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An Indian site, YourStory, has an unusually broad ranging interview with Richard Stallman. While much of the background and goals will already be familiar to SN readers, the interview is interesting not only for its scope but also that India is starting to take an interest in these matters.
To know Richard Stallman is to know the true meaning of freedom. He's the man behind the GNU project and the free software movement, and the subject of our Techie Tuesdays this week.
This is not a usual story. After multiple attempts to get in touch for an interaction with Richard Stallman, I got a response which prepared me well for what's coming next. I'm sharing the same with you to prepare you for what's coming next.
I'm willing to do the interview — if you can put yourself into philosophical and political mindset that is totally different from the one that the other articles are rooted in.
The general mindset of your articles is to admire success. Both business success, and engineering success. My values disagree fundamentally with that. In my view, proprietary software is an injustice; it is wrongdoing. People should be _ashamed_ of making proprietary software, _especially_ if it is successful. (If nobody uses the proprietary program, at least it has not really wronged anyone.) Thus, most of the projects you consider good, I consider bad.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday August 31 2017, @12:28AM (25 children)
The exponential factor in population growth means that whatever you do, you'll always run up against limits unless you constrain population growth. The relationship between surface area and volume means that it's a lot more efficient to live on chunks where most of the mass isn't crunched up around the center. Just because we've always lived on a planet doesn't mean that's a good idea when technology gets good enough to create space habitats that are proof against solar storms (which at first is going to mean a lot of shielding, but earth is good evidence that magnetic field shielding should also be possible.
OTOH, space habitats are complex. Complex technologies tend to break down. I wouldn't want to live in the first couple of generations of space habitat. Still, it would allow the same amount of mass to support an incredibly hugely larger number of people, especially when combined with some form of virtual reality.
Additionally, the population is currently shrinking in technological area. The reasons for this aren't clear. It could be that pollutants are retarding fertility. It could be that when there's lots of nice things to buy, people don't want to waste their resources (including time!) on children. This isn't really clear, but two things that became common shortly before this trend was noticed:
1) Widespread use of DDT.
2) TV
Was it one or the other of those? Or perhaps they interact in some sort of feedback loop?
That said, physical resources are inherently limited. There's only so much matter within our light-cone. The same limitation doesn't apply to virtual reality, and in virtual reality you don't get chiggers or Lyme disease.
P.S.: You want a population control method? Just imagine when VR gets haptic feedback and interactive AI. (It doesn't even need to be particularly good AI.) The population control you'll need is something to cause people to bother to have kids. This may solve the Fermi Paradox.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday August 31 2017, @03:02AM (18 children)
There's a simpler solution for nigh-unlimited real estate that you overlooked: Stop just living on the surface of objects.
As you point out, if you're living in space you probably want to live "underground" anyway - you want a few yards of rock between you and space to avoid dangerous levels of continuous radiation exposure. Magnetic shielding is nice for solar storms and other charged-particle radiation, but does nothing against EM radiation like X-rays, gamma rays, etc, nor cosmic rays whose mass and velocity are easily sufficient to punch through any magnetic shield. It pretty much takes several pounds per square inch worth of shielding to protect against those, in the form of either a substantial atmosphere or a few yards of rock. Especially against the cosmic rays, which trigger a far more dangerous fission cascade on impact.
But, if you're living in a sealed artificial underground ecosystem anyway, why leave Earth at all? We've got *tons* of far more (and far more convenient) underground space right here. The only reason to go to space is if it's space itself that appeals to you. Just for reference, the entire mass of the asteroid belt is estimated at about 5% that of the moon, or 0.06% that of Earth. Which if I did my math correctly is equivalent to roughly the outermost 0.02% of it's radius, or a depth of 1.27km. Of course ground temperatures increase at a rate of about 25*C per km of depth, so we'd need pretty impressive cooling systems if we wanted to utilize a substantial fraction of that. But hey, you've got gravity and fast and easy access to your neighbors for your trouble.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday August 31 2017, @05:07AM (6 children)
Probably the only object we'll be living on anytime soon in the asteroid belt is Ceres. Ceres has a surface area of 2,770,000 km2. That's roughly the size of Argentina. Earth has 148,940,000 km2 of land surface area. Ceres has 0.015% the mass of Earth but about 1.86% of the land surface area.
