Las Vegas in the US is one of the best examples of that : that big town was build in the desert.
That's a good example, but it is almost like a hydraulic state. What if there was a drop-off in the flow of the Colorado river, for example?
I like new dams, but can we afford their ecological impact? What about their social impact, to displaced peoples etc?
If we can't colonize places like Siberia or Chinese deserts, then we are certainly not ready to colonize Mars or giant planets "interesting" satellites (Europa, Titan & so on...).
Well, yes. But we all know that the real limitation against a colony on Mars, etc, is motivation, and it's the same here. It is a
little less problematic though.
It is important to remember that in Antarctica, for example, you face worse problems than on Mars, for example from the thick air trying to remove your heat... and on the seafloor, that becomes more problematic, and you now have to deal with high pressures as well.
Though in response to Siberian Tiger earlier, anyone who can count can see the value of spaceflight. Particularly the satellite systems that
allow the modern world to run. But that unfortunately has nothing to do with human colonisation, at least, not yet. But I don't know how it could matter.
Also, even in France, where the density is considered "high", there is lot of unused land in the inside of the country.
Unused land that also happens to be ecologically rich old-growth forest? :uhh:
Concerning food production, the problem is merely political/economical. A lot of land is being used to produce bio-ethanol and other ethanol-derived products, and the surface usually devoted to grains has shrinked. But the output didn't decrease, because agricultural technology is making progress everyday (the experiments on vegetals made in space greatly contributed on this).
Indeed, but... eventually there is a limit on how little water you can feed your crops and still expect them to grow, and there is a limit on how little land you can get a set amount of food from.
Vertical farming, maybe? It strikes me as very attractive, but like everything, it has problems.
I would say that the situation of the USSR vs the USA standoff is unlikely to repeat: both for the reason that nuclear weapons are slowly driven off their throne of unstoppable punishment by development of technologies, and by unlikelihood of appearance of an equally large political counterweight to the USA till at least the middle of the century 21.
Don't discount nuclear weapons. Despite technological development and disarmament efforts, I would not expect them to disappear any times soon... adding to that, the fact that you don't need a lot of nukes to be very destructive (which is by and large their purpose for existence as a weapon). You don't have to fight as envisioned in the cold war- an all-out barrage of nuclear weapons, intended as an approximation of the apocalypse. The threat, of just one nuclear weapon, striking a city such as New York or Moscow... I wouldn't want to think of it.
I agree though that a USSR-USA standoff is unlikely to repeat, but for other reasons (namely the root cause). Here we have the US and the EU as allies, China as a communist-in-name-only world factory, and then Russia... I'm struggling to see why the US and Russia would want to go to war. But with changing geopolitics over what? 20? 30? 50 years? I'm not sure.
The USA has a military that is far more than nukes, they have the largest military expenditure on the planet... there are a lot of things it cannot do (and fails at doing rather spectacularly), but that does not mean it is wholly worthless.
We have emerging superpowers, mini superpowers maybe... maybe they should be called
mesopowers. Brazil, India... there is a lot of change that could happen there, and lead to conflict, but potentially not lead to an actual world war (unless or until the bigger entities get involved).
Conventional war can be pretty damn destructive, and WWII proved that. That is not necessarily something any sane person would wish for.
The world order that existed during that standoff, was crumbling over last decades and the world gets more dynamic in development. At the same time, ongoing crises in economy correlate with growing problems with today's distribution of roles and profits in world economy.
Yes but... how does that cause a war? I agree with you in part, but how is it in and of itself, a stimulus for global conflict?
It does not take to be a prophet to say that fire is gonna happen sooner or later in a workshop littered with wood pieces and shavings if carpenters are drunk, careless and occasionally throw cigar stubs under their feet.
Well, no. But the problem is: I see no careless carpenters. Maybe drunk ones, sure, but not anyone downright stupid. I can't think of a leader of a superpower or at least a powerful nation, since 1945, who has been stupid enough to seek out conflict.
How did they define poverty measured for this chart, by the way?
They defined it as less than $ 1.25 per day. At the time of posting, that is equivalent to 0.95 Euro, 8.28 Yuan, 0.81 British Pounds, 56.47 Indian Rupees, and 8.43 South African Rand.
At present, it is estimated Earth could support up to 15 billion humans, and that number is increasing far more rapidly than the actual human population.
Yes, but, at what cost?
I think one of my worst nightmares would be a world covered in cities and farms, with no natural land left... the only biodiversity would be cockroaches, pidgeons, rats...
Not the kind of organism that you can easily make aspirin out of, either.
"Population control" reeks of the same genocidal mania that plunged the 20th century into unimaginable wars.
Indeed. Or the Human Extinction Movement.
One would expect such nonsense to
die out soon enough.
rolleyes
