China reforms: One-child policy to be relaxed

Re:China reforms: One-child policy to be relaxed by austinz on Friday November 15, 2013 @01:26PM (#6741134)

A 2.3% growth in population for 1400 years would lead to a population of around 4.6*10^23 people. This has nothing to do with reality - the rate of population growth is decreasing and will continue to decrease as countries get more prosperous. The increase in economic output taking place right now goes both towards making people richer and supporting the increase in population. If population levels off, even at some ridiculous level like 50 billion (which it won't), there is absolutely no argument for 2.3% growth extrapolated anywhere near that amount of time into the future without some sort of change in economic paradigm.

The math is fine, the assumptions that undergird that math are terrible. You can see that in a lot of his blog posts. There's another [0] that argues that economic exploitation of space doesn't make sense because it is impractical to ship large numbers of people offworld - which is true, and supported by mathematics and physics, but barely touches (if at all) on things like space-based solar power generation and asteroid mining, neither of which depends on shipping large numbers of people offworld, as colonization presumably does.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/why-not-space/

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Re:China reforms: One-child policy to be relaxed by Double_Cast on Friday November 15, 2013 @02:51PM (#6741726)

The 2.3% figure applies to economic growth, not population growth. The blog argues that our economy relies on energy. In the next 1400 years, our supply of energy must inevitably plateau. Therefore, the economy's growth has an upper bound.

I was using the blog as evidence to support my argument. My argument was that once we hit the economic plateau, our quality of living will decrease if the population continues to increase. Therefore, perhaps eugenics (a la China's one-child policy) won't sound like such a bad idea in the future.

> but barely touches (if at all) on things like space-based solar power generation and asteroid mining

Again, he covers this in his first post via reductio ad absurdum:

> Let’s think big: surround the sun with solar panels. And while we’re at it, let’s again make them 100% efficient. Never-mind the fact that a 4 mm-thick structure surrounding the sun at the distance of Earth’s orbit would require one Earth’s worth of materials—and specialized materials at that. Doing so allows us to continue 2.3% annual energy growth for 1350 years from the present time.

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Re:China reforms: One-child policy to be relaxed by austinz on Saturday November 16, 2013 @07:49PM (#6747065)

> My argument was that once we hit the economic plateau, our quality of living will decrease if the population continues to increase.

This is totally irrelevant because (as I said) population growth is slowing down and the population is almost certainly not going to continue to increase forever. It's forecast that human population will max out late this century due to declining birthrates in countries that are growing wealthier; hitting the theoretical limits (e.g. max solar output) before then is so implausible it's barely worth discussing.

> Again, he covers this in his first post via reductio ad absurdum:

His assertion that SSP (and everything else) is impractical for sustaining 2% growth for a millennium is true, but practically irrelevant. Space-based exploitation can increase the plateau cap, allowing for higher standards of living for a future populace whose population is level or declining.

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