Chapter 7 Chapter 2 There is no limit to growth

Overpopulation and energy crisis make environmental scientists pessimistically predict that the earth's civilization will soon be destroyed.Is there a limit to human growth?Before human beings conquer the universe, will they collapse first? Will not Bacon's policy bring us disaster, if it does not carry us to the stars?A literary magazine said Bacon bequeathed us all kinds of technological nightmares.Since 1968, the general expression of fear, excessive economic and population growth, coupled with a huge increase in pollution, more than in other centuries, has brought about the collapse of civilization, why is this trend of human thought Has it been particularly strong since 1968?That year was the first time that Helios 8 flew around the moon, and it was also the first time that humans could see the entire earth as a sphere through the porthole. During this mission, Mr. He Li and his companions were at a considerable height. .The surroundings of the earth were photographed in color. This bright earth seems to hang in space like an orbital ship, looking lonely and helpless in the darkness, just like the poet Mark Lee Xu described the viewpoint in Helios VIII:

Seeing the earth in its entirety We ourselves are like knights on a ball Accompanied by a bright and amiable home in the constant cold The psychological effects of these sights, environmentalists began to speak of this spaceship earth in rather harsh tones, and a whole host of books began to appear with warnings, such as the technological nightmare population bomb only one earth environmental doomsday, and famine 19 seven five! , magazines began to cry out as ecologists, and an organization was formed calling itself Friends of the Earth. These tumultuous theories culminated in 1972 with the publication of Limits to Growth, published by a group of scientists and industrialists called the Club of Rome, which has sold for dozens of years. The book of ten thousand volumes has been double-valued due to its astonishing claims and falsified data and conclusions.The authors claim to have collected all the data on world population, food supply, pollution, and industrial materials. They created a series of computer models to show the rise and fall of these issues over the next hundred years. Their conclusion is that today's trends will Let civilization collapse before 2100 AD, and the only way to avoid disaster is to impose complete restrictions on economic and technological growth.

The most admirable part of this book is its mathematical approach. The author uses the law called system dynamics to use an electronic computer to predict complex parts.This method was introduced in 1953 by electronic computer pioneer John.Feng.Newman (see Chapter 11), and was first applied by Forrest at MIT in 1961, yet the Club of Rome book (or report) was not scientifically successful .True, it reminds us of the infancy of von Neumann's and Forrest's technique, but it tells us nothing about its value.John.Mosaic called the book evil, and Sweden's Gana.Mild said it was nonsense.But it would be wrong to say that its conclusions give us nothing but lies.

The information that this club sent into the computer must have been calculated.Pollution is included as a variable in each model, but how is pollution measured?Is it by the smog density in Los Angeles?Is it based on the number of spent beer cans found each year in a particular area?Is it determined by the thickness and breadth of oil floating on the sea?This club did not tell us that the public opinion asked how the pollution will be given a value in the future. Three Dutch scientists pointed out in an article in the journal Nature; who can say the height of the earth's pollution level in 1970, and What does the level in 1900 matter?While not acknowledging these measures, the government has been successful in cleaning cities, air and rivers, the club's model seems to deny these useful measures.And they predict that pollution control will only be possible through a high level of excellence in research, these contrary beliefs, the fact is that in the post war world, control is in place, not through high levels of excellence in research, but the level of pollution itself increased.In many places, clean air laws have removed much of the toxic city smog, and restrictions on sewage have cleaned up so many rivers that fish are visible for the first time in fifty years. If it is not replaced within one year, all car exhaust will be subject to emission restrictions.

Like pollution, resources are summarized by clubs into a single undetermined variable.Their predictions of decline in resources will be dismissed as nonsense by future developments.Just glance at the resources presently available in the world today, and say that they are so exhausted; so we must hoard them, or it will be the end of the day.It's really not that useful.If the model of the Club of Rome was written in 1900, it would be sure that civilization would have collapsed before 1974, when the use of uranium was unknown, nuclear energy was unknown, plastic, stainless steel were unknown And the use of titanium, technologies like welding and superconductors are the same.They don't give us a clue about the total amount of resources that can be used in the future, so we don't know the total amount of resources available today. unused things.It is an affront to science that the Club of Rome asserts that these sources are equally accurate today.As we study these patterns, every reader will find their logical flaws, and the mathematical terms and technical material in this book are not authoritative.One of the patterns, for example, shows an unexplained and unpredicted rise in food consumption, as if the entire world had decided to simultaneously take the suicide route of overeating.Such as the chairman of the British Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution Eric.Assibi said: If you put your assumptions of the end-time outcome into the computer, don't be surprised that they predict the end-time.

