Iconoclast

Earth SA = 4 Pi r^2
=4*3*5000(km)^2
3/4 salt water, remaining land 1/4 desert and 1/4 ice.
= about 6 billon hectares
= about a football field each.
Imagine that if you like, but science cannot get blood out of a stone.

Currently we use a Joule of energy (petro/nuke/hydro) to produce a Joule of food. It takes another Joule to transport it to Texas. One energy crisis and most of the 10,000,000,000 new Texans would be eating each other.

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The individual is hopeless without the group.
The group is hopeless without its individuals.

Axiom

How much land does it take to hold 6 billion people? To give you an idea, consider the small nation of Japan. It has about 143,000 square miles of area. One square mile has 5280 * 5280 = 27.9 million square feet. Japan has a total of about 4 trillion square feet, enough to give each person of the earth 670 square feet. If we housed people in families of four in simple two-level buildings (8 people per building, one family of four per level), each building could be on a lot of over 5300 square feet. (Of course, I've ignored that fact that many parts of Japan would be unsuitable for dwelling places, and I've neglected the land needed for roads, parks, schools, etc.) In a land area as small as Japan, the entire population of the earth could be housed on lots of 5300 square feet, with 8 people per lot. That's smaller than the typical American lot of about 8000 square feet, but it's not unbearably small.If we insisted on American standards, with only 4 people per lot of at least 8,000 square feet, then Gale Lyle Pooley shows that an area the size of Texas plus Nevada would be adequate (op. cit., p. 93). That would make those two states less attractive, perhaps, but it would leave the rest of the world for food production, animal reserves, nature movies, Woodstock festivals, or whatever. In terms of the real resources of this planet, we are not overpopulated.
Is Human Population Really the Problem?

Except it's not trying to get blood out of a stone in this case , but make arid soil fertile ,...after all we did fly to the moon , you know !

This analysis of course fails to mention the massive energy savings that would accrue from servicing this hypothetical centralised population .

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"Sometimes the obligation of the intelligent is to restate the obvious. None more important than emphatically stating that there is a : ' Naked Emperor Elephant in the Room' " Axiom

Iconoclast

This is plain fucking plagiarism.

And it is plain non-sense as it fails to take into account infrastructure which takes an equal amount of land.

If you wan to be taken seriously, STOP regurgitating guff. Do the maths YOURSELF, and think "how could I be wrong." Be self critical.
Arid soil needs water
Unfertile soil needs NO3, PO4 excreta et cetera.
You gotta know science before you can mouth off about agriculture.
Feeding 10 billion makes a moon landing look dinky.

This analysis is so bad it does not even attain a level high enough to be called wrong.

Almost all of the economies of scale have already been wrung out of the system we call "city and hinterland."

__________________
The individual is hopeless without the group.
The group is hopeless without its individuals.

Axiom

The overpopulation lie
By Anthony LoBaido
2009 WorldNetDaily.com


It is perhaps the single greatest disinformation campaign in human history: The planet is grossly overpopulated, and unless something is done to limit human population growth, calamity will ensue.

Hunger, famine and resource depletion are often mentioned as the major reasons to justify limiting human reproduction. Unfortunately, few can summon the facts to repudiate this erroneous, non-scientific assumption.

Paul Ehrlich, mentor of U.S. Vice President Al Gore, wrote a landmark book in 1968 called "The Population Bomb." He predicted, "We will breed ourselves into oblivion."

Based on this assumption, American taxpayers are spending billions of dollars on population control programs around the world -- most of them in Third World countries populated by people with brown, yellow, red and black skin.

Going down?
Yet, while the one-billionth citizen of India was born last year, Japan, if it continues its current abortion policies and fails to raise its average birth rate of 1.4 children per married couple, will have fewer than 500 people by the year 3000. This is not a prophecy of the mad Aum Shinrikyo cult, but rather a pronouncement of Japan's Ministry of Health and Welfare.

If these two Hong Kong children, Stephanie and Shan Shan, had been born a just few miles north of Kowloon Island, in mainland China, they would very possibly have become victims of the Asian gendercide of abortion.

There are now 6 billion people on Earth. The planet's population will most likely continue to climb until 2050, when it will peak at 9 billion. Other predictions have the world's population peaking at 7.5 billion in 2040. In either case, it will then go into a sharp decline. The world may soon be facing an under-population crisis -- a prospect that has all but escaped media scrutiny.

