{"id":4521,"date":"2014-08-31T15:37:41","date_gmt":"2014-08-31T20:37:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=4521"},"modified":"2014-09-01T09:30:53","modified_gmt":"2014-09-01T14:30:53","slug":"how-long-can-you-outrun-malthus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=4521","title":{"rendered":"Is Malthus Really Gone For Good?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lately I’ve been listening to Prof. David Christian explain his “Big History” concept<\/a> (courtesy of a CD course from the Teaching Company<\/a>), and I’ve almost reached the end (i.e., the present). I’ve hung in there from the Big Bang and matter formation thru the first stars and star clusters leading to galaxies and solar system formation, then the condensation of the planets around those stars (using heavy elements sprayed into the void from the heart of supernova explosions). And then came the various coincidences that eventually allowed warm watery environments to evolve with slimy life forms somehow forming, eventually leading to intelligence, consciousness and society — at least on one tiny planet in an otherwise insignificant corner of the Milky Way (a generally insignificant galaxy in its own right). <\/p>\n

In one of his final lectures in the course, Prof. Christian discusses the “Malthusian Crisis<\/a>” or cycle, i.e. a situation where the human population of a large portion of the world (or sometimes the whole world itself) grows beyond its long-run carrying capacity in terms of nutrition, energy, shelter, and protection from disease. Under such conditions, the population starts decreasing, until things get back in balance a few generations later. Professor Christian offered two examples of an historical Malthusian Crisis — the first is in the 14th century, when people start intermingling from around the world, spreading nasty diseases and plagues (such as the Black Death) that started killing people off in large numbers. There were other basic factors, such as populations that were growing too fast for the agricultural capacity to keep up, along with climate changes that just made it worse. Experts estimated that world population levels dropped by perhaps one quarter<\/a> (from 450 million to 350-375 million) in the 14th century, after a few hundred years of slow growth. <\/p>\n

Then in the 17th century, things got bad once again, termed a “General Decline<\/a>” by some scholars. A global cooling took place (called the Little Ice Age, possibly related to solar radiation patterns), causing agricultural yields to diminish, and a lot of wars started occurring. World population had been rising for 200 years, but went into a stall<\/a> for the next century, with actual declines in various places such as portions of Europe and China. Eventually, though, renewed expansions of technology, trade and wealth allowed crop yields to rise once again, and the industrial revolution triggered the huge jump in population leading to the world we live in today (i.e., a 20 fold increase in world population between 1800 and the 2050 estimate). <\/p>\n

Can a Malthusian crisis happen again? Some say no<\/a>, because our technology and trade systems are so well developed that they will stay ahead of whatever the reproductive capacities of humankind can throw at it. I myself have to wonder, however. First off, take a look at a long-term world population<\/a> chart. Our planet hasn’t been supporting multi-billion population levels for all that long, relatively speaking. The big push past 1 billion, then 2, then 4, soon 8 and maybe eventually 10 billion (by 2100, according to the median UN forecast) happened mostly within the past 250 years. It makes you wonder if our technology is mostly just allowing us to burn resources at an unsustainable rate, as with fossil fuels. We really don’t know if what we presently take from the planet can be renewed in time to keep a 10 billion population going for millenniums on end. <\/p>\n

Our technologies continue to evolve, of course, but some unanticipated red lights are now flashing, especially regarding the possible effects of the approaching global climate changes. It seems pretty clear that the political and economic systems that allowed us to avoid mass starvation and gave a lot of people a previously unheard of standard of living is quite complex and tightly woven around existing world resource conditions (water, fuels, food, minerals, usable land, etc.). We really don’t know how well these complex systems will hold up when these current resource states start shifting around. Upcoming changes to major global weather patterns are certainly going to put it all to the test; we will find out just how frail or robust our technologies and economic mechanisms turn out to be. <\/p>\n

The next big question is, have humans learned to be more prone to cooperate and less prone to grab weapons in response to declining resources? It doesn’t look like our predecessors handled the 16th Century too well, and even modern history suggests that war is still the first choice of sub-populations facing major survival challenges. <\/p>\n

Personally, I’m hoping for another 20 or 30 years of relative world calmness. That’s about all the longevity I can reasonably hope for at my age. But looking past that, as today’s young people must do . . . it gets a bit uncertain, to say the least. I wish all of you well, and I’m a bit sorry that me and my peers were generally short-sighted about how quickly and thoughtlessly we used up all the “low hanging fruit” that our planet offers without regard for future generations. I hope that technology and trade-generated wealth can continue to keep the lights on, but . . . well, given that every nation and every village is already tied into an instantaneous global commerce system, I don’t see how trade expansion can continue to power the growth of wealth, as it had over the past 5 or 6 centuries. Recall that for many centuries and millennium, human growth was powered by opening up new uninhabited lands; but after 1200 or so, that mostly came to an end — just before trade started taking off. [There were more “lands to be conquered” after 1200, but that was mostly a case of an existing civilization being pushed aside by a more powerful one, as with Euro colonialism in Africa, South America, Asia, Australia, and of course, the push to take the American West from the Native American tribes in the 18th-19th Centuries.] <\/p>\n

If so, then it’s mostly up to technology to keep the party going . . . but technology has always had a self-limiting side to it, in terms of how much it helps to improve the overall lot of the human race. I.e., for every possibility that a new technology opens for improving life, it also offers a better means to take life away. In other words, military technology continues to grow apace with every other technology on the planet. Humankind shows no remorse in using its ever expanding knowledge to find better ways to wipe out as many of its own as it desires, in any place at any time. Nuclear weapons were a big military advance, but now so are computers and information highways and robots (such as aerial drones and soon robo soldiers). Who knows what the generals have planned<\/a> for nanotechnology. <\/p>\n

Once again, good luck to you millennial people of today. I hope that the Malthus deniers continue to be right, but . . . every lucky gambler knows that their streak will come to an end, somewhere and sometime.<\/p>\n

[PS, that’s why an “eternal student” like myself is grateful to be living in these times, and regrets what might be coming. If our lucky streak comes to an end, we could see a revival of the “Dark Ages<\/a>“, when humankind was so busy trying to survive that it had little time for accumulating and disseminating scientific knowledge and cultural achievements. Today, most any interested layperson in the developed world has the opportunity and ability to learn about superstring theory, quantum gravity, chaotic inflation cosmology, the “phi” theory of consciousness, the history of the Crusades, the tenants of Taoism, Egyptian pottery development during the reign of the Pharaohs . . . in 200 or 300 years from now, will this still be the case?] <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lately I’ve been listening to Prof. David Christian explain his “Big History” concept (courtesy of a CD course from the Teaching Company), and I’ve almost reached the end (i.e., the present). I’ve hung in there from the Big Bang and matter formation thru the first stars and star clusters leading to galaxies and solar system […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,20],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4521"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4521"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4537,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4521\/revisions\/4537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}