If anyone doubts that the club model might have some utility, we can turn to a World Bank report published in late 1972 on the Club of Rome.Economists often look a little deeper into everyday human affairs than ecologists, and this bank report reads like a suboptimal academic.It says that many of the assumptions fed into the models are rather pessimistic and have no scientific basis, and that the use of the data is often careless and informal; the club has used mineral resource statistics from documents published by the US Bureau of Mines, but these Charts are used indiscriminately, and small annotations are ignored; deduction of the future is very heavy and pessimistic. The club simply multiplies the current limited resources by five times to illustrate its argument. This is really true. is patently unreasonable; the club is very wrong to claim that the mathematical elegance of its model is historically unprecedented; there is absolutely no scientific evidence for some of the club's miraculous claims; and perhaps worst of all, the club To call the immediate relation of strange variables to their applications they are laws of nature.

The art of cursing is quite popular, but the science of futurology will show its sick side.Are there no more substantial diagrams and equations, based on data that cannot be easily refuted, that point us in the precise direction of human destiny?Happily, since 1913 we have had a rather famous astronomical document, the Hertz-Plann and Russell diagrams, first published in that year by the Danish Inner.Hertz Brown and Henry of the United States.Norris.Drawn by Russell.It has been used over and over again many times.It was a statistical chart comparing millions of stars, showing the relationship between their color, absolute luminosity, and spectral pattern; from this data, their masses, and the time to reach steady state, could be calculated.What does this have to do with the destiny of mankind?This chart tells us that the most important planet for us at present is the sun.Our sun is located at the center of the angle belt curve from the upper left corner to the lower right corner of the figure. This wide band represents the main sequence, which means that those planets have become stable, and have no obvious changes in brightness and volume since their creation.

Now that the mass of the sun is known, we can compare it with the masses of many other planets.At present, a rule has been obtained: the greater the mass of the star, the shorter the life span on the main sequence.When a planet burns out its hydrogen, it leaves the main sequence broadband.If it's massive, it explodes, but usually expands into a red giant, growing thirty times in diameter.This type of planetary death abounds on orbiting planets of a star, and even if its planetary partner does not release gas, any living things on it will end Swallow many planets in orbit close to the star, or even if not swallowed, the gas of the neighboring planets will be lost, and any life on the planets will become extinct. According to new calculations in the 2010s, the sun will expand by a factor of 256 when it becomes a red giant , even Earth's orbit would be swallowed.).When will this happen to the solar system and its planets?We see on the graph that the answer will make us thankful, because the mass of the sun is no longer increasing, and below that is a table showing the approximate lifetimes of the stars on the main sequence, with an average error of about ten percent.

mass (sun: one) time on the primary sequence (million years) Thirty. ○ five fifteen one fifty one.five two one hundred one.four three five hundred one.three four nine hundred one.two six five hundred one.18300 one. ○ 11000 ○.5100000 In short, the lifespan of the sun, from its birth to the red giant star stage, is about 11 billion years in total, and it is generally believed that 5 billion years have passed, so we can say that the sun will shine for another 60 years with its current intensity. Hundreds of millions of years.The intensity of solar radiation changes at any time, but based on the known history of the earth and the examples of other planets on the main sequence, such changes will not cause danger to the planets.Ice ages, whether or not they were affected by changes in solar radiation, have come and gone but have not wiped out life, so there is no reason to fear future glacial events.Some malicious people can curse the sun, but all life on it will survive except the earth.

Six billion years seems to be a fun time period beyond many people's imagination, but this chart really tells us that six billion years of history will pass before the curtain of the natural world's arena ends, and this time scale will be affected by nuclear war or other rather ludicrous long-term effects of natural disasters.The two-million-year timescale of human evolution is only a fraction of the total (it is only one-thousandth of a thousand). (J Note: This paragraph is translated as the long-term effects of many people imagining and fearing nuclear wars or other rather ridiculous natural disasters, but this time scale is far less than six billion years. And this chart tells us more realistically , even 6 billion years of history will pass long before the curtain of the natural arena ends. The time scale of 2 million years of human evolution is only a small part (only 1/3000) of the total. Will relatively smooth.)