Another interesting thing to note are the internal oceans on some of these objects. Ceres is thought to contain more water than the fresh water on Earth [wikipedia.org]. Ganymede apparently contains more water than Earth's oceans [space.com]. Now we can use desalinization on Earth just like we'd need to use processing on this space water, but that is a very interesting resource ripe for the taking (and it might contain life forms at this very moment so we'll want to drill there at some point).
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(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday August 31 2017, @08:22AM
But how much of that water is potable? I mean, earth has vastly more water than fresh water; the problem is that we cannot drink that water without first applying costly and energy-consuming processes to remove substances (mostly, salt) from it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Thursday August 31 2017, @12:47PM (4 children)
I see no reason to assume that. I mean, what exactly is the draw of Ceres to bring you there in the first place? Not many folks are going to be drawn to microgravity homesteading by the fertile soil and lush vegetation. Meanwhile, it has sufficient gravity (0.28g) to mostly destroy most of the advantages of zero-G mining and industry, but probably not nearly enough make it trivial to adapt terrestrial practices, nor to satisfy human health requirements.
Now, once we have a thriving asteroid mining industry, then Ceres will no doubt become a valuable resupply depot, eventually to become the thriving Mecca of the asteroid belt - but it has comparatively little to offer until then.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Thursday August 31 2017, @02:51PM (3 children)
Meanwhile, it has sufficient gravity (0.28g) to mostly destroy most of the advantages of zero-G mining and industry
Wrong. Ceres has surface gravity of 0.28 m/s2, which translates to a mere 0.029g. Units are important!!
0.029g really is microgravity (0.28g is not). It really might be very advantageous for zero-g mining and industry. But it's certainly not going to be livable by humans long-term. You'd probably achieve escape velocity just jumping, and would certainly have health problems from such low gravity.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday August 31 2017, @04:42PM (2 children)
Quite right. Careless of me.
0.029g still isn't anywhere clos to microgravity though. It's closer, you start to get some of the minor benefits, but unlike in free-fall nothing stays where you put it.
Escape velocity is also still an issue at 0.51km/s, or about 1141mph. Over 20x less than on Earth, but still nothing to sneeze at.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday September 01 2017, @06:53AM (1 child)
I want to play catch with you using a 5 kilogram boulder (hint [wikipedia.org]).
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday September 03 2017, @04:14PM
5kg is hardly a boulder. And you still wouldn't be able to toss it very far, even if it effectively only weighed the same as a baseball - for the same transfer of momentum it's speed is going to be far slower, so even though it falls a lot slower it won't actually travel that far.
Meanwhile, one of the big perks of microgravity industry is that you can toss around cars and buildings in a controlled and frictionless manner, without worrying about gravity at all.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday August 31 2017, @05:37PM (10 children)
I think you have to give up on uncharged cosmic rays. And shielding is just likely to increase the damage surface via secondary emissions. OTOH, they're a lot less of a problem than the others.
Also, I wasn't even thinking of living on the surface of objects in space. Too many micro-meteorites around at too high a relative velocity. But that dust could be valuable if you could just catch it. Some of it's charged, that should be able to be handled. Some of it's ferro-magnetic. That should be able to be handled. It all depends on how flexible you can make the magnetic shielding. But some of the dust is uncharged and not ferro-magnetic, and you want a shield between you and it. So you need a thick rind on your habitat, and internal barriers against accidents. Use the outer layers for stores that don't mind the vacuum. Use the next inner layers for things like water, etc. The layer in from that for food storage. Then you come to living areas. Since gravity is probably needed, this will be the living quarters (you spin the place). Inner from that are work areas and the library, schools, etc. Inner from that is labs. Inner from that is rapid transit (actually that doesn't need a separate layer, but it benefits from light gravity and short distances, use elevators to get in and out. Inner from that is manufacturing...which isn't necessarily enclosed and extends all the way to the center. At the center there's an ion-rocket for moving around...not agile, but economical in fuel.
Note this is just a rough sketch, and I'm not really committed to any part of the design, but this grows by increasing the height of the cylinder, until it makes sense to split it into two cylinders...possibly spinning at different rates, but still magnetically bonded with a zero friction link (so no direct material link). Clearly with this design you want your entry/exit ports to be on a non-rotating cylinder, and there may be a central core that is used to move freight between the cylinders. Calling it an elevator is too simplistic, but that's almost what it is, but it must contain mechanisms for isolating itself from various things rotating around it at various different speeds. You can think of it as magnetic levitation, but if done properly that's just a bumper that would only be used in case of emergency. But it needs to be in multiple isolated slices that can adjust their rotational speed to match either the core or the external shell.
