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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>I had an idea I have been playing withwardly. Alfred Nobel invented dynamite and thought that he had ended warfare, since the new explosive made the whole notion of armed conflict just too dangerous to be any fun. He was tragically wrong of course: warfare just became more dangerous, as demonstrated in two major European conflicts. But in a way he was right: eventually we went thru another round of invention of still bigger explosives when we built nukes, and in that way, warfare really is too dangerous now for nuke-enable societies to play. So Al Nobel was premature, but not exactly wrong.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Today we look at Mr. and Mrs. Ehrlich’s notion of the population bomb and their predictions, and oh, were they silly, so wrong, etc. But in retrospect, it isn’t entirely clear to me they were wrong exactly, but rather just too pessimistic on the timeframe of their predictions. Perhaps they really had the right idea to some extent, just didn’t really model it correctly. Perhaps in the very long run, Malthusian population dynamics really do apply to this overcrowded planet, but the model is far more complex than a jar of fruit flies.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>What other examples can we think of where the initially presented model is too simple but perhaps contains some truth?<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>spike<o:p></o:p></p></div></body></html>