The price for installed electrical generation capacity by solar voltaics is dropping by 40% a year. Within four to seven years, solar power will be cheaper than coal! Two years after that, it will be cheaper even than nuclear power! The total usable solar energy reaching the planet is equal to 80 million nuclear power plants. We do not have an energy problem on this planet. We are nowhere near any sort of limits to our growth with regard to energy.
At the population density of the proposed Dongtan development, 40 square kilometers can comfortably house one million people. Sky farms can feed this million people using less than 10 square kilometers of additional space. At this population density, the earth can comfortably sustain 20 billion people using less than one percent of the earth's land area. We are nowhere near any sort of limits to our growth with regard to space.
There are literally millions of large asteroids in our solar system. Several thousand of them pass near to the earth. Any one of these asteroids could provide more resources than all our current resource extraction on Earth. The current cost for starting an asteroid mining operation is huge, but the resultant value of the resources gained is even more huge. Given time and technology, the costs will go down. It is an inevitability that at some point, it will simply be cost ineffective to mine the Earth for resources, because asteroids will be cheaper and more productive. We are nowhere near any sort of limits to our growth with regard to resources.
The one limiting factor for which I do not have an answer is the limits we suffer to our imaginations and our courage. To that end all I can do is speak and hope, hope that my speaking can help spark the imagination to see the possibilities and the courage to make that happen.
We have seven billion people on the planet right now. We cannot feed them farming with ox driven plows and manure. The only way to stop population growth using some method 'other' than getting them rich enough that the growth stops by itself, is to use force. Malthus advocated the forcible sterilization of the 'inferior' classes. The limits to growth, 'steady state economy' folks are very much in the same spiritual camp as Malthus. The world their efforts would create is the most dystopic I could possibly imagine. It would be one of rampant poverty, starvation and war. Ultimately it would destroy the planet.
The human race is not a parasite upon mother Earth. We are as much an integral part of the organism of Gaea as are the ocean and forests. The problem we have is that we do not see Gaea as the super-organism she is, we do not understand what super-organisms are in the context of the universe, and so we do not recognize what our organic function is in Gaea. We serve simultaneously two functions for the Gaea super-organism. We are both her brain and her seed. Gaea possesses consciousness because we are part of Gaea and we are conscious. To the extent that the human race understands Gaea, to that extent is Gaea self aware.
If an intelligence with no knowledge of organic life, a machine intelligence perhaps, were to stumble upon, and in it's curiosity examine, a human being, it would be utterly astounded. As it begins to learn how this organism functions it might notice that this organism has another organism growing inside it, unaware that it picked up a pregnant woman. With it's limited understanding of this new organism, it might very well conclude that the organism is host to a cancer or a parasite and that this growth should be cut out in order to save the woman. Given it's limited understanding, this would not be an unreasonable conclusion. The limits to growth, putative ecologists have come to much the same conclusion about Gaea. To them, human beings are a parasite, a cancer upon the Earth. They could not be more wrong.
Gaea is pregnant!
Gaea is pregnant and she's going through labor. Giving birth is not without pain. Giving birth can be dangerous for a mother. Sometimes mothers don't survive. But that reality is not a reason to suggest that Gaea's child be aborted! The human race is on the verge of bringing life to otherwise dead planets. In the next eye blink of time from the perspective of the universe, Gaea will self replicate, spreading her life throughout the galaxy. Previously dead planets will become Gaea's themselves as human beings colonize and terraform those planets. The human race is Gaea's seed.
