The UN is going to save us..

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Just scanned an article where the United Nations says we are fast approaching dire straights (no, not the rock group) regarding world population growth and use of the earth's resources. One has to wonder if they would love to see a massive world war that would manage to kill off maybe 2 to 3 billion people, but then again, that also means more pollution (even nuclear??) and more rapid depletion of resources.

Anyway, they were talking about the earth having 6.7 billion people and that means each person has 5 acres of land space available to them. Well I'm here to tell you that far less than 1% of the earth's land surface area is inhabited by human beings. In fact, every human on the planet could fit inside of the three wealthiest counties in Virginia (Fairfax, Loudoun, and Prince William). The earth's land area is so sparcely populated that the number boggles the mind.

Less than 1/600th of 1% of the earth's land surface area is inhabited by humans. Now I know, this does not take into consideration buildings, paved roads, and other kinds of man made entities. Nor does it take into consideration food sources and the land needed to grow food. But there is plenty of space remaining and yo can bet it will be there long after we have all turned to dust. The single biggest reason for famine is war and despotic governments, so you can't blame that one on some other far fetched agenda. And what does this have to do with guns, you ask?

Plenty. These very same people who would control our populations, our food sources, our land acquisition and use, and our lives want also to control our access to firearms. These are one-worlders and they would like nothing better than to control everything around the planet, make no mistake about that. How better to do this then through scare tactics like over-population, pending food shortages, and the big one - global warming. Just another way to paint control.

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You're preaching to the choir.

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No, they're watching out for "our" best interests.(extreme sarcasm)Funny, I don't ever remember telling them what my interests were...

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expvideo wrote:

You're preaching to the choir.

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Perhaps. But I just thought this was interesting.

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Humans do need to stop breeding like rabbits. Fortunately, mother nature will take care of it one way or the other. We are cascading towards the point where a lack of food will curb the population. The UN has little, if any say in the matter.

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Earth land surface = 148,939,100km² http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth
Population = 6.7 x 10^9 your number

Allows 222.3 acres per individual (1% is 2.223 acres per individual)

The Grand Canyon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canyon is 277 miles long, about 10 miles wide and max depth more than a mile, we'll call it half a mile. 277 miles x 10 miles x 0.5 mile = 1385 mile^3

and divided by 6.7 x 10^9 people = 29,546 ft^3 per person, a cube 30 feet on a side.

My cottage has ~900 feet^2 heated on 6.5 acres.

Either we are equal or we are not. Good people ought to be armed where they will, with wits and guns and the truth. LAB/NRA/GOP KMA$$

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I'm certainly no fan of the U.N. or their policies, but there are already too many people on this planet, regardless of how many acres per person are available. Take into account the amount of area required to grow food to feed the average person. Then take into account the areas that are basically uninhabitable and/or which are not fertile enough to grow crops (this is a large majority of the total area, folks). Then take into account that the planet is not here solely for us, and that even if we could use every possible square foot for farming and living, it would likely end up killing us because it would destroy the Earth's biodiversity.

Perhaps if we would do things on our own - curb our consumption and keep our population in check - the U.N. wouldn't have any power over us in the first place.

"Everything is fine here. Go help Africa...they seem to need it".

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a lack of food will curb the population.

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No. The food can be grown but not distributed. Look, we're growing corn for fuel rather than building nuclear power plants.

Wind and 'renewables'? The Solar Constant is 1.35 kW m^-2 or almost 7.5 acres per megaWatt at 100% efficiency. In 2004, the worldwide energy consumption of the human race was 15 TW (= 1.5 x 10[sup]13[/sup] W), I'll leave it as an exercise to divide 1.35 kW m^-2 by 1.5 TW.

Either we are equal or we are not. Good people ought to be armed where they will, with wits and guns and the truth. LAB/NRA/GOP KMA$$

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Roughly 1/4 of the Earth's surface is arable and that poorly distributed among the continents/cultures.

Tree hugging 'watermelons' are green on the outside and good ol' RED (state) socialist on the inside.

Either we are equal or we are not. Good people ought to be armed where they will, withs wits and guns and the truth. LAB/NRA/GOP KMA$$

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Being born and raised in Sweden and lived in Europe til about 9 years ago...They can take U.N and shove it where the sun don't shine.

I am sick and tired of them. They are Part of the "New World = 1 Government Theory". New World Police Force.

