quote:Originally posted by agnosticnixie: Admittedly my numbers at 9 billion for Earth itself where with the assumption of a post-ww3 recovery baby boom (earth's population did quadruple in the 20th century despite it being the bloodiest century since the 17th with the gunpowder empires) between the 2050s and the 2150s.
But the US had its post-WWII baby boom because it won the war, the economy had recovered after the depression, and people were generally optimistic about the future. From what little we saw of Earth in First Contact I think that none of that could arguably apply until at least the 2070's, if not 2100. (Depending on what part of the world you visited, anyway.)
Also, there's my argument that people won't necessarily be reproducing like rabbits in the future. From a layman's point of view, part of the problem that our real-world planet is having is that mortality rates are declining while birth rates are either holding steady or even growing in some parts of the world. I would expect that in the Star Trek future they'll likely solve this problem by the 22nd century, as part of the great recovery after First Contact.
Because when you come right down to in, the biggest cause of conflict on the planet is population. People compete for space, food, and resources. If Earth becomes the classic Trekkian paradise where they leave behind hunger, prejudice, warfare, and so on, a huge part of that will come from overcoming population pressures. Sure, part of that will come from emigration to other planets. But a lot of it will just come from being more rational about population management right on Earth.
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quote:Originally posted by Pensive's Wetness: in short, nothing says getting over big drama like fucking like mad rabbits...
Worked after WWII.
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posted
I've had some similar ruminations from time to time(*), and it's nice to see such a well-considered post on the matter. For instance, your knowledge of the varying definitions for gross tonnage was particularly nice, given that many people in the sci-fi communities I often deal with (myself included) were unaware of its mass-specific definition (hence this part of my starship volumetrics page).
However, regarding shipping, I can't help but wonder whether you're overestimating profoundly based on current (and historical) needs.
That is, as it stands now, our society is based on centralized production. Raw materials are collected and transported to a factory or amongst a series of factories, and shipped to a distribution node, and shipped to a final retail location and then carried home by a customer. The same basic pattern holds true even for large industrial items (and may even be ten times worse in that case, given the assorted parts involved).
However, I think the future will see a decline in shipping, rather than an increase. Advancements of technologies like the RepRap for home production might make much of that transport unnecessary, and improvements in live-off-the-land technologies that would be almost bound to take place in a new colonial period would further reduce shipping requirements.
That way, instead of shipping raw materials back to Earth or other factory worlds, most basic needs could be met locally without the capital investment of dedicated factories and whatnot. Sure, even a room-sized RepRap-of-the-future couldn't make everything, but you wouldn't have the modern problem of whole factories tooled to make one little thing being incapable of making another little thing without massive retooling.
Only the most unique situations would require bulk transport of unprocessed items (e.g. Terok Nor's ore), and I'd wager that in many cases only the most highly specialized parts (rather than finished products) would be shipped out to colonies.
One flaw in this reasoning is that small-scale production may not keep pace with centralized and specialized production. For instance, a modern inkjet printer can be made to create working circuits, but that's not going to enable the creation of a computer processor that's made in a factory using nanometer-scale fabrication processes.
However, if a computer to run a doodad is needed on a colony world and the future-inkjet and future-RepRap can make a dual-core processor with solid state storage from raw materials available locally, and it solves the problem, isn't that still a damn sight better than nothing? Yes it is, and they just saved the transport of a computer across space.
Just an example.
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posted
When preparing my Starfleet Museum articles on transport ships, the paradigm I used was that transport by fusion-powered ships was like today's maritime shipping whereas transport by matter/antimatter-powered ships was like airfreight. Therefore, fusion was slow but cheap and used for most shipping, and M/AM was expensive but fast and used for only the most high-value cargo. I similar dichotomy exists today in which airfreight accounts for only a small percentage of world cargo by weight but something like 25% of cargo by value.
Anyway, I figured that in the fusion-only era (before 2160), there wasn't much interstellar trade. Earth could probably obtain most of its raw materials in the Sol system. Colony worlds around nearby stars needed to receive finished goods from Earth, but most raw materials mined on them were probably consumed in-system rather than being shipped back to Earth. Industries and internal consumer markets eventually developed on these colony worlds.
As the Sol system's mineral resources began to run out and interstellar transport became cheaper, then some of these system probably began to send raw materials back to Earth. Also, as interstellar transport gets cheaper, it may become cheaper enough to transport finished goods between star systems rather than to manufacture them in each system.
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posted
Minutiaeman - Europe's colonies and little bits of Europe itself did have major baby booms (at least Belgium and the Netherlands did, and I think Scandinavia's population did double) at the same time; France, Germany, Britain and Italy already had their period of massive growth in the 19th century and most of their growth was absorbed by the american republics in the 20th century.
Guardian2k - I admit rethinking things through I feel I probably overestimated two things - one I suspected I did already (that is, assuming a per capita increase in merchant fleet capacity, when today is already saturated - a 50%-ish carrying capacity might even be workable all told).
The other being assuming more centralized rather than less centralized industry, thanks for pointing it out. Colonies would probably be independent after a generation or two of terraforming (Mars took a century according to ENT, but it was also earth's first attempts at it) at which point they would probably also begin to be the industrial center of their own system rather than depend on earth. So interstellar trade would probably also go by bursts and be more on par with air freight than sea freight except in times of busy colonialism.
A lot of activity around the Belts and the Oort Cloud would probably lead to a lot of trade though, although probably not on the scale my initial thoughts went for (again the error of doing a per capita increase).
I kind of doubt the Sol system mineral resources would run out before sometime around the 400th century though, unless we're really not recycling anything and using three orders of magnitude more mineral resources at that point xD
[ August 09, 2010, 02:06 AM: Message edited by: agnosticnixie ]
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