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from the are-those-imperial-or-metric-units? dept.
We humans like to think ourselves pretty advanced – and with no other technology-bearing beings to compare ourselves to, our back-patting doesn’t have to take context into account. After all, we harnessed fire, invented stone tools and the wheel, developed agriculture and writing, built cities, and learned to use metals.
Then, a mere few moments ago from the perspective of cosmic time, we advanced even more rapidly, developing telescopes and steam power; discovering gravity and electromagnetism and the forces that hold the nuclei of atoms together.
Meanwhile, the age of electricity was transforming human civilization. You could light up a building at night, speak with somebody in another city, or ride in a vehicle that needed no horse to pull it, and humans were very proud of themselves for achieving all of this. In fact, by the year 1899, purportedly, these developments prompted U.S. patent office commissioner Charles H. Duell to remark, “Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
We really have come a long way from the cave, but how far can we still go? Is there a limit to our technological progress? Put another way, if Duell was dead wrong in the year 1899, might his words be prophetic for the year 2099, or 2199? And what does that mean for humanity’s distant future?
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2014/09/02/how-advanced-earthlings-cosmic-yardstick/
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Wednesday September 10 2014, @12:16AM
My first reaction to the Metabolic Theory Of Ecology was similar to yours. However, if you plot [paulchefurka.com] birth rate [wikipedia.org] against energy consumption [wikipedia.org] you'll find that high birth rate and high energy consumption are mutually exclusive. Furthermore, the most energy-intensive countries generally have less than two children per breeding pair [wikipedia.org].
Like you, I would have presumed that more energy means more stability and more resources to have more children. But that doesn't match the data. Indeed, it is suspected that some families stop having children after they have male and female children. Also, fertile couples tend to replace lost children. Whereas, people in energy poverty tend to breed prolifically to counter high infant mortality and other dire circumstances.
I think this raises interesting questions about quality of life, labor participation, work patterns, migration, contraception, medical care and very probably other matters.
1702845791×2
(Score: 2) by khallow on Wednesday September 10 2014, @02:04AM
ours. However, if you plot birth rate against energy consumption you'll find that high birth rate and high energy consumption are mutually exclusive.
And I already came up with a better explanation, opportunity costs resulting from women in the work force reduces human fertility. This is an example of the amateur statistics I referred to earlier. You can come up with all sorts of correlations, but correlation isn't causation.
Like you, I would have presumed that more energy means more stability and more resources to have more children.
And you would be right in your presumption. What is missing here is that the real cost of raising children in terms of things more important than energy went up a lot. This includes opportunity costs and use of resources. Further, while the biological cost of giving birth to a child may not have changed much, the actual energy cost of having and raising children vastly increased perhaps even more than the availability of energy. Where's the inclusion of the energy cost of two decades of schooling and education? The actual facts of human rearing indicate that the premises of this model don't apply here.
This goes back to my original assertion "A nonsensical model (which doesn't actually support your assertion even) coming from amateur statistics (which doesn't actually support the model even) isn't evidence".