If you think about it, population growth and the atomic bomb have a lot in common. In this blog, I will try to show you how.
First, you need to know a little about how the atomic bomb works. Atomic bombs start off with a material that is very unstable with atoms splitting apart all the time. As these atoms split apart, fragments hit other atoms and cause them to also split apart. As long as the population of atoms is not vary dense, many of the atoms fragments do not hit anything when they split. The fragments continue to fly out into space or hitting an atom that is not unstable. When a bunch of these unstable atoms get pushed together, as in a very dense population, a high enough percentage of the fragments hit unstable atoms that the splitting starts accelerating to the point of generating so much heat that there is an explosion! This last part happens in a blink of an eye. Everything looks calm and then in a split second the world explodes. That is how it works.
Now, how about population? People are just like these unstable atoms, only rather than just getting closer and closer together, they multiply inside of a restricted space, the Earth. It is like packing more and more people into a pressure cooker. At first people only notice that there are more and more cars on the road or that they have to drive farther and farther to find a nice place to camp or fish. One day the person can not get to work because the roads are completely jammed. The school has had to give up its football field for another class room. This keeps going until people are killing one another for food and living space. They can not escape, because every other place is just as bad. Hatti would be there right now if they did not have the ability to escape. Same for a lot of other countries. This last phase is equal to the atomic bomb going off by reaching "critical mass" or "density".
Remember my blog about "what happens in the limit". In the case of population growth, the human race as we have known it for thousands of years "explodes". What the fragments look like, I am not sure, but we do have examples to learn from. Easter Island is the best model that I know of and it all happened from start to finish in less than 1,000 years. That is not very long!
The solution is not letting people from places like Hatti escape or immigrate to make life worse some place else. We all have to be honest and mature enough to solve the problem by getting the net human birth rate down to zero. We are doing that now with cats and dogs in the civilized world. If is good enough for cats and dogs, why not us humans?
PS--I looked up the birth rate for Niger. They "average" 7.2 children per family while the USA and much of civilized world is less than 1.5! When was the last time you purchased a TV set, car or computer made some place in Africa? Never! Starting to see the problem?
First, you need to know a little about how the atomic bomb works. Atomic bombs start off with a material that is very unstable with atoms splitting apart all the time. As these atoms split apart, fragments hit other atoms and cause them to also split apart. As long as the population of atoms is not vary dense, many of the atoms fragments do not hit anything when they split. The fragments continue to fly out into space or hitting an atom that is not unstable. When a bunch of these unstable atoms get pushed together, as in a very dense population, a high enough percentage of the fragments hit unstable atoms that the splitting starts accelerating to the point of generating so much heat that there is an explosion! This last part happens in a blink of an eye. Everything looks calm and then in a split second the world explodes. That is how it works.
Now, how about population? People are just like these unstable atoms, only rather than just getting closer and closer together, they multiply inside of a restricted space, the Earth. It is like packing more and more people into a pressure cooker. At first people only notice that there are more and more cars on the road or that they have to drive farther and farther to find a nice place to camp or fish. One day the person can not get to work because the roads are completely jammed. The school has had to give up its football field for another class room. This keeps going until people are killing one another for food and living space. They can not escape, because every other place is just as bad. Hatti would be there right now if they did not have the ability to escape. Same for a lot of other countries. This last phase is equal to the atomic bomb going off by reaching "critical mass" or "density".
Remember my blog about "what happens in the limit". In the case of population growth, the human race as we have known it for thousands of years "explodes". What the fragments look like, I am not sure, but we do have examples to learn from. Easter Island is the best model that I know of and it all happened from start to finish in less than 1,000 years. That is not very long!
The solution is not letting people from places like Hatti escape or immigrate to make life worse some place else. We all have to be honest and mature enough to solve the problem by getting the net human birth rate down to zero. We are doing that now with cats and dogs in the civilized world. If is good enough for cats and dogs, why not us humans?
PS--I looked up the birth rate for Niger. They "average" 7.2 children per family while the USA and much of civilized world is less than 1.5! When was the last time you purchased a TV set, car or computer made some place in Africa? Never! Starting to see the problem?
