Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.3 4.3bsd-beta 6/6/85; site ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!ucbvax!mc.lcs.mit.edu!KFL From: KFL@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU ("Keith F. Lynch") Newsgroups: net.space Subject: Re: Population Message-ID: <[MC.LCS.MIT.EDU].852574.860316.KFL> Date: Sun, 16-Mar-86 18:36:18 EST Article-I.D.: <[MC.LCS.MIT.EDU].852574.860316.KFL> Posted: Sun Mar 16 18:36:18 1986 Date-Received: Tue, 18-Mar-86 01:39:45 EST Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The ARPA Internet Lines: 145 From: Chuck Simmons In your counterexample, I see that you have proposed increasing the population by a factor of 1000 as well as increasing the disposable income by a factor of 1000. Umm, it is not so much that I am proposing doing anything. My main point is that it should be up to the people involved to decide how many children they should have, whether to live in space or on Earth, how hard they want to work for the incremental dollar, etc. Nobody should have the right to decide those things for others. I am not saying that I should sit in a control room somewhere and set the population and median income to some figure. I don't think that I or any government has the power to do anything of the sort. And if anyone did have such a power, they shouldn't. There is no point in colonizing space, or even on living on Earth, unless we can be free. My thesis is that increased population is a bad idea unless you take steps to increase the standard of living of the current population as well as take steps to maintain an acceptably high standard of living for whatever future sized population you are encouraging. How do you propose increasing the standard of living of the present population in the short term? There is only so much wealth, and it isn't going to increase by fiat. Only by long hard work by a lot of people over a long period. And it cannot increase by more than a factor of ten or so (very rough estimate) without considerable use of space resources. If you are saying we should not colonize space or do anything which might make the people of the U.S. wealthier until we bring the rest of the world up to our standards, all I can say is it isn't going to happen, there isn't enough wealth to go around. What if Columbus was not allowed to sail so long as there remained a slum in Europe? Increasing the disposable income by a factor of 1000 would be an acceptable increase in the standard of living as far as I am concerned. Also notice that in your comparison of 1G people with 100M dollars that each person could buy the equivalent of a Cray. Well, I think that the whole nature of the economy would be so different that this sort of linear comparison isn't really very meaningful. Yes, I know I have been the main offender here. But what is meant by the processing power of a Cray? Don't many of us already have the processing power of a supercomputer of 20 years ago? Don't you think it is likely that the micro of 20 years from now will exceed the power of the Cray in many ways? Twenty years ago, who would have believed that the average person could ever afford to purchase ten million of anything? (i.e. on-chip transistors in an average high-end micro.) We run into the same sort of trouble when trying to compare the current value of the dollar with its past value. Even over a period of one year. There is a lot of dispute about what the current inflation rate is, for instance. I believe it is around 8%. The government is saying it is less than 1%. As for just how rich in today's terms John Rockefeller (first dollar billionaire, around 1910) was. At the time you could buy a good meal in a good restraunt for ten cents. But you couldn't buy the processing power of an APPLE II for any price. And central air conditioning would have cost hundreds of thousands. And how much was Judas payed in terms of today's currency? In this future economy, I expect that food, clothing, water, and shelter would be quite inexpensive. Air would be inexpensive but not free as it is on Earth. Most kinds of hardware would be fairly inexpensive, except those which had some risk associated with them. Risky things (cars, spacecraft, power tools) would have a cost that mostly subsidizes lawsuits against the manufacturers. Anything that had to be custom designed or manufactured would be fairly expensive. For instance a special piece of software, a unique building, a piece of music composed just for you. Medical costs would probably be fairly expensive, and people probably wouldn't live much longer than they do today, though a smaller proportion of people should die young. Taxes would probably be fairly high, and would mostly be for defense. Most healthy people would save most of their salary. Few people would borrow. As a result, interest rates would be quite low, and there would be plenty of capital for investing in new enterprises. In this economy nobody would starve, but a poor person might get bored if he has tastes that cannot be satisfied by such things as public libraries and evenings with friends. Forty years ago, who would have guessed that so much of so many people's leisure time would be spent watching television? Or doing just one thing, whatever that one thing is? Remember that not so long ago, the great majority of the population had just one vocation (farming) but many avocations. Today, it is reversed. People have many vocations, but the majority have just one avocation (watching TV). Is it possible that it will change again? That perhaps someday the great majority of all people will be programmers? Or artists? (If there is any difference between the two then!) Probably many of the people on the net(s), especially those that read and write to a lot of lists, think that computers will be very central in the world of the future. Not just that there will be one in every appliance and that most people will use one every day (we are close to that point now!) but that the majority of people will spend most of their working hours and leisure hours hunched over a keyboard and screen. Is this realistic? Personally, I do not think a Cray would provide more computer power than I could use (given sufficiently good software). Same here. If nothing else, one can compose synthetic movies using ray-tracing software. I read that a Cray can produce one high resolution ray-traced image in a half hour. So to do this at 24 frames per second (standard movie rate) would require about 400,000 times the processing power of a Cray. Other applications include deeper-lookahead chess programs, and AI. Note that this future economy presupposes really good robotics and computer science. This can be regarded as AI, I suppose. But I am not really assuming that we will have true AI, that is, computers which can do everything humans can. I am not sure that that is possible, and I am pretty sure that it is not necessary to get computers and robots to do useful and independant things. Current computer visions algorithms could be used to make robots much smarter at dealing with an unstructured environment. The only problem is that the algorithms are too slow. Faster hardware will cure this, even if vision researchers never come up with better algorithms. My objection to your original posting was that you were implying that an increased population in and of itself would be a good idea. I am hoping to get you to modify this approach to: "an increased population is a good idea if we can maintain a sufficiently high standard of living". Not exactly. I am convinced that the average person produces more than he consumes, and thus makes the world (er, solar system) a wealthier place. The only hole in this argument is that he does consume certain limited resources, and as such reduces the net wealth in a way that he cannot offset in the same way. This is the very crux of my argument for space. In space, all such limited resources are much less limited. It may be the case that "a sufficiently high standard of living" constraints on the number of people we are willing to place within a cubic kilometer of one another. Well, once again I disagree with the way you are saying it. You say "we are willing to place" when you should be saying "are willing to place themselves". Note that there are over ten to the 26 cubic kilometers in the inner solar system alone. If everyone requires a volume equal to that of my apartment, you can fit three million people into each cubic kilometer. This would allow a total population of the inner solar system of over ten to the 32. I don't think the solar system can support a population anywhere near that high, ten to the 20th seems more likely. Sheer volume is not a problem. ...Keith