Too much detail, but it's definitely NOT living on the surface. Only planets, and not most of them, even permit living on the surface. Habitats on the moon would clearly need to be subsurface, and the same is probably true of Mars, once people think really hard about living there. And both cases need just as much life support as a space habitat with pluses and minuses. Gravity would be harder to deal with, but shielding would be easier (as there was more easily available material to use for shielding.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday August 31 2017, @09:58PM (9 children)
Cosmic rays will kill you just as surely as the others, just not quite as quickly. But like I said, it's easy enough to shield against the same way we do here on Earth - cover yourself with several pounds per square inch of shielding. Not terribly viable for a space vehicle that you'd want to accelerate - in that case yeah, you just deal with all the baseline radiation rather than try to protect yourself and have to deal with the far worse secondary emissions from cosmic rays. And just try not to spend any more time than necessary exposed to it. But it's not an issue if living in a hollowed-out asteroid. Assuming a density comparable to basalt (1.74oz/in^3) it only requires 135 inches, or 11.3 feet to get roughly the same 14 lb/in^2 worth of shielding as we get here on Earth's surface.
One of the designs I've played with is to hollow out a large region within the asteroid, and then put rotating habitats in that - you get the benefit of shielding, without having to hold an immense mass of spinning shielding together. You can then travel between habitats and the rest of the microgravity facilities within the asteroid by way of either axial "spinning airlocks", or via circular "elevator" railcars that run between the rim of the habitat and the surrounding rock, alternately matching speed with one or the other. Not a perfect solution, but it gets you up and running without massive up-front outlays for a huge facility, and gives relatively easy access between "gravity" zones and regions free of both "gravity" and the associated Coriolis effects.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday September 01 2017, @05:53AM (8 children)
What proportion of cosmic rays are ionized out in space? IIUC almost all of them are, in which case a magnetic shield should be able to divert them. If I'm right then the only question is would the magnetic field needed to shield against them be so strong as to be just as dangerous,.. but a thin ferro-magnetic skin should shield against that.
The problem is that we don't yet know how to generate the magnetic shield. Planets seem to show that if properly done it shouldn't consume significant energy, but IIUC right now we either need to use electro-magnets or super-conductors, neither of which is particularly energetically efficient.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday September 01 2017, @01:04PM (7 children)
I believe many are ionized, so they could theoretically be diverted by a sufficiently powerful magnetic shield - but we're talking about momentums that often completely dwarf anything in our largest particle accelerators, so that even those insanely powerful and highly concentrated magnetic traps couldn't dramatically divert them. The Earth's paltry magnetic field can mostly handle the slow, heavily ionized solar wind, but has basically no effect whatsoever on cosmic rays.
Also, I'm not sure there there's any evidence whatsoever that planets produce magnetic fields particularly efficiently - I think you're grossly overestimating the strength of the fields, and grossly underestimating the energies at work in planetary phenomena. Heck, just the tiny change in solar energy retention from our CO2 emissions traps a million times more incoming energy than was produced burning the hydrocarbons.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday September 01 2017, @05:59PM (6 children)
Yes, but diversion is a LOT easier than stopping. So I think it might well work. Of course, we don't yet have a good magnetic shield to test it against.
So with this supposition the question becomes "How dangerous are the neutral cosmic rays? The ways I can think of to ionize them are all clumsy, and most of them result in secondary radiation. (E.g. have multiple layers of shield with high capture cross-sections in the expected energy spectrum. [Could you just target the electrons of the neutral cosmic rays? Probably not, but if so this might possibly be made to work. I see no way, however, to avoid this being clumsy and expensive.
