(CNSNews.com) – John P. Holdren, the White House science adviser to President Barack Obama, wrote in a book he co-authored with population control advocates Paul and Anne Ehrlich that “ways must be found to control advertisingâ€.
“Advertising now functions in large part to keep the economy growing by creating demand for a wide variety of often useless, dangerous or environmentally destructive products,†Holdren and the Ehrlichs wrote.
“Its most dangerous abuses might be halted immediately by legislative action,†they said. “For instance, it could be made illegal for any utility to advertise in such a way as to promote greater demand for power. Also references to size, power or sexual potency (direct or implied) could be banned from automobile advertising.â€
Holdren and the Ehrlichs’ suggestions were presented in a 1973 book–Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions—in which they argued that the United States and other developed countries (DCs) needed to transition from a “cowboy economy†to a “spaceman economy.â€
“Worldwide population limitation must be accompanied by other major changes if present trends are to be reversed and the already awesome burden of human misery is to be kept from increasing,†they wrote. “The most urgent of the needed changes is a series of moves to close rapidly the widening gap between the rich and the poor nations
(My Addition)Â The current administrations solution seems to be make America poorer, not poor nations richer.
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Population growth at a tsubtansial, fixed positive rate cannot, of course, go on forever. Let us assume that A) growth continues at the present world population growth rate of about 1.2% per year. B) All that is necessary to move around the universe is the will to do so. C) Any matter, even dark matter, can be turned into food and consumed. D) Humans can survive unprotected in the vacuum of space.How long before the entire visible universe is turned into food and eaten?Let’s assume 1 billion galaxies exist within the visible horizon and that each has a mass (including dark matter) of 1 trillion solar masses. With the Sun’s mass at 1.9891 x 10^30 kg, the total mass is then 1.9891 x 10^48 kg.Take the current human population as 6.7 billion and assume the mean mass of a human being is 50 kg. Total human mass is then 3.35 x 10^11 kg.Human mass at a given time is:M = Mo (1 + r)^Nwhere Mo is the initial value, r the growth rate as a decimal (1.2% = 0.012), and N the elapsed time in years. Solving for N, this becomesN = log(M / Mo) / log(1 + r)For M = 1.9891 x 10^48, Mo = 3.35 x 10^11, and r = 0.012, N is 7,098. In approximately 7,000 years, we run completely out of universe and the next year, everybody starves to death.More realistically, we can assume we are merely colonizing planets and that we are constrained by the speed of light limit. At a 1.2% growth rate, the volume growth rate is 1.012^(1/3) or about 1.004% per year, and frontier expansion passes the speed of light when the radius exceeds about 100 light-years. This is a sphere with a volume of about 4.2 million cubic light-years, and with stars at about one per ten cubic light-years in the Orion Arm, 420,000 stars will be available. About a fourth of these will be of the sort to support habitable planets, but due to the possible problems with correct age of the star, location of a planet at the right range for comfortable temperatures, orbital and axial tilt stability for climate purposes, sufficient mass to hold down a reasonable atmosphere and permit plate tectonics but not enough for gravity to be overwhelming, etc., etc., probably no more than 1% of these stars will actually have habitable planets, or about 4,200 such planets will exist. At your proposed maximum of 20 billion people per planet, this amounts to 84 trillion people, or M = 4.2 x 10^15 kg. At 1.2% growth, we reach this level in 791 years.Other problems might arise sooner, from the physical difficulty of moving billions of people from planet to planet to the political problems involved with doing so.Actually, we already passed peak per capita grain production, so the time to stabilize population just might be now.