Malthus was wrong
Thomas Malthus is a British historical figure of great note. His most studied work, "An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvements of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of M. Godwin, M. Condorcet and Other Writers," was first published in 1798. Its thesis -- that overpopulation would destroy the world unless war, famine and disease rose to check human growth -- has proven to be dead wrong.

Malthus reasoned that, since people increase exponentially and food production only increases arithmetically, food production could not possibly hope to keep up with more and more empty stomachs. Ironically, he predicted mass starvation on the eve of one of the biggest farming expansions the world has ever seen. For free countries, hunger has effectively been eliminated.

Rather than booming, as one might expect in the face of such plenty, the world's population is aging and in decline. As fertility rates fall and abortion, contraception and life spans increase, the world will soon enter a new paradigm in which the elderly outnumber the young. In 1975, the mean global age was 22. In 2050, it will be 38. Europe, South Korea and Japan will be particularly hard hit by this phenomenon.

With fertility rates low and anti-foreigner sentiment rising in Europe, the United Nations recently released a study that suggests Europe will need mass migration from the Third World to populate it. The report, written by the United Nations Population Division, states that South Korea, Japan, Europe and Russia are facing population crunches.

By 2050, the population of Russia will be down to 150 million. In the 1970s, Russia's population rivaled America's, at more than 225 million people.

Europe's population plummets
In 1950, 32 percent of the world's population lived in developed countries in the West, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Today that figure has shrunk to 12 percent. Europe had 25 percent of the world's population in 1900. By 2050, Europe will have only seven percent. In 1900, Europe had three times the population of Africa. By 2050, Africa will have three times the population of Europe.

When it comes to the overpopulation lie, Spain serves as a prime example. Abortion is rampant in that nation, one that in relatively recent history helped to spread the Catholic faith to the four corners of the Earth. Today, however, Spain is caught in a moral decline. It is legal, for example, for grown men to have homosexual sex with children as young as 12 years of age.

While in the past generation, Spain "blossomed" from a right-wing dictatorship to a liberal democracy, it has also plunged to the bottom on the United Nations report of worldwide birth and replacement rates.

"Spain is in last place," says Florentina Alvarez, a demographer at the National Statistics Institute. Spanish woman have on average 1.07 children, far below the 2.1 needed to maintain the population. Spain has today 39.4 million people, a figure that will begin to drop in coming decades. As recently as 1976, under the much-maligned reign of Francisco Franco, Spain had a fertility rate of 2.6.

'Gendercide' in Asia
The major cities in Asia -- Bangkok, Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo and Hong Kong -- are overpopulated, but prosperous nevertheless. Overpopulation does not lead to poverty.

A young boy rides an ox in Laos. The hill tribes of the region are decreasing in population due to the genocidal policies of the Laotian government, as well as their being targeted by the United Nations with a population control campaign.


For example, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan are very densely populated and are some of the richest nations in Asia, if not the world. Taiwan has a population density of 1,460 per square mile, while China has a population density of 360 per square mile. Yet, according to the CIA's "World Factbook 1999," Taiwan's per capita gross domestic product is $16,500, while China's is $3,600.

The communist government of China has had a one-child policy for much of its history, but even now the Chinese government is beginning to question that policy. As most Chinese want sons, they abort the females on a massive scale. It is not uncommon for a Chinese family to murder its two- or three-year-old daughter if the mother becomes pregnant again with a boy. Within 100 years, China will have far more boys than girls. Will the men then decide to become homosexuals, or will they march out of China, as did the Mongol horde, in search of wives?

South Korea faces a similar problem. Because of abortion of females, kindergartens in Seoul today have around 60 percent boys. In the future, South Korean boys may well have to marry North Korean girls to perpetuate their race.

The overpopulation lie
The U.S. State Department and the United Nations are major players in this population game. Their measures are funded in large part by top U.S. foundations like Ford and Rockefeller. Ted Turner, founder of CNN, is also a major population-control sugar daddy for the United Nations, having cut a $1 billion check to the world body when conservatives in the U.S. Congress threatened not to pay off America's back dues to the U.N. if those dues would be used to set up abortion clinics overseas.

Make no mistake: Abortion and depopulation are a top priority for the powers-that-be in the West. And it's not just about women's sexual freedom and independence, as many claim. ...

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"Sometimes the obligation of the intelligent is to restate the obvious. None more important than emphatically stating that there is a : ' Naked Emperor Elephant in the Room' " Axiom

Axiom

Did you read it ? he took into account infrastructure in that quote i presented ! And if that's not enough breathing space for you just add another country of your choice to the inhabited land mass !