The thing is, planetary fields aren't that strong, but they have a long reach. So they exert a small amount of force over a long distance of travel. As for efficiency....well, IIUC the evidence is that the planets magnetic fields are a side effect of internal flows of lightly charged magma. (And also IIUC this is a theory that doesn't have much in the way of experimental evidence. Mainly things like the Moon lost it's magnetic field at such and such a time and its core solidified at such and such a time....and these all depend on long chains of reasoning from small pieces of evidence.) But the theory, such as it is, doesn't seem to suggest that much energy is spent on maintaining the field. And permanent magnets tend to hold their charge with little reinforcement, and things that are moving tend to stay in motion unless stopped by friction, etc. So it wouldn't be beyond the bounds of reason that maintaining the field wouldn't require ANY input of energy. Things are rarely that perfect, however, and even with perfection any energy used in diverting objects would need to be repaid...though perhaps momentum transfer could be so arranged that diversion was symmetric. Etc.
OTOH, I do tend to envision a space habitat based around a cylinder, so a rock shield isn't something I find unreasonable. I just want to minimize it, because any mass you use that way can't be used for extending the cylinder;
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday September 03 2017, @04:57PM (5 children)
Diversion *is* a lot easier - but the smaller the diversion, the greater the distance it needs to be done at, in a fairly linear inverse relationship. But magnetic fields fall off with the inverse cube of distance, making large-scale magnetic shields extremely problematic
Yeah, if you could create a planetary strength-and-range magnetic field, with a tiny spaceship at the center, it might be enough to protect from ionized cosmic rays. Maybe. I'd have to work out the math to see if it's even within several orders of magnitude of strong enough, but it might be. Certainly if you assume the ship is the source, in which case the magnetic field nearby would likely make those in the LHC look like refrigerator magnets in comparison.
As for maintaining the field - superconductive electromagnets are actually really good for that - the current will simply keep circulating when you cut the power source, with very low maintenance losses provided you can keep the superconductors cold enough. They still have working losses though, diverting a particle traveling at nearly the speed of light takes some small amount of energy, and that energy is permanently drained from the magnetic field (same thing happens with permanent magnets too)
I will say for your cylindrical space habitat bias - do consider the size of asteroids available. There are hundreds of them 100km across, and several thousand more 10km across. We'd still run out eventually, but not for a while. Plus you've got that old square-cube law working in your favor: only the outer few yards needs to be shielding, while the interior can be almost entirely living and working spaces. Double the diameter and you get 8x as much living space while only requiring 4x as much shielding material.
And just because I was curious as to how much you could actually fit within an asteroid: The US covers an area of 9.8 trillion square meters. Assume an average interfloor height of 5 m and that's about 50 trillion cubic meters - the volume of a sphere less than 46 kilometers across.
Also - basically unrelated, I'd be tempted to put the water storage near the center, simply because it's so important - that's very likely your primary water and oxygen reserves, you don't want to risk it venting into space. Plus, zero-G swimming pool... Storing i as an ice shell might be an option if you were far enough from the sun, but just the body heat of the inhabitants would probably make active cooling necessary unless you were out near Nptune or something. I'd likely go for commerical/recreational districts in the outside rings: easier to evacuate in case of problems, and keeps people in the highest-gravity sections while they're at their most active, maximizing the benefit.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday September 03 2017, @11:54PM (4 children)
Actually, the field from a single magnet falls off as the 4th power of the distance, because of the dual polarity. But this may possibly be finesses, and probable the field would need to be generated in a set of rings around the habitat rather than within the habitat, so the strongest part of the field would be external to the habitat. This might mitigate the need for a ferro-magnetic shield around it...of course, if the walls were made of steel that would be essentially irrelevant. If they were aluminum though, it would be a significantly different. Similarly for titanium, or glass with carbon fibers. (Glass with conductive fibers, though, might hold the shield in place. But if it were to require minimal electrical power for maintenance the fibers would need to be superconductors. But it would need to be a glass that wasn't too strongly affected by thermal stresses.)
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday September 04 2017, @04:09PM (3 children)
Do you have a source for that? Everything I've seen says magnetism falls off as 1/r^3. If we had magnetic monopoles they'd fall off as 1/r^2, the same as gravity, electrostatics, light intensity, and everything else that propagates through 3-dimensional space.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday September 04 2017, @04:54PM (2 children)
Sorry, it's been a long time since physics. Now that you say so I remember that EM and gravity fall off as the square, so you are right, magnetism falls off as the cube. But that's only far enough away that you get the two poles acting about equally. When you get closer the computation becomes quite difficult as you're combining two "falls off as the square" effects which conflict with each other. As you approach one of the poles it becomes sufficiently dominant, that the other fades into insignificance. I think that was where that "4th power" effect came from.
