Let's talk about Mars.

[AngelG]

It looks like A**n has been invited Alaskan, have you been in the army ? I hope you find my jokes amusing.
Btw in Bulgarian, europe is called/spelled 'evropa' also.
@Benm Hahahahh :crackup: The aliens not only have cloaking devices.
I think that we may want to take the risk & try trading with them, because they *always* have what ?
Yes, you guessed !!! Very powerful LASERs :drool: :crackup:

 

[Benm]

I like the cyrillic letters really... i guess it's because i had to take greek in highschool, but they come to me quite naturally in some cases. It's been ages since i was in bulgaria last though, i think that must have been for the solar eclipse of '99

 

[AngelG]

Cyrillic letters do not have anything related to Mars - they were designed @ end of 9th century by order of one of our greatest emperors - Simeon I aka Simeon The Great. His ruling is called the Golden Age by the historians (but probably a disaster for some neighbor empires). Our previous letters (created @ 855th year) were too difficult to learn, so he decided to improve them to have more people who can read/write.

1999 wow ! It was ~ 10 years after the end of the SIV (the socialist concurrent of the EU). Our industry was ruined, our money were stolen by the people who created the hyper-inflation, we were very poor and our new "democratic" politicians already had begun to ruin & sell what has left of the economy .... you could have seen interesting things. The newly created mafia groups (something new to us) fought each other & created daily news for the newspapers...

Your pic Sofia#5 looks strange - we do not have a sea there. But the others have historical value - some things do not exist now.

 

[Benm]

Yeah, those are very old digitized copies of analog photos. I think it must have been mis-labeled and actually was taken in Burgas or perhaps Varna back then.

It's so long ago i hardly remember the details of it all, but we took a flight to sofia and made our way to burgas via plovdiv back then, going to varna to see the actual solar eclipse. I think we took a train from burgas to varna just for the day then, to get the maximum eclipse length possible witout crossing the romanain border (which would have been a bit hard back then).

As for historical value of photo's: i've gotten more aware of that during the syrian conflict. I have a lot of photo's from syria before the war, including numerous ones taken at palmyra and the Bel temple before ISIS destroyed much of it.

In the moment i never think of my pictures to be among the last of ones taken from any historical site. Sad reality is that i do have numerous pictures of things that simply are not there any longer - from streets in damascus to palmyra ruins, with rural areas of indonesia that have been destroyed for property development in between.

Perhaps we should conserve the image of Mars taken by the rovers just as well. IF humans ever conquere that planet i'm sure it would look vastly different after and images of Mars as it is now would be interesting glimpses into the past.

This applies to places on eath as well though: take photos and save them, much will be destroyed in only a few decades and it is important to have documents of what things looked like even just 10 or 20 years ago.

 

[AngelG]

Sad, but true. Some explorers have said that Mars actually looks like the future of the Earth. The humans are cutting the branch on which they are sitting.
One of the biggest problems that the politicians don't talk about is the unstoppable population growth. It's obvious that the Earth doesn't grow. Even if the resources were unlimited (and they're not) the moment when there will simply be no place for the next people will come.
If the growth is not stopped, a future world war or other way of mass extinction will be triggered by the humans... They don't say "То have many kids is no longer good, because then they'll have to fight each other in wars for food/metal/energy sources". Probably they imply "We'll send' em on Mars and the problem will be solved..for a while"

 

[Benm]

Sending people to Mars will not do anything to solve earths overpopulation problem. The cost alone makes it an improbable solution, but the technological reality is it will cost far more resources to maintain someone on mars with supplies compared to that person living on earth.

Population growth or earth is mostly a problem in africa though. In western countries the birth levels are at or below replacement level, and other countries getting more developed they are declining rapidly. Japan and europe would have declining populations as it is if you factor out migration, the US would be about stable to slightly declining.

In many parts of africa this is wildly different: people have loads of children, either by choice (so they can care for them at old age) or by lack of contraceptives. This could change rapidly by the spread of the information age, but that's dubious. If it goes according to current best estimates human population will peak at about 10 billion around 2050.

I think it's fair to question how many people can actually live off this planet structurally, and i think the number is far lower than the current population. If we could gradually bring down the population of humans to a billion or so over a century i think this would probably be a good thing - given the resources remaining we should really look a a declinig number of humans that can have better lives instead of an increasing number living in poverty.

 

[AngelG]

I couldn't say it better than Benm.

Now I think about interstellar journeys. The main problem is the radiation. The scientists are not sure that even unmanned spaceships could survive it to the closest star, but with a new engine which they think can accelerate to near 1/4 LS, they are eager to try.
An idea about what could be thought about comes from a Sci-Fi book I've read. There the most advanced (and the most expensive) few military space ships the Earth federation had created were of class "Eternal fight". One of them has had been severely damaged in a war and remained lying on а bottom of an ocean of a hostile planet for many years. Those ships had the ability to self-heal, so it slowly recovered itself absorbing metals from the water....
So if the scientists want to create something which resists damage, they could think about something with self-healing caps...

 

[NightExplorer96]

I agree with you Benm, I was actually just watching a video about this topic today. It's been estimated that we are already above the Earth's population levels and currently use about 1 and 1/2 Earth's worth of resources to sustain the population. If the global population does increase to 10 billion it wouldn't be a long shot to imagine an even more lack of resources for groups of people that are already struggling with a population of 7 billion!

Some estimates show that we will never reach 10 billion since that population can never be sustained, however others show we will easily surpass that by the 2050's at our current population growth rate!