One need not be a math wizard to quickly ascertain that overpopulation is a myth.
I think an entire planet bar the odd inhabited country as per above would suffice would it not ?
And i think you underestimate science here.


Well just give yourself a little more breathing room , after all you have the rest of the planet to choose from .

__________________
"Sometimes the obligation of the intelligent is to restate the obvious. None more important than emphatically stating that there is a : ' Naked Emperor Elephant in the Room' " Axiom

Axiom

Overpopulation Myths

Is the earth becoming overpopulated? It is not a question of the human population outstripping resources, since food production continues to exceed population growth and non-renewable resources become more plentiful each year as new sources are found.

Even in sheer numbers, though, there is growing evidence that the world's population is heading toward stability.

* The growth rate of the world's population appears to have peaked around 1970, when the annual rate of growth was 2.09 percent.
* By 1980, annual population growth was down to 1.73 percent, and by 1990 to 1.7 percent.
* By 1995, the annual increase had slowed even more to 1.5 percent.

What is sometimes meant by overpopulation is overcrowding, or too great a population density. However, population density varies widely. Much of the world's land surface is empty, and many countries with dense populations have a higher standard of living than less crowded countries.

* In 1992, the population of Hong Kong City was approximately 247,501 per square mile, while in New York City it was 11,480 per square mile, and in Houston 7,512.
* If the entire population of the world were put into the land area of Texas, each person would have an area equal to the floor space of a typical U.S. home and the population density of Texas would be about the same as Paris, France.
* In 1988, China had a population of 409 people per square mile and gross domestic product per capita of $320, while Hong Kong, with a population density more than 450 times greater, had a per capita GDP of $8,260.

One reason people are crowded together in cities is because it makes possible many more exchanges and greater specialization of labor, thus increasing living standards.

Source: Jim Peron, "Exploding Population Myths," Fraser Forum, October 1995, Fraser Institute, 2nd Floor, 626 Bute Street, Vancouver, B. C., V6E 3M1, (604) 688-0221.

For more on International Issues:

International Issues - Page 1 | National Center for Policy Analysis

Overpopulation Myths

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"Sometimes the obligation of the intelligent is to restate the obvious. None more important than emphatically stating that there is a : ' Naked Emperor Elephant in the Room' " Axiom

Axiom

Monday, October 26, 2009
The Overpopulation Myth, Part 1

Myth: We can't produce enough food to feed the people in the world today, much less in years to come.

Fact: The world today produces enough food to provide every person alive with an adequate daily diet, and there is more land still available for agriculture than is being used now.

Remember Paul Ehrich's prediction in his 1968 book, The Population Bomb?

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...

Ehrlich’s book was influential far beyond the credentials of its author - he was a butterfly specialist (really!) - or the phony science he used. The present world view that overpopulation is a ticking time bomb threatening to end in mass death derives directly from Ehrlich’s apocalyptic fairy tale.

The planet’s population is now six billion and climbing. Across the world, people are better nourished than ever before in all history. Chronic hunger in the world today is caused by politics, not lack of food production. GlobalIssues.org lists the following causes of hunger in the world. I have asterisked (**) those that are purely or predominantly political:

* ** Land rights and ownership
* ** Diversion of land use to non-productive use
* ** Increasing emphasis on export-oriented agriculture
* ** Inefficient agricultural practices [there are also cultural, economic and educational issues with this one]
* ** War
* ** Famine
* Drought
* ** Over-fishing
* Poor crop yield
* ** Lack of democracy and rights

Note that famine is actually not a root cause of chronic hunger, it is just the name of local, enduring shortages of food, shortages which have antecedent causes. The result is famine; famine is not a cause. But famine's relief is not an arcane art. Shipments of food stocks from other countries to the famine area take care of the problem. But whether that humanitarian deed is done is a political decision.

Famine can also result from intentional political decision. The people of North Korea are the most enduringly malnourished people on earth. The reason is simple: North Korean communism cannot organize resources and labor to produce and distribute enough food to feed the people on the one hand, and on the other the ruling classes divert the country's resources to their own use, to arming the country and to cement their iron grip on the masses. If the people finally resort to cannibalism, well then, so be it.

The International Food Policy Institute says that even so about 20 percent of the world's population,

... are chronically undernourished ... [S]ince the mid-1970s the world has produced enough food to provide everyone with a minimally adequate diet. Hunger is one piece of a complex of interrelated social ills. It is linked intricately to global economic, political, and social power structures; modes of development and consumption; population dynamics; and social biases based on race, ethnicity, gender, and age. The world community has both the knowledge and the resources to eliminate hunger [emphasis added].

