CanOWorms, on 28 February 2012 - 08:24 PM, said:
Daytrader:
Asteroid mining seems a rather expensive under taking, besides why would we need space ships unless we have colonies (moon/mars etc.)?
Did not know about the miniguns, awsome.
Asteroid mining is the ultimate capital investment. There is more metals in the nearest asteroid than humanity has mined in all of our existence.
Planetary colonization is less feasible than space colonization. Before we can look to other planets, we must colonize L5. To do that, we must either put IMMENSE quantities of stuff into space, or take stuff that already exists in space and move it to L5. The second approach is far more feasible.
http://en.wikipedia....point#L4_and_L5
Longsword, on 28 February 2012 - 11:10 PM, said:
Even if we do succesfully switch over to new resources- we still have a serious problem. For some reason, the human race is obsessed with growth. Our economies, technologies, way of life, are all focused around growth. A nation isnt happy if its population isnt increasing at a fantastic rate. The only way to keep up with this growth is to consume more resources at ever increasing rates- one day, our technology and resource supplies will fail to catch up with this unchecked population/industrial/financial growth, and it wont be pretty. The human population has gone from a few million to 9 billion+ in an incredibly short amount of time, and that rate is still going. The earth does have a limit to how many people it can support, and we have likely already exceeded it (as evidenced by the state of the third world, the massive ecological damage we have done to the planet, etc). Oil has artificially inflated it on the food production and logistics side.
Our stock markets have often used a similar principle- they operate on the assumption that growth will continue and continue and continue, but eventually the growth bubble does burst and the consequences are ruinous/
You're right. All animals follow the logistic formula for population growth:
N'(t)=r(1-N(t)/B)N(t)
You must notice that B is the carrying capacity. You're right in your statement that all animals have reached an equilibrium with their surroundings at some point. There is no reason to assume we won't either, but the actual number of carrying capacity and mechanism of the equilibrium occuring is TBD.
My point, when you combine the analysis I've done for you in the previous answer to your post is that
1) We won't run out of combustibles in the forseeable future.
2) Fusion power will become available in the forseeable future. (far sooner than we will begin to feel the scarcity mentioned in point1)
3) Deuterium's concentration as % of natural hydrogen (far more concentrated at bottom of ocean) is .015%
4) The mass of the ocean is a mind boggling number: 1.5×10
18 short tons. (The mass of hydrogen is less, but is still a huge number)
5) The mass of deuterium is a slightly smaller than the mass of hydrogen, but is still ridiculously mind boggling number that we won't deplete in millions of years of fusion.
6) In millions of years, we'll have colonized a lot of space and Earth may not even be inhabited anymore (asteroid impact?) and we'll have no shortage of energy in space (lots more water/hydrogen in space!) making energy concerns a very mild isssue of engineering.
Combine fusion with aeroponics/hydroponics and you have a carrying capacity in the trillions of people.