Benford, Gregory - Humanity as Cancer
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2024-11-25
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GREGORY BENFORD
HUMANITY AS CANCER
" . . . still I have not seen the fabulous city on the Pacific shore. Perhaps
I never will. There's something in the prospect southwest from Barstow which
makes one hesitate. Although recently, driving my own truck, I did succeed in
penetrating as far as San Bernardino. But was hurled back by what appeared to
be clouds of mustard gas rolling in from the west on a very broad front. Thus
failed again. It may be however that Los Angeles will come to me. Will come to
all of us, as it must (they say) to all men."
Edward Abbey - Desert Solitaire
In 1960 the journal Science published a short paper which is still sending
slow-motion shock waves through the soothsayers of our time. Titled "Doomsday:
Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026," its abstract reads in full, "At this date
human population will approach infinity if it grows as it has grown in the
last two millennia."
Period. Its authors, Heinz van Foerster, Patricia Mora and Lawrence Amiot,
were members of the staff of the department of electrical engineering at the
University of Illinois, Urbana. They were not population experts, but they
noted a simple oddity of mathematics. The rise in human numbers was always
studied in "doubling times," the measure of how quickly population doubled.
But real human numbers don't follow so clean an equation.
For a species expanding with no natural limitation aside from ordinary deaths,
the rate of increase of population is proportional to the population itself.
Mathematically, the population N is described by an equation in which the
change in N, dN, over a change in time t, dt, obeys dN/dt = b N
with b usually assumed to be a constant. If b is truly constant, then N will
rise exponentially.
Fair enough. But if people are clever, the proportionality factor b itself
will weakly increase as we learn to survive better. This means the rate of
increase will rise with the population, so N increases faster than an
exponential.
In fact, it can run away to infinity in a finite time. The equation describing
this is a bit more complicated. To find how b changed with N, the authors
simply looked at the average increase over the last two thousand years, to
iron out bumps and dips, seeking the long-term behavior.
They found a chilling result. Our recent climb in N in the last few centuries
is not an anomaly; instead, it fits the smooth curve of human numbers.
Tracking the solution backward "post-diets" that we were a mere 9.00,000
people a million years ago. Of course such great spans aren't well fit by
population counts gathered from two millennia, and the equation becomes silly.
But it should be good for at least a few centuries more.
Looking into the near future, it predicts a chilling result: a singularity,
with N rising faster and faster,going beyond view on Nov. 13, 2026. "The
clever population annihilates itself," they remark laconically. "Our great-
great-grandchildren will not starve to death. They will be squeezed to death."
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分类：外语学习
价格：5.9玖币
属性：10 页
大小：58.71KB
格式：PDF
时间：2024-11-25
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