it pretty much represents the arguments today that descend from the Club of Rome study and those that advocate the contraction of our industrial civilization and perpetual life on our one small planet as the only possible future that we have. Space advocacy at its finest rejects the notions embodied in this mindset and lays down the gauntlet to posit that not only is the future bright, it is unlimited through the economic development of space, our solar system, and the incorporation of its resources into our economic system here on the Earth. Rather than belabor this through highly technical explanations, a vision of the Earth in the year 2100 is laid out for inspection to see if it is more desirable than the bullet points above for the year 2099.

The mindset he derides espouses the philosophy of not living beyond one’s means, and caring for the environment. It is a prudent and sustainable way to live. His philosophy is about greed and exploitation, whether of Earth or of the space beyond it. For the forseeable future we are confined to Earth, and it is beholden upon humanity to live responsibly.

I found this via “Dennis Wingo - Why Space? Why Now?” at NASA Watch. Most commenters agree with him; one posting as “Reality” offers an opposing view. Of course Dennis Wingo virulently attacks him two posts down (perhaps he does not want to see the truth). There are also comments at the Public Population Forum.

Good luck with that. Technology has produced more freedom, longer lifespans, and greater opportunity for humans than any other cultural construct in the history of the planet. As for Gaia, maybe she likes plastic and created humans just to make some for her. What you are attempting here is to use a “good panic” to achieve some quasi-socialist-neoluddite world that is optimum as you see it. We are approaching these problems as human beings to create the conditions for the continuation of freedom and the expansion of humanity into the cosmos.

Technology has also caused a lot of problems (I am not anti-technology, but anti-misuse of it). As for the frivolous comment about plastic, read this online chapter, “Polymers are Forever”, from The World Without Us. He then inevitably mentions the “freedom” word (it had to come out sometime). It’s the typical Libertarian mentality: do away with governments and regulations so you can do whatever the hell you want – they see space as the “next frontier” which will enable them to do that.

An extract from an entry at the Steady State Blog on the Space Cadet mentality that technology can solve anything. They don’t address the possibility of going into space to find more resources – but as I noted, the technology to enable that could be decades away.

Substitution

Objection: “As we use up resources, we will find substitutes or alternatives.”

Reality: This argument is akin to the technology argument – it rests on the notion of humans using their cleverness to solve the problems of over-consumption of resources. Although people have demonstrated some successes in finding alternatives to meet needs when resources become scarce (e.g., fiber optic instead of copper wire or particle board instead of timber), some materials and services are not so readily substitutable. What are the substitutes for clean supplies of fresh water, pollination, intact species habitat, or climate stability? Several characteristics of resource scarcity events are negative for long-term sustainability. Oftentimes substitutes are simply extracted from other areas of the planet to avoid local scarcity (e.g., oil from the Mideast nations to feed U.S. demand). Scarcity and price increases often provide an increasing incentive to liquidate natural capital (e.g., oil corporation profits when demand outstrips supply) even as alternatives are being developed. Substitutes are often not developed or manufactured sustainably. For example, in the search for a substitute for fossil fuels, renewable energy from biomass is spurring transformation of tropical forests into palm oil or sugarcane fields.

Case Study: What resources will be used as substitutes for Haiti’s forests and the ecological services they once provided? Economic growth on Haiti generated widespread deforestation, first through sugarcane planting, then through timber sales, and finally through subsistence farming and provision of fuel wood. Already impoverished, with only 1.4% of their land in forest, the citizens of Haiti face ongoing soil erosion, serious floods, and loss of biodiversity.

Technology

Objection: “Humans are clever. Our technology will allow us to manage any problems with resource use, energy, and ecological health.”

Reality: Some economists think that, because a particular production process can become more efficient (more output per unit of natural capital), there is no limit to economic growth. These economists and “technological optimists” are disregarding the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy law, which tells us that we cannot achieve 100% efficiency in the economic production process. When the entropy law is applied across all economic sectors, or in other words when the limits to efficiency have been reached, the only remaining way to grow the economy is by using more natural capital (including energy).

Case Study: Besides the limits to efficiency, there is another issue with technology. Societies have wielded it in many ways, some useful for long-term sustainability, and some harmful. When gasoline prices rose in the 1970s, automobile companies developed new technology to increase the efficiency of engines. Marked improvements in vehicle mileage occurred with a resultant drop in pollution from transportation. When gas prices dropped in the 1980s and 1990s, fuel efficiency in the United States stagnated. The technological improvements were used to provide increased horsepower to smaller cars and sufficient horsepower to big cars, trucks, and SUVs. Technology that could have continued to improve the fuel efficiency of the U.S. auto fleet was used instead to power bigger and faster vehicles, resulting in a less sustainable transportation systems and more pollution (e.g., smog and greenhouse gases). In addition, technology has widely been used to increase the liquidation of natural capital. Readily recognizable examples include technologies for logging and fishing.