Too many books talk about space travel and other future projects, and when imagining great achievements, add a warning: don't blow the bullshit too much. These authors don't seem to see that many people often make a living out of bragging.The storage capacity of nuclear weapons has reached the equivalent power of ten tons of black explosives per person, but this does not mean that everyone will be killed by a nuclear war with the power of ten tons of black explosives.The megaton-level power of the explosion is limited to one bomb, not all over the world.In 1958, 1960, and 1961, two congressional committees in the United States studied the most unimaginable nuclear war, chaired by Congressman Chet.Hollyfield.After hearing the testimonies of countless experts, they announced the death toll of this type of war (Note: This paragraph has also been modified by me for clarity, and witnesses have changed their testimony). Holifer's group hypothesized that two megaton bombs had fallen on New York City, and that winds of forty miles per hour were blowing west-southwest, bringing the fallout to most densely populated areas; a total of 275 megatons 1,450 million tons of bombs exploded in the area between Boston and Washington, and 1,450 million tons of bombs fell all over the United States; only 30 percent of the population (about 56 million people) would be killed, Another 12 percent (approximately 22 million people will be injured, 21 million of the 46 million homes in the United States will be damaged, and another 500,000 homes will be damaged. Due to the impact of falling dust, evacuation must be carried out within at least one year, and fuel and transportation will be temporarily suspended. Looking at the whole incident, it can be seen that in the war of Holifer, fifty-seven percent of the population, or one hundred and three million people, were not harmed, and twenty-four percent, or half a million houses Unaffected by explosion damage and fallout, all belligerents will suffer the same loss except for densely populated industrial nations like Great Britain and the Netherlands, where the percentage will be increased. A year later, Hollyfield's research was accepted by Herman.Kahn did a more optimistic study.In his famous book On Thermonuclear War, he listed the plots of nuclear wars of different intensities.He concluded that casualties would be as bad as Commissioner Holifer had feared, but I call his book optimistic because, whatever the casualties, he had greater expectations for healthy survivors.After describing various imagined nuclear wars, he asks: Do the living envy the dead?In every instance, his answer was: no.After talking with many economists, agricultural geneticists and other experts, he estimated that in no more than forty years, the United States will return to the situation before the attack, as long as forty years?Kahn's estimate was too optimistic. He might have made a mistake by a factor of ten or a hundred.It may take the United States and other attacked countries four hundred or four thousand years to restore the old view, which will be a long dark age for mankind at that time.Nuclear war is a rather horrific destructive force, but when we look at the Hertz-Pollen-Russell diagrams, and consider the scale of Earth's future history, we have no reason to fear Kahn's forty-year estimate being wrong (J note: the sentence pattern has been modified for smoothness); we can see clearly by looking at the reconstruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bomb attack. The complete annihilation of all human beings seems an impossible task. To permanently eliminate intelligent life from this planet, it is necessary to: 1. Kill all humans.If there are fifty or so male and female survivors in a certain place, this work will be in vain, and our civilization will return to the previous situation after 500,000 years. 2. Kill all the apes in the world.After a period of time, one of them will evolve into a more powerful technological civilization. 3. Kill all squirrels, tree rats, and other mammals that call trees home.Everyone believes that our ancestors were animals of this type 70 million years ago. 4. The destruction of all trees and plants, and the silting of the oceans, depriving any species of oxygen. 5. The work of destruction must be repeated every million years, otherwise plants will grow again, and an oxygen-containing atmosphere will then appear. Therefore, it seems that the earth is indestructible, and human beings have a long future.The world population is growing at a rate of 2% per year. If this continues, it means that the population will double every 35 years, from 3.7 billion in 1972 to 6.5 billion in 2000 Humans, 47 billion people in 2100, will reach 250,000,000,000 in 1,000 years.When all the oceans have provided room for human habitation, there will still be thousands of miles per square yard!Such a claim is obviously unreasonable, and this growth rate should reach a kind of stability, the question is, when?Paul.Orlik published his polemical work Population Bomb with the following anecdote: I learned all too well about the population explosion on a hot night in Delhi a few years ago.My wife and daughter and I took an old taxi back to the hotel.We drove into crowded areas, the streets seemed to be overgrown with people, people eating, drinking, washing, sleeping, visiting, arguing and shouting; people reaching into their hands through taxi windows, begging, people urinating, people Buses, people packed like animals; people, people, people, people.Since that night, I have experienced what it