Exponential Mathematics

IV
Late-phase exponential?

Exponential Mathematics - IV What About Other Planets?

There is still another balloon to be popped, one that also lures us into complacency when we evaluate our possible demographic futures. Colonizing other planets is not a safety valve that is going to have any impact whatsoever on overpopulation here at home. We are sometimes tempted to imagine that other planets represent a sort of ultimate safety outlet if our population problems worsen. It is easy to imagine that our species will eventually travel to and colonize other planets. Soon, for example, our species may send astronauts to Mars. And if we do, it is quite possible that humanity will have established an inhabited research station on the red planet by mid-century, if not sooner. Someday, such an outpost might come to resemble the research stations that exist in Antarctica today. There may be a dozen or so scientists who spend a year or two at a time at such a facility. These ideas are real possibilities. But will Mars and other planets save us from our current patterns of population growth? Are they an ultimate safety valve if our population problems get out of hand? Although the thought is tempting, it turns out that other planets are an impossible safety valve. First, our nearest neighboring planets, Mars and Venus, are atmospherically and climatically unsuited to any sort of large-scale human habitation. Venus, for instance, has surface temperatures of 900 oF, puddles of melted lead on its surface, a crushing atmosphere of carbon dioxide, and clouds composed of sulfuric acid. We have yet to devise unmanned spacecraft that can long survive or function on its surface, much less human beings. And although terraforming, as discussed in some of our other resources, is a possibility, it would take a very long time even if it worked. Mars Won't Work Either Aside from prohibitively hostile conditions existing on the other planets of our solar system, the problems involving costs and logistics are also insurmountable. Contemplate, for example, how much it will eventually cost to fly a dozen astronauts to Mars aboard a small fleet of three or four spacecraft. Suppose, instead, that we decide to just transport one or two billion people to Mars to eliminate overcrowding at home, remembering, of course, that a billion is a truly enormous number. Now imagine how much it would cost to fund the hundreds of thousands of missions that would be necessary to accomplish such a feat not to mention all the expenditures needed to build the necessary homes, factories, farms, roads, water and sewer plants, schools, and similar infrastructure the new human colonies would require on a new planetary home. Might we send a dozen or so astronauts to Mars on a mission of exploration? Of course. But even if billions of people volunteered themselves and their families for such a hazardous trip, all the governments and taxes in the world could not afford to send those billions to Mars. It would

be an utter nightmare of expense and logistics to fly billions of people to Tierra del Fuego never mind sending those same billions to the planet Mars. Lessons of the Dinoflagellates II Recall for a moment the mental experiment involving dinoflagellates in our previous excerpt. We di flagellates excerpt saw that by doubling their numbers repeatedly every sixty seconds, the dinoflagellates comnumbers com pletely occupied their container in the course of an hour. d

Suppose that our dinoflagellates are a technologically advanced species and, in the last few minmin utes before disaster, that they explore distant parts of the laboratory in which they live. Suppose also that they are extraordinarily lucky in their explorations and fortuitously discover three more containers exactly like their home jar (after Bartlett, 1978; 2005) (see illustration above). ) Let us further imagine that these new bottles contain salt water, nutrients, temperature, and light conditions that are nearly identical to those of their home jar. Thus, if the dinoflagellate popula population can somehow accomplish the necessary transportation, all three of their new bottles are perfectly suited, by sheer good fortune, for immediate dinoflagellate habitation. If all of these lucky events occur, how much more time do the dinoflagellates buy for themselves? di ? Do they buy themselves three more hours? Three More Hours? Unfortunately, our intuitions lead us once again to an incorrect answer. The logic suggested by most of our K-12 training goes like this: It took one hour to fill the first bottle, so three more 12 first bottles must buy the species three more hours. As we saw in the previous excerpt, however, excerpt these organisms are growing in an exponential pattern, so that the fortunate discovery of three additional bottles does not buy the organisms three more hours. In an exponential setting, such extremely fortunate discoveries buy the organisms just two more minutes. As the dinoflagellates approach the environmental limits of their home jar, their numnum bers continue to double every sixty seconds. This means that the occupants of a filled jar at 11:00 ery a.m. will double over the course of the next minute, so that two bottles are full at 11:01 a.m. And the occupants of those two jars will all double in another sixty seconds. Thus, by 11:02 a.m., we . find ourselves with four bottles completely filled with dinofla dinoflagellates and they are just as close to collapse as they were two minutes ago. In this case, however, there are four biospheres and FOUR times as many individuals faced with death as the population finally exceeds the limits of even a quadrupling of its original environment. environment

In addition, there is a widely-held misperception that a calamitous overpopulation somehow cannot exist or cannot be very serious so long as "vast amounts of open space" are still available in a population's environment
(A topic that we address analytically in other PowerPoints and PDFs in this set; See Population calamities in vast open-space conditions and Human Population Growth and the Open-space Delusion.)

