[extropy-chat] ex-tropical

Adrian Tymes wingcat at pacbell.net
Sun Feb 29 21:45:02 UTC 2004


--- Harvey Newstrom <mail at HarveyNewstrom.com> wrote:
> Adrian Tymes wrote,
> > Some of it is sci-fi, some of it is not
> unexpected.
> > E.g., Europe having to deal with a lot of
> immigrants:
> > that's happening today.  But planetary
> depopulation
> > primarily from famine?  Earth is more likely to be
> depopulated by mass 
> > emigration to off-Earth living facilities than by
> famine.
> 
> This is ludicrous.  The Hunger Project reports that
> 20,000 people die every
> day from hunger.  Other statistics claim this is as
> high as 35,000 people
> per day.

Yes, but those are largely in areas which have a high
birth rate to compensate.  Quite a lot of those
deaths are children, who were born in large quantities
in the hopes that a few of them would survive.  A few
of them do, and the cycle continues.  Net result, as
we have seen over at least the past century: stable or
increasing population, not depopulation.

Emigration, on the other hand, would probably not
cause a high birth rate to compensate.  Net result:
depopulation.

That is what I was trying to communicate.



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