"Benford-HumanityCancer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Benford Gregory)

GREGORY BENFORD

HUMANITY AS CANCER

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" . . . still I have not seen the fabulous city on the Pacific shore. Perhaps I
never will. There's something in the prospect southwest from Barstow which makes
one hesitate. Although recently, driving my own truck, I did succeed in
penetrating as far as San Bernardino. But was hurled back by what appeared to be
clouds of mustard gas rolling in from the west on a very broad front. Thus
failed again. It may be however that Los Angeles will come to me. Will come to
all of us, as it must (they say) to all men."

Edward Abbey
Desert Solitaire

In 1960 the journal Science published a short paper which is still sending
slow-motion shock waves through the soothsayers of our time. Titled "Doomsday:
Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026," its abstract reads in full, "At this date human
population will approach infinity if it grows as it has grown in the last two
millennia."

Period. Its authors, Heinz van Foerster, Patricia Mora and Lawrence Amiot, were
members of the staff of the department of electrical engineering at the
University of Illinois, Urbana. They were not population experts, but they noted
a simple oddity of mathematics. The rise in human numbers was always studied in
"doubling times," the measure of how quickly population doubled. But real human
numbers don't follow so clean an equation.

For a species expanding with no natural limitation aside from ordinary deaths,
the rate of increase of population is proportional to the population itself.
Mathematically, the population N is described by an equation in which the change
in N, dN, over a change in time t, dt, obeys dN/dt = b N

with b usually assumed to be a constant. If b is truly constant, then N will
rise exponentially.

Fair enough. But if people are clever, the proportionality factor b itself will
weakly increase as we learn to survive better. This means the rate of increase
will rise with the population, so N increases faster than an exponential.

In fact, it can run away to infinity in a finite time. The equation describing
this is a bit more complicated. To find how b changed with N, the authors simply
looked at the average increase over the last two thousand years, to iron out
bumps and dips, seeking the long-term behavior.

They found a chilling result. Our recent climb in N in the last few centuries is
not an anomaly; instead, it fits the smooth curve of human numbers. Tracking the