Real-world dinoflagellates (as well as classical reindeer herd experiments discussed in other documents in our collection) both confirm and demonstrate that this misperception is seriously incorrect. During an outbreak of deadly red-tide in the ocean, for example, if we collect one liter of the sea water in the outbreak, the entire sample has toxic levels of "brevetoxins" that have been released into the water by the dinoflagellate cells. Yet, the one million dinoflagellate cells per liter whose activities have poisoned the water in this same water sample managed to do so by exceeding an unseen population threshold for their species: Thus, while occupying less than two one-thousand ths of one percent of the total available "space" in their environment (see the tiny white dot in image, left), real-world dinoflagellates (such as Karenia brevis) routinely invite calamity upon themselves and the aqueous surroundings in which they reside, so that they constitute one of natures quintessential examples of population disasters.*
*These topics are treated in What Every Citizen Should Know About Our Planet and in our presentation Population calamities in vast open-space conditions

In other words, real-world dinoflagellates produce their red-tide catastrophes LONG BEFORE the dinoflagellate cells themselves manage to fill the environment in which they live. It should be disquieting, in fact, that they manage to inflict a population disaster upon themselves and the aqueous environment in which they reside when they physically occupy only a volumetricallyinsignificant portion of the empty space that visually appears to be theoretically-available to them and in environmental conditions that appear to be ALMOST ENTIRELY EMPTY.

Good Planets Are Hard To Find We are, of course, not really interested in dinoflagellates and their imaginary bottles. We are, however, interested in ourselves and our planet. We have devoted a lot of attention to our dinoflagellates because they are a useful vehicle to better understand ourselves. Thankfully of course, our own doubling time, is not one minute. Our own doubling times have become shorter and shorter throughout history (yet another characteristic of exponential progressions). Our most recent doubling time has been approximately forty years as we progressed from three billion in 1960 to six billion in late 1999. As former CIA director Jim Woolsey, commenting on permafrost and feedbacks, recently noted, nature is not always going to behave in linear fashion [just] because our minds think that way (as cited in Friedman, 2008). Our astounding planet with its natural systems and interacting life-support machinery is utterly unique anywhere in the known universe. We know of no other planet even remotely like it. And yet our exploding numbers, industrialization, and collective impacts are destroying its non-human inhabitants, its beauty, and its life-support infrastructure with selfish abandon. If our current trajectories persist, there will be no planetary do-overs available if we destroy everything around us this first time around. Dinoflagellates and Brevetoxins It is useful to imagine what might kill the dinoflagellates in such an experiment. Do they suffer from hunger and mass starvation? No. Do they suffer from an outbreak of epidemic disease or an infectious virus? No. Do they undergo violent phenomena such as war and aggression? No. Among dinoflagellates, each organism releases tiny amounts of poisonous brevetoxins into its environment, and in a vast ocean with few dinoflagellates, these wastes are diluted and have no ill effect. But when population explosions result in a million or more dinoflagellates per liter, the toxins become sufficiently concentrated to poison scores of marine species (including, for instance, fishes and whales and even the dinoflagellates themselves). We thus see a quintessential example of organisms inviting calamity upon themselves and other living things in their environment by their production of wastes. And finally, dinoflagellates help underscore the fact that most of the growth in an exponential sequence occurs at the end of the progression, along with the degree and the rapidity with which conditions can deteriorate in its closing phases. One hopes that it is our destiny in the decades and millennia ahead to visit other planets and to explore the universe that is our home. But can other planets allow us to escape our present collision with the carrying capacity of our planet and its environment? Even if we were to fly billions of people, probably against their will, to presently uninhabitable planets at unimaginable costs, other planets are not going to save us from the collision and overshoot that is presently underway and which will continue to proceed at breakneck speeds in the decades ahead. Thus, we see that: (a) Colonizing other planets is not a safety valve that is going to have any impact whatsoever on problems of overpopulation here at home, and (b) Even the existence of seemingly large amounts of open space does not shield a species from population catastrophe.

A continuation of todays demographic tidal wave may constit stitute the greatest single risk that our species has ever undertaken dertaken.

Courtesy of THE WECSKAOP PROJECT What Every Citizen Should Know About Our Planet Used with permission.

Copyright 2011. Randolph Femmer. . All rights reserved.

This document is entirely free for use by scientists, students, and educators anywhere in the world.

Sources and Cited References

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Anson, 2009. Anson, 1996. Bartlett, 2005. The Essential Exponential. Campbell, et al., 1999 Cohen, 1995 Cohen and Tilman, 1996. Dobson, et al., 1997 Duggins, 1980; Estes and Palmisano, 1974 Mader, 1996 Mill, J.S., 1848. Pimm, 2001. Prescott, et al., 1999. Raven, et al., 1986 Wilson, 2002.