In reply to Paul's message of Sun, 14 Jan 2007 07:14:41 -0800 (PST): Hi, [snip] >Robin van Spaandonk wrote: > > In reply to Paul's message of Fri, 12 Jan 2007 >07:16:25 -0800 (PST): > > Hi, > > [snip] > >> Sounds exactly what you said. Our rate of energy > >> production is exponential. Given > >> unlimited "free energy" such energy usage will >explode > >> worldwide. > >> > >> > > Actually, our collective rate of energy usage >depends upon three things. > > > > 1) What we can use it for. > > 2) How much each of us has available. > > 3) How many of us there are. > > > > Number 1 is dependent upon level of technological >development. As our technology > > becomes more sophisticated, we tend to find more >uses for energy, but also each > > use tends to become more efficient. > >It's more complex. For example, the gasoline engine >replaced the horse.
Thank you for making my point. With an improvement in technology came an increase in energy consumption, and since then the technology has been refined so that it is becoming more efficient. When we change to electric/CF vehicles, it will become more efficient again. [snip] >I think Gaia's self-defense and humanities undeveloped >emotional nature will take care of >over population within the next decade or two. My >concern is not for the humans that >survive such upcoming changes, as such humanity will >become responsible. It's the idea of >handing an irresponsible world portable energy >*adding* devices such as cold fusion and ZPE. If your second law violating technology actually works, then I would be quite happy to rely on that to stabilize the World population, however if it doesn't pan out, then I think we need to look to the energy adders, because otherwise we are going to witness catastrophic deaths on a vast scale, IOW the "bust" side of "boom and bust". [snip] > > The alternative is that nature continues to >regulate the population according to > > the tried and true method known as "boom and bust". > >That's a great concern. Humanity first ***needs*** to >wait for adulthood before offering >energy adders such as cold fusion to 7 billion people. > Such devices at best are for deep >space. The energy adders would not be a major problem, if we could stabilize the population at no more than say twice it's current size, though I would prefer to see it considerably less than it's current size, e.g. 1 billion? Note that this need not cause anyone any grief. We simply need to expand the trend of falling population that has already taken hold in some Western nations to the whole planet, which means that we first need to rapidly increase the standard of living of all people. One indicator that the planet is already over populated is the dwindling fish stocks World wide. Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://users.bigpond.net.au/rvanspaa/ Competition provides the motivation, Cooperation provides the means.
