Hamilton.es@PARC-MAXC@sri-unix (10/30/82)
Space is NOT an ultimate answer to population pressures. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I recall someone calculated that if we continue to increase our numbers at the present rate, in a few thousand years humanity would have to expand outward in a ball at the speed of light to avoid overpopulation. Just think for a minute -- as the near space around you fills up, the constant overpopulation stream from your planet has to go farther and farther, meeting more and more people along the way, to reach the frontier. (Anybody care to come up with some numbers?) I'd like to discuss optimum population size, which has relevance for both earth and space colonies. I believe the optimum population is one which is big enough that most important economies of scale can exist, and with enough redundancy such that a large common-mode disaster would not cripple the economy. I strongly suspect that a world population of around 100 million would be plenty large enough to meet these criteria. Further, as genetic engineering raises the avg I.Q., and people have lots of free time to devote to the arts, we will not need large populations to get cultural variety. Unfortunately, as technology marches onward, it seems like a larger and larger production runs (and thus, population) are required to achieve the necessary economies of scale. Conceivably, robotics and easily-reprogrammable factories will change this. Does anyone know of any studies addressing these questions? I'm also interested in the question of technological bootstrapping. How long would it take a couple of thousand people dropped on a tropical island (or minimal space colony) with nothing, to develop to our current technological state? Suppose we gave them all our knowledge (microfiche, access to computer data bases, etc.) but no tools. How long would it take them to progress from stone axe, to blast furnace, to VLSI factory? What are the critical points? For instance, would giving them a bar of platinum, or a human-powered lathe, or a bank of solar cells, or whatever, reduce the time by a generation? Anybody know of any studies (or SF novels!) addressing this in detail? --Bruce