<story><title>We&apos;re Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction</title><url>http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/were-underestimating-the-risk-of-human-extinction/253821/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cletus</author><text>It&apos;s worth bringing up &lt;i&gt;The Most Important Video You&apos;ll Ever Watch&lt;/i&gt; [1], which the lecturer characterizes as humanity&apos;s biggest problem is our inability to understand the exponential function. Watch all 8 parts.&lt;p&gt;I have come to the conclusion that there simply are too many of us. We can probably sustain our current levels for a century, maybe two, but at some point scarce resources (and their subsequent cost) will have a devastating effect.&lt;p&gt;Basically, we need to correct our population before nature does.&lt;p&gt;As much as people point to space being our future, I simply (sadly) do not agree. While there might be plentiful resources in the asteroid belt (and on other bodies) nothing compares to how cheaply we can pull things out of the ground here on Earth. Our society is predicated on cheap, plentiful resources such that it can&apos;t survive them being several (or even one?) order of magnitude more expensive.&lt;p&gt;As far as interstellar space goes, even if we solve the reaction mass problem and have perfect (100% efficient) conversion of matter to energy, it will still be prohibitive to go to even the nearest stars.&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the simplest explanation of the Fermi Paradox is that potential growth for a starfaring civilization is geometric (being a sphere ultimately limited by the speed of light) while growth rates are exponential. And exponential will ultimately &quot;win&quot;.&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>astrofinch</author><text>That video is a joke for anyone who has more than a superficial understanding of math. Just because a process has fit an exponential curve does not mean exponential growth is going to continue forever. Past growth patterns are fairly weak evidence of future growth patterns. (&quot;Housing prices always go up!&quot;)&lt;p&gt;That&apos;s not to say we shouldn&apos;t fear a process that is inherently exponential in nature, like the reproduction of bacteria or a nuclear reaction going supercritical. But if the process only appears from the outside to have been growing exponentially, that&apos;s only a weak indicator that it will start behaving in an insane fashion.&lt;p&gt;In any case, it seems that as nations become more developed people stop having kids:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/11/fertility-the-big-problem.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/11/fertility-the-big-prob...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>We&apos;re Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction</title><url>http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/were-underestimating-the-risk-of-human-extinction/253821/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cletus</author><text>It&apos;s worth bringing up &lt;i&gt;The Most Important Video You&apos;ll Ever Watch&lt;/i&gt; [1], which the lecturer characterizes as humanity&apos;s biggest problem is our inability to understand the exponential function. Watch all 8 parts.&lt;p&gt;I have come to the conclusion that there simply are too many of us. We can probably sustain our current levels for a century, maybe two, but at some point scarce resources (and their subsequent cost) will have a devastating effect.&lt;p&gt;Basically, we need to correct our population before nature does.&lt;p&gt;As much as people point to space being our future, I simply (sadly) do not agree. While there might be plentiful resources in the asteroid belt (and on other bodies) nothing compares to how cheaply we can pull things out of the ground here on Earth. Our society is predicated on cheap, plentiful resources such that it can&apos;t survive them being several (or even one?) order of magnitude more expensive.&lt;p&gt;As far as interstellar space goes, even if we solve the reaction mass problem and have perfect (100% efficient) conversion of matter to energy, it will still be prohibitive to go to even the nearest stars.&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the simplest explanation of the Fermi Paradox is that potential growth for a starfaring civilization is geometric (being a sphere ultimately limited by the speed of light) while growth rates are exponential. And exponential will ultimately &quot;win&quot;.&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>snowwrestler</author><text>The world population growth rate is not exponential; in fact it has been declining for decades. It seems increasingly possible that the human population will stabilize or even decline in this century.</text></comment>