"Kim Stanley Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

just because it might create poisons that would last fifty thousand years.
On the other hand, solar was coming along fast enough to encourage Frank to hope
for even more acceleration. There were problems, but ultimately the fundamental
point remained: in every moment an incredible amount of energy rained down from
the sun onto the Earth. That was what oil was, after all: a small portion of the sunтАЩs
energy, captured by photosynthesis over millions of yearsтАФall those plants, fixing
carbon and then dying, then getting condensed into a sludge and buried rather than
returning to the air. Millions of years of sunlight caught that way. Every tank of gas
burned about a hundred acres of what had been a forestтАЩs carbon. Or say a hundred
years of a single acreтАЩs production of forest carbon. This was a very impressive
condensate! It made sense that matching it with the real-time energy input from any
other system would be difficult.
But sunlight itself rained down perpetually. About seventy percent of the
photosynthesis that took place on Earth was already entrained to human uses, but
photosysnthesis only caught a small fraction of the total amount of solar energy
striking the planet each day. Those totals, day after day, soon dwarfed even what
had been caught in the Triassic fossil carbon. Every couple of months, the whole
TriassicтАЩs capture was surpassed. So the potential was there.
This was true in so many areas. The potential was there, but time was required to
realize the potential, and now it was beginning to seem like they did not have much
time. Speed was crucial. This was the reason Diane and others were still
contemplating nuclear.
It would be good if they needed less energy. Well, but this was an entirely different
problem, dragging in many other issuesтАФtechnology, consumption, lifestyles,
values, habitsтАФalso the sheer number of humans on the planet. Perhaps seven billion
was too many, perhaps six billion was too many. It was possible that three billion
was too many. Their six billion could be a kind of oil bubble.
Edgardo was not calling, neither was Caroline calling.
Desperate for ways to occupy his mindтАФthough of course he did not think of it that
way, in order not to break the spellтАФFrank began to look into estimates of the
EarthтАЩs maximum human carrying capacity. This turned out (usefully enough for his
real purpose) to be an incredibly vexed topic, argued over for centuries already, with
no clear answers yet found. The literature contained estimates for the EarthтАЩs human
carrying capacity ranging from one hundred million to twelve trillion. Quite a spread!
Although here the outliers were clearly the result of some heavily ideological
analyses; the high estimate appeared to be translating the sunlight hitting the Earth
directly into human calories, with no other factors included; the low estimate
appeared not to like human beings, even to regard them as some kind of parasite.
The majority of serious opinion came in between two billion and thirty billion; this
was satisfyingly tighter than the seven magnitudes separating the outlier estimates,
but for practical purposes still a big variance, especially considering how important
the real number was. If the carrying capacity of the planet was two billion, they had
badly overshot and were in serious trouble, looking at a major dieback that might
spiral to near extinction. If on the other hand the thirty billion figure was correct, they
had some wiggle-room to maneuver.
But there were hardly any scientific or governmental organizations even looking at
this issue. Zero Population Growth was one of the smallest advocacy groups in
Washington, which was saying a lot; and Negative Population Growth (a bad name,
it seemed to Frank) turned out to be a mom-and-pop operation run out of a garage.
It was bizarre.