| NOTE: The below was a divergent thread from a discussion on the United States board, but I felt it should be moved over here, so I'm cutting and pasting the original, and I'll cut and paste future responses from there as well, until hopefully the discussion is all over here.
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I guess I'll reveal a darker side of my nature at this point: I'm an English major, and a science fiction writer.
I've actually strayed somewhat into the realm of "hard" science fiction and tried to work out what might happen when the population of mankind exceeds that of the ability of the planet to sustain. Incidentally, that capacity has been rated by some cynical estimates to be as low as 12-15 billion, which we could easily reach within our lifetimes. Others make predictions of several times that, but we'll still get there eventually, almost certainly before the year 2200.
However, there are hundreds of possibilities for dealing with this inevitability which, unfortunately, do not all lead to mankind asserting its place among the cosmos. I've always hoped for this, but I think it's unlikely. I've actually filled whole notebooks with speculations on other scenarios:
1) The most likely event is that something even more destructive than the atomic bomb is developed, and we destroy ourselves as soon as those weapons fall into the hands of those crazy enough to use them. And there are always going to be those crazy enough to use them.
One such weapon that SP alluded to not too long ago is the potential for harnessing small asteroids as continent-breakers.
2) Another likely event is that, through increasingly deadly and global wars, the population can gradually be brought back down to size. Practically as morbid as option #1.
3) Population stabilization. This is the most benign of the options that are still quasi-within the realm of realist fiction, as opposed to true science fiction. Basically, if you discount immigration, the population growth of the Western world has slowed to a crawl. It will continue to dimish as land resources are further consumed and raising a family becomes an increasingly daunting prospect. The argument goes that, if the second and third worlds are really brought up to the standard of living of the current first world countries, then population growth will essentially become a non-issue. Increasing lifespans will account for more population growth than actual birth-death rate disparities.
Now I'll go into some of the more sci-fi oriented visions:
4) Subterranean expansion. One option that I explored was similar to that explored in H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine," that a great deal of human society could move underground. It's not impossible. Advances in hydroponic technology, as well as improvements on such facilities as the biospheres in parts of the western American desert, could make the subterranean world far more habitable than it would otherwise be.
5) Aquatic civilizations. If we're dealing with theoretical possibilities as remote as colonizing space, you might as well look at going underwater. The myth of Atlantis might well become a reality (hopefully without the earthquakes, volcanoes, and tidal waves at the end).
6) Colonization of the sky. If you can come up with something that facilitates mass space travel, then the same order of magnitude of technology might well be able to create things that float using nothing but, say, the magnetic field of the Earth. That isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Of course, I don't know where we'd get the material to build all these floating cities, and I don't know how the farmers below would take to it, but it's a possibility. This is the realm of the Cloud City in the Empire Strikes Back, for example.
Only once you get beyond total domination of earth, sea, and sky do you have to start looking at space.
7) Lunar expansion. Not impossible, but it would almost certainly have to be supported from the homeworld (though just talking about a "homeworld" instead of a "homeland" is fun). Expansions in hydroponic technology could make even this less necessary.
8) Extra-lunar expansion. At this point, you're talking about concepts that are really far out there (literally). I always wondered how all those starships in Star Wars got built (that's a lot of metal, after all, even if we hollowed out the metallic core of the Earth), and how they were fueled. That kind of power, sustainable over a long period, in as small a space as your average current spacecraft, would require something along the lines of a miniature antimatter reactor. Good luck with that. Let me know if you have any problems ... of course, you'll probably be dead, along with everything in your country and all adjacent ones, before you have a chance to call in tech support.
It's pretty sad that I've actually filled notebooks with ramblings and brainstorming on these issues ... I don't think my life really followed that of my fellow high schoolers in that |