I am Glad not to be a Part of the Sheepherd in Europe anymore.

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" No. The food can be grown but not distributed. Look, we're growing corn for fuel rather than building nuclear power plants."

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Corn is subsidized, nuclear power is not. That pretty much takes care of that. Not to mention that nobody seems to care about a corn crop in their back yard, but just mention the word nuclear....

Also, the United States has more areable land per capita than most other countries, so that comparison won't really work for the rest of the world (and let's not forget that we've already destroyed something like 70% of our temperate grasslands to turn into farmland).

"Wind and 'renewables'? The Solar Constant is 1.35 kW m^-2 or almost 7.5 acres per megaWatt at 100% efficiency."

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Can you cite your sources? Most everything that I have read suggests that our energy usage could easily be met with nothing more than solar power (this doesn't take into account transportation, only manufacturing, home and business heat and electric, etc). There are still some huge hurdles to jump before we can go 100% renewable, but they are not insurmountable.

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Doug Huffman wrote:

Earth land surface = 148,939,100km² http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth
Population = 6.7 x 10^9 your number

Allows 222.3 acres per individual (1% is 2.223 acres per individual)

The Grand Canyon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canyon is 277 miles long, about 10 miles wide and max depth more than a mile, we'll call it half a mile. 277 miles x 10 miles x 0.5 mile = 1385 mile^3

and divided by 6.7 x 10^9 people = 29,546 ft^3 per person, a cube 30 feet on a side.

My cottage has ~900 feet^2 heated on 6.5 acres.

Either we are equal or we are not. Good people ought to be armed where they will, with wits and guns and the truth. LAB/NRA/GOP KMA$$

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This is where I started with the figures.

The land surface area of the earth is [size="-1"]57268900 square miles (being an American, I don't use metric measurements). The amount of acres per person was quoted from the article at five. However, the figure works out to be 5.47 acres when using the UN's population estimate of 6.7 billion (their figure, not mine).

Anyway, if we square a mile, we come up with 27,878,400 square feet in a square mile. Multiply that times the number of square miles for the land surface and you get 1,596,565,301,760,000 or nearly 1.6 quadrillion square feet. Then divide the population into that number and you come up with 238,293.3286 square feet per person. Now I each human being can stand in four square feet of space, so divide this number by 4 and you get 59,573.3322 (rounded) units. This results in 0.0016786 which the decimal fraction of the land surface area inhabited by people.

Interestingly, I have occasionally asked people to estimate how much of the earth's land mass is inhabited by humans and most say around 75%!

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Cite my source for what, the Solar Constant?

Handbook of Physical Calculations, Jan J. Tuma McGraw-Hill, 1976, pg. 267, Appendix A 'Physical Tables', A.03 Earth Data - fifteen lines down.

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Or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_constant#Solar_constant

Or for 1.5 TW? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_resources_and_consumption

Second paragraph

In 2004, the worldwide energy consumption of the human race was 15 TW (= 1.5 x 1013 W) with 86.5% from burning fossil fuels.[1] This is equivalent to 0.5 ZJ (= 5 x 1020 J) per year, although there is at least 10% uncertainty in the world's energy consumption. Not all of the world's economies track their energy consumption with the same rigor, and the exact energy content of a barrel of oil or a ton of coal will vary with quality.

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Renewable? Barbara Streisand! Ultimately all of the energy for renewable-energy comes from the Sun and there you are again, up against the Solar Constant.

Hell, just do some order of magnitude estimates.

Now consider the 'integrated pollution committment' of your photovoltaics or hydrogen power, IPC being the pollution committed by the development of the infrastructure to support these pie-in-the-sky dreams. Look at Compact Florescent Lights - CFL - each one contains 5 mg Hg. What is the cost of disposal of hazardous material Hg (it's in florescent tubes too)?

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Cue-Ball wrote:

I'm certainly no fan of the U.N. or their policies, but there are already too many people on this planet, regardless of how many acres per person are available. Take into account the amount of area required to grow food to feed the average person. Then take into account the areas that are basically uninhabitable and/or which are not fertile enough to grow crops (this is a large majority of the total area, folks). Then take into account that the planet is not here solely for us, and that even if we could use every possible square foot for farming and living, it would likely end up killing us because it would destroy the Earth's biodiversity.

Perhaps if we would do things on our own - curb our consumption and keep our population in check - the U.N. wouldn't have any power over us in the first place.

