That's right. Finding more space to live is, in the end, a fantasy solution. Even a "Ringworld" (if we could build one) would not hold us for long unless we developed intelligent resource use and only had babies at the proper rate. The reason is this: exponential growth. Exponential growth will out-strip any finite space, and populations grow exponentially unless people have babies at a reasonable rate. It is hard for most people to grasp this, because they don't have a good enough grasp of mathematics. But it is easy to see with examples.Shadowblaze wrote:the poiunt of a ringworld, 3 million times the surcafe area of the world, is this:
3 million times the area of teh world.
we build it
3 million times the area of the world, with DAMN ENAR AL OF IT USEABLE LAND. you could get forests bigger than the ara of the earth, oceans so large that the fish populatio ncould be i nthe trillions and the oceans still empty, you could fit entire maps of worlds on! my point is this: there's room for anywhing, civilization, primitive mud huts, anything in between and beyond.
of course, my argument is moot, because a: we don't have the technology to do this, b: no one here seems to have read anywhing about this, c: the controll needed to do this is nonexistant.
but as you said, vilkacis, yes, the problem isn't people, its the correct use of land and resources.
Exponential growth means that a population will periodically double. Furthermore, this period of doubling will gradually become shorter and shorter with subsequent cycles.
For an example, let's say we have a human population that is growing exponentially, currently doubling at a rate of every twenty years, and that we've just filled the earth. However, lucky us, at the same moment we have just terraformed Mars and it is perfectly inhabitable. Scientists think that Mar's gentetically-engineered habitats and terraformed landforms will be able to house exactly as many people as earth, despite Mars being smaller than the earth. Guess what? Even though it took us millions of years to fill the earth, we'll fill Mars in just 20 years, one generation. But, lucky us, our technology saved us just in time again. We found a wormhole to another planetary system with six inhabitable planets! It takes us slightly less than twenty years to fill up two of them. The other four planets take just 18 years to fill. Now, we're going to have to find eight more inhabitable planets in a hurry, and it will only take sixteen years to fill them all....
At doubling of roughly twenty years:
first doubling: we fill 2 planets
second doubling: we fill 4 planets
third doubling: we fill 8 planets
fourth doubling: we fill 16 planets
fifth doubling: we fill 32 planets
(five cycles is less than a century- potentially within one person's lifetime)
You get the picture. Even with enormously high techology (which we don't have) and lots of lucky breaks, all the planets in the universe can't make up for bad habits in having too many babies. Technology of the sort we have can buy us some time before we have to change our habits, but not much time, and if we don't use that technology wisely, it will make things worse in the end.
Also, it doesn't matter if America and parts of Europe are producing babies at slightly less than a replacement level, because much of the world is still increasing according to exponential growth, and isn't going to change anytime real soon.
Even the Ringworld fish would eventually fill the Ringworld oceans- and probably sooner than you think.