Growing like a cancer

“Pressure grows as Melbourne rockets to 4 million”, The Age, 24/4. Another dismaying report from the Bureau of Statistics, showing that Melbourne is growing at an alarming rate (an average of 1500 people coming here a week).

The label of Australia’s fastest-growing city might once have been one for which Melbourne yearned but these days it could be more of a burden for Premier John Brumby and his Government, adding to overcrowded trains, congested roads, housing prices, housing shortages and delays in hospital treatment. In the past, the State Government used to seize on figures showing strong population growth as evidence that Victoria was leading the nation. Yesterday Mr. Brumby was silent on the data showing even faster growth.

Because it makes life increasingly unbearable for those already living here! Increased stress due to increasing competition for resources and living space, which means that crime will invariably rise. The suburbs continue to spread across the once-open land like a metastizing cancer – but residents oppose increasing suburban density:

Despite the pressures of a booming population – much of it driven by overseas students and new migrants wanting to settle close in – growth in the inner and middle suburbs declined significantly, as rising costs and council opposition blocked many residential redevelopments.

And rightly, too! The suburbs as originally designed were intended to give some space for the residents of the houses, and avoid the squalor of overcrowded slums like those in London. Unfortunately that vision is being eroded as high-density developments intrude.

“Influx putting the brakes on travel times”, The Age, 24/4. The overcrowding is also leading to increased road traffic as underfunded, privately-run public transport proves inadequate to cope.

Melbourne is not yet at the nightmarish level of megacities such as Tokyo, Moscow, Mexico City or London, but it is heading in that direction.

“Move over, it’s getting crowded”, The Australian, 22/4. Good opinion piece on the negatives of population growth.

“Jason Kenney fires up the melting pot”, Ottawa Citizen, 18/4. An article about the Canadian Minister for Immigration and Multiculturalism who is taking the (now-radical) view of encouraging immigrants to integrate, rather than wall themselves off in ethnic communities – “Integration, not separation” could be a slogan; such a policy encourages social cohesion and harmony.

In the past two months, Kenney has been speaking out at newspaper editorial boards, chambers of commerce and universities, raising concerns over the language abilities of immigrants, the danger of ethnic enclaves, even the “radicalization” and “extremism” among some tiny pockets of immigrants.

Multiculturalism? “Marvellous, established, irreversible.” Just don’t expect taxpayers to foot the bill for cultural festivals. “We don’t need government grants for cultural communities to celebrate their customs,” said Kenney in an interview Friday.

He makes no apologies for diverting the focus of the multiculturalism department from anti-racism programming to what he calls community “bridge building.”

“The best way to combat bigotry, racism or stereotypes is for people to get to know each other,” he said. “I’m a little skeptical that sending people to sterile sensitivity-training seminars is going to address those who harbour racist sentiments.”

To the topic of space travel. I was reading the comments at a NASA Watch entry, “NASA Faces Tough Choices & Needs an Administrator Now”, and some of the commenters display a dislike of “greenies” (environmentalists) apparently because they have the audacity to suggest that humanity should learn to live within its means rather than look to space as a source of more resources to fuel endless growth (and that they are also to blame for the decline of the U.S. space program in general!). A comment by Dennis Wingo that exemplifies this:

We must recapture what is important about space, which is that we live in a solar system rich with resources and that it can be the ultimate legacy in history of the United States of America to open that frontier for all mankind.

[…]

Today in Japan, a man named Meadows received Japan’s highest honor for a book that is complete bullshit, which is that we live on this single planet, this is all that we have, and that we must learn to live with less. Dr. David Webb once told me that he was a member of the board of directors of the group that funded the study that Limits to Growth was based upon. After the Club of Rome report was provided to them, he asked why space development was not included as an alternate future. He was informed that none of the people in the study believed in space as an option (this was circa 1968). Dr. Webb then started on the path to teach people about the value of space and there is an ad on this page today for the graduate space studies program that he set up.

Space is the Black Swan of civilization, the disruptive technology that will allow us to look back on Limits to Growth as a quaint example of limited thinking about the future.

[…]

We will have an RLV when there is a market to support it. Get over it. We will have the support of society for our dreams, when we quit dreaming small dreams. We create markets, and we fulfill dreams, by the development of the economic resources of the solar system, beginning at the Moon, asteroids, and then Mars.

Getting to space is currently expensive and difficult, so mining the resources of the solar system is a long way off yet (I don’t see it happening before the end of this century, if ever, barring some technological breakthrough such as making nuclear fusion energy viable). This attitude does nothing to solve the environmental problems besetting Earth, and perpetuates the mentality of greed. Humans should learn to live within their means as it is the prudent and moral thing to do. (I have some difficulty creating a coherent argument to counter such a viewpoint – any better suggestions? The article, “The Dream Palace Of The Space Cadets”, provides some counter-arguments to some of the nonsense espoused by “armchair experts” in the space community – I wrote about this attitude in my 4/2/2009 entry.)

“Meadows” is Dr. Dennis Meadows, author of Limits to Growth – the Japanese award is described here.