"Everything is fine here. Go help Africa...they seem to need it".

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At the risk of appearing a smarta--, what would you have us do with the bulging hordes? Spark a war? Perhaps mass sterilizaton? Maybe just culling the herd a bit from time to time would do.

No, I am not being an a--hole, just a little tongue-in-cheek. There is nothing we can do about population growth in most of the world because it is outside of the U.S. where the bulk of the problem lies. The simple figures I was presenting was just an example of space and people. Nothing to do with food or shelter. A more in-depth and serious discussion would be the place for that matter. It is an unfortunate historical fact of the human condition that the three most effective population control mechanisms have been war, pestilence, and famine. These things seem to do what we as a species cannot and will not do. The real danger is the unbridled population explosion in underdeveloped third world countries while we have diminished population growth in the highly developed and advanced nations.

BTW, the UN has no power over Americans, though they would certainly like that.

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Doug Huffman wrote:

Cite my source for what, the Solar Constant?

Handbook of Physical Calculations, Jan J. Tuma McGraw-Hill, 1976, pg. 267, Appendix A 'Physical Tables', A.03 Earth Data - fifteen lines down.

Click to expand...

Or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_constant#Solar_constant

Or for 1.5 TW? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_resources_and_consumption

Second paragraph

In 2004, the worldwide energy consumption of the human race was 15 TW (= 1.5 x 1013 W) with 86.5% from burning fossil fuels.[1] This is equivalent to 0.5 ZJ (= 5 x 1020 J) per year, although there is at least 10% uncertainty in the world's energy consumption. Not all of the world's economies track their energy consumption with the same rigor, and the exact energy content of a barrel of oil or a ton of coal will vary with quality.

Click to expand...

Renewable? Barbara Streisand! Ultimately all of the energy for renewable-energy comes from the Sun and there you are again, up against the Solar Constant.

Hell, just do some order of magnitude estimates.

Now consider the 'integrated pollution committment' of your photovoltaics or hydrogen power, IPC being the pollution committed by the development of the infrastructure to support these pie-in-the-sky dreams. Look at Compact Florescent Lights - CFL - each one contains 5 mg Hg. What is the cost of disposal of hazardous material Hg (it's in florescent tubes too)?

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Your sources (wikipedia) show "Thus, for the whole Earth, with a cross section of 127,400,000 km², the power is 1.740×10[sup]17[/sup] W, plus or minus 3.5%."

and "In 2004, the worldwide energy consumption of the human race was 15 TW (= 1.5 x 10[sup]13[/sup] W)"

If those numbers are correct, then that would mean that we receive over 11,000 times more energy from the sun than all of the energy we use in a year from every combined source.

Is there something I'm missing here? If not, it would seem that solar power alone, provided you could capture and convert it, would easily meet Earth's energy needs.

As to the pollution generated by photovoltaics, CFLs, etc, I addressed that a bit in my earlier post by saying that these things may not be the answer at all (I remain unconvinced about photovoltaics usefulness or overall efficiency), but science makes great strides all the time. It's also worth noting that such things may not even be necessary anyway. There are already operating solar power plants which do not use photovoltaic cells, we have other options besides CFLs (LEDs, OLEDs, etc.). I don't see this as pie-in-the-sky in the least. There have already been numerous builders who have constructed homes that require no energy for heating or cooling, which is where the vast majority of household energy goes. With more efficient (and fewer) appliances, electric needs could be met more easily. Let's also not forget that there is no infastructure to build if you strive for an off-grid system where each home generates its own power.

No matter what side of the fence you're on about whether or not it can be done, I'd say it's far better to try than to throw your hands up and say "it can't be done".

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SouthernBoy wrote:

At the risk of appearing a smarta--, what would you have us do with the bulging hordes? Spark a war? Perhaps mass sterilizaton? Maybe just culling the herd a bit from time to time would do.

BTW, the UN has no power over Americans, though they would certainly like that.

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I keep hoping for the "Twelve Monkeys" virus to start its outbreak. Population is one of those things that controls itself in one way or another. We can either do it the easy way and quit reproducing, or we can do it the hard way and end up like the inhabitants of Easter Island.

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A cross-section is a circle, a plane with smaller area than a hemisphere.

Circular area is Pi r^2.

Sphereical area is 4Pi r^2

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The solution, as hinted previously, is the next great plague. MRSA, VRE, influenza, HIV, etc. One will rise to the task.