-Alex

 

[Crazlaser]

Some estimates show that we will never reach 10 billion since that population can never be sustained, however others show we will easily surpass that by the 2050's at our current population growth rate!

-Alex

I think this explains poverty. Poverty will never go away if we're literally on the edge of what the earth can sustain. I wonder how they calculate that though.

Benm, I agree. Less lives and high QOL would be far better than bone thin children dying left and right.

 

[Razako]

I think this explains poverty. Poverty will never go away if we're literally on the edge of what the earth can sustain. I wonder how they calculate that though.

Benm, I agree. Less lives and high QOL would be far better than bone thin children dying left and right.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus
Read up on Malthus and you'll see that he explains the problem very well. Societies typically use an overabundance of resources to increase their population growth to the point where the underclass is again impoverished, rather than to raise the QOL of everybody.

Basically people just need to stop having so many children and the problem will correct itself. Whether people are capable of this is uncertain though. Many religions still believe in the 'multiply and be fruitful to the best of your ability' model.

There's also something known as the Iron Law of wages

 

[AaronT]

World population living in extreme poverty, 1820-2015

In spite of a much larger population there are in total less people living in true poverty than 200 years ago. This is also an accelerating trend.

Also the idea of being even remotely close to what the Earth can "sustain" is absurd. The entire population of the planet could fit in Alaska with 5 acres Each. Just termites outweigh humanity in shear biomass to the point they produce 10x more CO2 than we do in spite of our energy consumption.

Not to mention the more carbon we add to the carbon cycle rather than leave locked away in FF deposits the more biomass the Earth can sustain. This is an evident fact that is already playing out.

13 years of greening recorded via sat

Record CO2 Coincides With Record-Breaking Crop Yields, 'Greening of Globe'

 

[NightExplorer96]

Aaron,

You do realize that almost all of the usable land that can be used for farming is already being used currently, right? Imagine a population of 10 billion people. Good luck sustaining that!

-Alex

 

[Crazlaser]

Hap, we waste so much food! If we were more efficient we wouldn't need that extra farmland.

This quote is from here

Roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year — approximately 1.3 billion tonnes — gets lost or wasted.
Food losses and waste amounts to roughly US$ 680 billion in industrialized countries and US$ 310 billion in developing countries.
Industrialized and developing countries dissipate roughly the same quantities of food — respectively 670 and 630 million tonnes.
Fruits and vegetables, plus roots and tubers have the highest wastage rates of any food.
Global quantitative food losses and waste per year are roughly 30% for cereals, 40-50% for root crops, fruits and vegetables, 20% for oil seeds, meat and dairy plus 35% for fish.
Every year, consumers in rich countries waste almost as much food (222 million tonnes) as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa (230 million tonnes).
The amount of food lost or wasted every year is equivalent to more than half of the world's annual cereals crop (2.3 billion tonnes in 2009/2010).
Per capita waste by consumers is between 95-115 kg a year in Europe and North America, while consumers in sub-Saharan Africa, south and south-eastern Asia, each throw away only 6-11 kg a year.

 

[NightExplorer96]

We must become less wasteful that's for sure

-Alex

 

[AngelG]

Why do you concentrate only on food ? There are problems with the water also. With energy (fuel, electricity, oil). With the air (well some new presidents deny that).
Even if there were not any problems as AaronT suggests, do you believe that the count of people could rise without limit, knowing that the Earth doesn't get bigger to hold them ?
The religions want people to have more children because this way they have more members. It's so, because their leaders desire more power...

 

[Benm]

You'd have to ask on each subject what the actual limitation is.

With food, it's not that there is not enough worldwide production to feed all people, but distribution is problematic. Sometimes people say something like 'that could have fed an african family for a month' if a restaurant or shops throws out excess food that is at that point still edible. The only reply to that can be: 'good, you go bring it to them then'.

I can probably buy here the sufficient amount of calories for a week for $1. So i could spend $50 and feed some african family for a year, right? Well yeah, i could spend $50 to obtain that amount of food, and probably pay around $5000 in shipping it to that family.

The same goes for drinking water. Perfectly drinkable tap water costs $1 per cubic meter here. That could provide some african family with plenty of water for $1 a week, if someone else would just put a 10.000 km hose in place to move it.


But this is al side stuff. The more realistic question would be how many people we can sustain at western life standards with the current production of food, energy, water and such. The answer to that is hard to find, but it certainly is not 7 or 10 billion, perhaps closer to 1 billion, or even less if you want to do it without extracting fossil fuels faster than they are replenished.

In any case it is not possible to support an expanding population forever, and sadly the population has expanded steadily for milennia apart from a few drops to pretty dramatic diseases that resulted in some sudden declines.

If you want to set a true goal for the future, don't go messing about with so many degrees of climate change, so much fossil fuels left etc. Set a realistic goal for population, like 7 billion for 2050, 4 billion for 2100 and perhaps 1 or 2 billion for 2150.

Reducing resource usage per person by 90% does the same as reducing the population by 90%, the difference is you get a billion happy people instead of 10 billion people leading an extremely restricted lifestyle.

In some areas this is already happening: the population of europe would be declining if it was not for migration, the population of the US would be stable towards declining without migration as well.

One country that got this part right is china. They've had policy to reduce the number of people since the 1980s, and this has been somewhat of a success. The population is not declining yet since most people born in 1960-1980 are still alive, but it will probably be declining in a a decade or two.