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

solution backward "post-diets" that we were a mere 9.00,000 people a million
years ago. Of course such great spans aren't well fit by population counts
gathered from two millennia, and the equation becomes silly. But it should be
good for at least a few centuries more.

Looking into the near future, it predicts a chilling result: a singularity, with
N rising faster and faster,going beyond view on Nov. 13, 2026. "The clever
population annihilates itself," they remark laconically. "Our
great-great-grandchildren will not starve to death. They will be squeezed to
death."

The paper has never been refuted. Further checks on the growth of the factor b
have pushed the singularity date further away, to about 2049. This is
comforting, moving the date by about twenty years in the thirty-four years since
the paper appeared.

But the general conclusion stands. As an exercise in statistics it is
stimulating, and as far as I know the authors did little with it after their
first telling point.

Of course, nothing grows to the sky. Something will happen before b gets too
large; the four horsemen of the apocalypse will ride again. Perhaps they already
are. Still, we are not doormats. We are attempting population control, but
results are slow, and pressures are mounting.

I wrote before in this column about the ideas which follow, in a piece titled
"The Biological Century." I'd like to revisit an idea I floated there, with some
second thoughts.

The future is coming, and it's ugly.

Or so many believe. From staid university presidents and scruffy
environmentalists alike, a growing consensus holds that humanity has entered a
watershed era, a time of vast disasters looming large, just over the horizon of
this generation. Their case rests on far more than an equation, too.

In 1992 1 went on a cross-country hike in Orange County to protest a highway
soon to go in. Puffing up a hill, I struck up a conversation with a member of
the eco-warrior group Earth First, who wore the signature red shirt with a
clenched fist. We mounted a ridge and saw the gray sweep of concrete that lapped
against the hills below.

"Looks like a sea of shit," the Earth Firster said. "Or a disease."

That same month the National Academy of Sciences and Britain's Royal Society
jointly warned of the dangerous links between population and environmental
damage. Following this up, the Union of Concerned Scientists mustered 1500
experts to sign a "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity" and published it in
leading newspapers. Heavy hitters, these, including the predictable (Linus
Pauling, Paul Ehrlich, Carl Sagan), the inexpert but sanctified (Desmond Tutu],