Population control will NOT save our environment; and why Stephen Hawking was right.

[Democrats_win]

51. Physicist Bartlett: sustainable growth is contradiction

According to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Bartlett

Professor Bartlett often explains how sustainable growth is a contradiction. His view is based on the fact that a modest percentage growth can equate to huge escalations over relatively short periods of time.

Bartlett argues that, over time, compound growth can yield enormous increases. For example, an investor earning a constant annual 7% return on their investment would find their capital doubling within 10 years. But the same exponential power, so advantageous to patient investors, may be potentially calamitous when applied to human population. A population of 10,000 individuals, if it were to grow at a constant rate of 7% per annum, would reach a population size of 10 million after 100 years.[5]

Bartlett regards overpopulation as "The Greatest Challenge" facing humanity, and promotes sustainable living. He opposes the cornucopian school of thought (as advocated by people such as Julian Lincoln Simon), and refers to it as "The New Flat Earth Society"

J. B. Calvert (1999) has proposed that Bartlett's law will result in the exhaustion of petrochemical resources due to the exponential growth of the world population (in line with the Malthusian Growth Model).

Bartlett has made two notable statements relating to sustainability:

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."

and his Great Challenge:

"Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases in population, locally, nationally, or globally?"

---
Note that because of exponential population growth, by the time we really realize that we must find a more places to live, the Hawking idea, it will be too late. We will have already outgrown the earth. Just think how global warming is still denied. Will the population bomb be the same?