is like to be overpopulated. This is the kind of future world full of human beings that Orlik warned us about, the same doomsday predictions from William and Paul.Barduk's Famine 1975!Both are very sad books, their statistics, like those of the Club of Rome, are based on false assumptions; and the facts that contradict their theories are denied.They call for international policies that reduce the growth of the world's population and, if adopted, increase it.The brothers Olick and Barduk had a great influence on the environmental movement, and on political decision makers, they took the same position that Malthus had taken in 1798.At that time, he published the first edition of the famous theory of population. He believed that the population would increase to be mediated by famine, plague and war. The second edition of Malthus’ works, published in 1803, believed that the population would be mediated by a system called morality. Repressive to control, we may call thrifty, but what does he mean? Some researchers have discovered that animals themselves have the ability to control birth.One of the experts, American John.Calhoun made an important experiment with wild Norway rats.He fed them regularly in a large pen that could hold 5,000 rats.First of all, it is found that within two years, they have not reached their maximum theoretical population of 50,000; moreover, starting with five mice, they will stop increasing when they reach 200, no matter how long the test time continues, this is their limit numbers.Calhoun's experiment is not quoted by the populace, as far as I know, perhaps because it contradicts their alarm. The British statistician also discovered the implications of Malthus's moral repression, although he himself defined the idea only vaguely.Using world demographics, the British let a startling pattern emerge.Contrary to all assumptions, it seems to point to medicine as the most useful regularizer of population growth.In the developed world, such as the United States, Soviet Russia, Europe, and Japan, where medical technology is high, infant mortality and death from disease and famine are low, and population growth is less than one percent; in developing countries, We found growth rates ranging from two percent to four percent.Developed countries have reached demographic stability, while some undeveloped countries have marched forward, showing fairly high birth rates.Now that modern medicine has been introduced to the developing countries, within a few years, there will be a change. Parents will no longer fear the death of their children, nor will they feel the possibility of a population burden. The reduction in death rate will immediately follow the increase in birth rate. As it decreases, marriage will be delayed, the growth rate will slow down, and the stability of the population will gradually increase. This is obvious to all in developed countries, and it will begin to spread all over the world.There used to be a fairly high birth rate; then medical technology improved and the birth rate decreased.The following are the statistics made by the United Kingdom for some countries in the world: National peak years Births in 1969 Births (or lowest year) Percentage reduction Asia: Ceylon 1962,371,270,000 (1968) 27.2 Hong Kong 1962198333.2 Jordan 19669469000 (1968) 26.6 Pakistan 196351034950 (1965) 3.0 Singapore 1959644529.7 Taiwan 196342443536.7 Africa: Algeria 1966.56253 million (1968) 5.7 Mauritius 196328222214 United Arab Republic 1966123511953.2 America: Barbados 1960 85000 (1968) 37.5 Canada 195947937122.5 Cuba 1964,264,232,000 (1967) 12.1 Jamaica 19667165000 (1968) 8.4 Puerto Rico 196286815 Trinidad｜Tobago 1962342817.6 United States 196142683571163 Chile 1963,292,283,000 (1967) 3.1 In most developing countries, birth rates have fallen dramatically.At the end of this century, it seems unlikely that the population growth rate will remain below 2 percent.And this decrease, as we have seen, is largely due to improvements in medicine.But what is the answer to our population problem preached by brothers Orlik and Barduk?Their rather serious proposal is to eliminate US foreign aid to countries that do not have birth control programs.In other words, reduce medical aid to them (what Orlik calls output death control) until their birth rate is visibly reduced.It's like saying to a sick person: How dare you be sick!No more medicine will be given to you until you feel better. If any rich country adopts the policy of Orlik and Barduk, no one will be willing to do so, and the result will be a worrying population explosion.Birth rates are kept low not only by medicine and birth control devices, but also by improved agriculture, clean streets, good schools, and efficient hospitals.Developing countries that currently have a high birth rate that will surely decrease in the future will need the benefits brought about by new inventions in society and technology (J press: rewritten sentence patterns, the original translation does not make sense).The British predict that the current annual population growth rate of 2% in the world will begin to slow down in 1980, and will stop at 1.5% to 1.9% in ten to fifteen years. time, and then quickly eased off again.Most demographers believe that the population will stabilize at ten billion over the next century.The reduced birth rate tells us that this moral repression, precisely predicted by Malthus, removes some unreasonable doubts that there is no limit to the growth that developed countries can achieve. (J press: Rewrite the sentence pattern, the original translation is unreasonable)