According to a report published this year by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), there are 1.4 billion hectares of land under farm production in the world today. "Some 1.6 billion hectares could be added" and most of that in Africa and South America (OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2009-2018, PDF). I have read some estimates that the amount of arable land in Africa alone could feed produce enough food to feed the whole world, although as a matter of practicality, that will obviously never be the case.

The point is that the amount of arable land used today can be more than doubled. Lack of food production is not the cause of hunger today and there is no reason it should be the cause in the many years to come.

Update: There is a new twist on Ehrlichean apocalypticism that goes like this from "the world is about to end" bunch:

1. Okay, we admit that we can produce enough food for all six billion of us, plus many billions more.

2. That doesn't matter because human beings are poisonous to the earth. They produce carbon dioxide!

The worst thing that you or I can do for the planet is to have children. If they behave as the average person in the rich world does now, they will emit some 11 tonnes of CO² every year of their lives. In their turn, they are likely to have more carbon-emitting children who will make an even bigger mess. If Britain is to meet the government's target of an 80% reduction in our emissions by 2050, we need to start reversing our rising rate of population growth immediately.

That from the UK's Guardian newspaper. The piece ends,

Some scientists, the German chancellor's adviser, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber among them, say that if the cuts are not achieved, we will end up with a planet with a "carrying capacity" of just 1bn humans. If so, we need to start cutting back population now with methods that offer a humane choice – before it happens the hard way.

To which University of Wisconsin law Professor Ann Althouse responds, "Oh, great. Thanks for the warning about cutting back 'population' the hard way, Germany."

A few months ago, Dr. Freeman Dyson, one of the most respected physicists in the world, had a long essay in the New York Times Book Review in which he explained why environmentalism is now an actual religion in its own right.

There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible.

Mind you, in his mind this "perfect po-mo religion," as Michael Crichton once termed it, is a good thing. Dyson wasn't the first to make that claim. I took the ball and ran with it in my post, "Environmentalist religion explained."

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"Sometimes the obligation of the intelligent is to restate the obvious. None more important than emphatically stating that there is a : ' Naked Emperor Elephant in the Room' " Axiom

Axiom

Georgianne Nienaber: Africa is No More "Overpopulated" Than Iraq Was a Haven for WOMD: Do the Math

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"Sometimes the obligation of the intelligent is to restate the obvious. None more important than emphatically stating that there is a : ' Naked Emperor Elephant in the Room' " Axiom

Iconoclast

Let's get back to basics.

Tell me:
What is the approximately the maximum population, that could live on earth, at a long-term stable population, given that we could eat everything that could be farmed.

Show your calculations!

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The individual is hopeless without the group.
The group is hopeless without its individuals.

Just2Good

You mustn't throw the baby out with the bath water. I reckon every one in ten of Axiom's theories have a basis in reality.

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"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

~ Buckminster Fuller ~

Firegoat7

I support you on this one Ax!
But shhhh don't tell Matty cause he might go ape.

cheers,

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"...What I meant?

Dear Mr Ian Rout (ACF news publisher) could you please put Ozchessforum in the next news letter! There is no reason to hide this forum from the Australian chess public.

What they meant?

Sorry, No english!- Amir Karibasic

Iconoclast

__________________
The individual is hopeless without the group.
The group is hopeless without its individuals.

Axiom

BETTER THAN A.... :-




this question's rendered redundant by the foundation post of this thread !

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"Sometimes the obligation of the intelligent is to restate the obvious. None more important than emphatically stating that there is a : ' Naked Emperor Elephant in the Room' " Axiom

Iconoclast

You gotta know the boundrays 0f ""box" before you known where the outsideis wich is where you think you are. STF U

Get his up yas
http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podca...91119_2205.mp3

__________________
The individual is hopeless without the group.
The group is hopeless without its individuals.

Axiom

declining fertility rates is what is INSIDE the box , the boundaries are superfluous....


re;audio link: what a sickening piece of brainwashed propaganda that is ,
a double concentration of pure ignorance, erlich and adams ..unwitting useful idiots of the elite , pushing their long failed socialist human hating bile.

__________________
"Sometimes the obligation of the intelligent is to restate the obvious. None more important than emphatically stating that there is a : ' Naked Emperor Elephant in the Room' " Axiom