Two is enough

It was revealed that the woman, Nadya Suleman, who recently had octuplets by IVF already previously had 6 children (also conceived by IVF). There is some public outrage. I find this comment irksome, though:

“A number of commentators are saying a woman with six kids should not be allowed medical treatment to have additional ones, and I think, at a common sense level, that makes good sense,” Mr. Tipton said. “However, to make that work, that means someone is going to start deciding for other people how, when and why they can have children. That’s a very big step and one that we might not be prepared to take.”

Well, “someone” damn well should decide! In my view she should be compulsorily sterilized! At the very least, she should not receive any government (taxpayers’) assistance with her family, as this only encourages others. People who chose to have large numbers of children are selfish as this adds to the competition for resources amongst an already too-large population.

(I found a photo of her during her pregnancy – seriously scary! Her abdomen looks ready to explode! I shudder at the damage 14 pregnancies have done to her body.)

“Green GP refuses to help women have large families”, Times Online, 1/2. “Dr. Pippa Hayes, a Devon GP, has a conscientious objection. She believes couples should restrict their families to two children – and says she would not help to provide fertility treatment for women who want to have exceptionally large families.” Someone with the right mindset and a sense of social responsibility! In the same issue, a U.K. environmentalist, Jonathon Porritt, said that there should be incentives to have no more than two children, and those who chose to have more are irresponsible (“Two children should be limit, says green guru”). Yes, this is social engineering, but if you want a livable society, such engineering is necessary! Making the choice to have a large family should become regarded as socially unacceptable.

“One last chance to save mankind”, 23/1, New Scientist. Environmentalist James Lovelock is critical of the government attempts at being green (which I share the same cynicism for):

Not a hope in hell. Most of the “green” stuff is verging on a gigantic scam. Carbon trading, with its huge government subsidies, is just what finance and industry wanted. It’s not going to do a damn thing about climate change, but it’ll make a lot of money for a lot of people and postpone the moment of reckoning. I am not against renewable energy, but to spoil all the decent countryside in the UK with wind farms is driving me mad. It’s absolutely unnecessary, and it takes 2500 square kilometres to produce a gigawatt - that’s an awful lot of countryside.

He believes that humans will eventually learn to regulate their behavior, but things will get very unpleasant before that:

I’m an optimistic pessimist. I think it’s wrong to assume we’ll survive 2°C of warming: there are already too many people on Earth. At 4°C we could not survive with even one-tenth of our current population. The reason is we would not find enough food, unless we synthesised it. Because of this, the cull during this century is going to be huge, up to 90 per cent. The number of people remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less. It has happened before: between the ice ages there were bottlenecks when there were only 2000 people left. It’s happening again.

“Tehran’s Health Patrol”, TIME magazine, 29/1. Despite the bad press Iran gets, it seems to be doing something right with health care, including enabling women access to family planning. In this regard, Iran is more socially progressive than many of its neighbors!

Women Health Volunteers arose out of a mix of necessity and pragmatism as well as a fundamental belief, expressed by Malek-Afzali, that “women are the axis of health development and health is the axis of sustainable development.”

[…]

Perhaps the program’s most crucial success was to introduce family-planning to revolutionary Tehran, an effort that has brought down the birthrate per female, from six children to two, with the full support of religious leaders. They at first urged Iranians to boost the ranks of the “soldiers of Islam” but then promoted contraception to stop the alarming growth in population. The lower birthrate is critical to a nation like Iran as its economy evolves. About 7,000 women went door-to-door in Tehran and talked to mothers about the benefits of smaller families, informed them of the different types of birth control and handed out condoms and pills. “I must give credit to Iran’s religious leaders for a pragmatic and creative approach to family-planning,” says Dr. Mohamed Abdel-Ahad, an Egyptian who is head of the United Nations Population Fund in Iran.

“Water – another global ‘crisis’?”, BBC News, 2/2. Population growth is briefly mentioned as a factor in worldwide water shortages, but not the solution of reducing such growth!

A more populated world – and there could be another 2.5 billion people on the planet by 2050 – is likely to be a thirstier world. Those extra people will need feeding; and as agriculture accounts for about 70% of water use around the world, extra consumption for growing food is likely to reduce the amount available for those basic needs of drinking, cooking and washing.

“Planetary demographics and space colonization”, The Space Review, 2/2. There is a belief amongst some spaceflight enthusiasts that the overpopulation problem on Earth can be solved by sending off the excess people onto space colonies or other worlds. This is a foolish fantasy as:

• The development of sustainable space colonies could be centuries away – I can’t see it happening this century at least, unless there is some radical technological breakthrough.
• If the negative attitude towards regulating populations (i.e. “social engineering”) doesn’t change, then the off-world colonies will eventually face the same problems as on Earth – depletion of resources from overpopulation. So colonization is only sending the problem somewhere else (i.e. delaying the inevitable).

The very real problems of environmental degradation from overpopulation need to be solved this century if we want a still-habitable planet by its end.