What's really going on is difficult to model, which is why they always trot out that "lines of force" model, but what's really happening is more line induced magnetism reacting against two poles which each fall off as the square in strength, but which conflict. And the resultant effect depends on whether the particle is charged, ferro-magnetic, or para-magnetic. Or just unresponsive. And then there's the field created by a charge running along a wire, which produces a linear effect, but the line isn't usually straight. I never even tried to calculate from first principles how an electro-magnet field was generated. It was hard enough for a straight wire. (This was multiple decades ago, and that wasn't my main interest in physics. And I dropped out about the time they started using tensors.)
Anyway, that third power response is the effect you get at a distance from the magnet. When you get closer the effects become stronger and not evenly spread.
In a way it's sort of like "jerk". Nobody ever calculated the higher derivatives, they always stop with acceleration, but acceleration has to start, and that's a higher derivative. And that has to start, which is a higher derivative. The "jerk" at the start of acceleration actually theoretically has an infinite number of derivatives, each of which acts for a shorter period of time. But rate of change of acceleration is always something that happens for a very short period of time, for lots of very good reasons. So people tend to ignore it. But if it weren't for jerk, glass wouldn't break when you dropped it.
Now this seems to mean that a strong magnetic shield would need to have LOTS of magnetic poles, which may be impossible. OTOH, if it has lots of magnetic poles, the effect at a distance would be minor. So you may be right that it can't be done...but the situation is complex enough that I'm going to keep hoping it's doable. (How would one calculate the effects of a rotating magnetic field? Usually the speed of rotation is slow enough that this can be ignored, but one rotated electronically might be able to do it fast enough that...?? Or what about a pulsing one? That last, though, doesn't sound like a low energy solution.)
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday September 04 2017, @04:56PM
Sorry, that was largely thinking out loud. I'm not really sure of ANY of that. As I said, it's been a long time since physics.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday September 04 2017, @08:21PM
No worries, I think out loud here a fair bit myself.
I think you're wrong about "jerk" though - firstly it's quite common to consider the rate of change of acceleration, mostly as a comfort thing. Elevators are a common example - some accelerate gradually, while others transition quite rapidly, giving a "stomach in your throat/feet" feeling. Where glass is concerned the problem is its rigidity, which means any impact with another rigid object will cause a spike of acceleration as the contacting point comes to a stop nearly instantly. Often considered as as an "impulse" a spike of infinite force for zero duration, that imparts a definite finite change in momentum. Hard drives have a similar weakness - that "20Gs of impact resistance" can easily be overcome by, say, tapping a screwdriver against its casing. Rigid body collisions invariable involve rather ridiculous momentary accelerations.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday August 31 2017, @04:50AM (1 child)
So you're saying DDT is causing people to not procreate or not get pregnant, rather than massively increasing miscarriages which would be very noticeable? Except you're really not saying anything at all because you're putting it in a list that could have hundreds of items, including many manmade chemicals [ecowatch.com] that didn't exist 100 years ago that can now be found in the urine of 99% of the population.
Even effects on pregnancy rate should be noticeable in studies. You bonk 15-20 times [menstrual-cycle-calculator.com] at random times of the month, and a pregnancy is likely to occur.
I think it's widely accepted that economic and social factors are to blame for the falling pregnancy rates. As people in the third world move up into the middle class, their pregnancy rates will also decline.
I imagine that you are just goddamn unlikely to be a poor person on mankind's first Martian colony. If Musk gets his way, the ticket costs $100,000 a person. That's likely just travel expenses and doesn't count the cost of building living space. And it's a very optimistic estimate based on as many as a thousand reusable spaceships shuttling in between Earth and Mars. Once you get there, basic needs are going to have to be met using indoor greenhouses and water production + aggressive recycling. So it will be very planned out so that nobody is starving, since food + water distribution will be airtight. It's unclear that you will need to pay for food and water.
Also, no human has ever given birth beyond Earth (that we know of, insert your ancient alien/Stargate fantasy here). Conditions on Mars could lead to more miscarriages, weird births, and people shunning sex or unprotected sex. We'll have to see if there is a population explosion problem on Mars. It might become a problem they want to have.
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday September 01 2017, @06:05PM
Actually I think there is more evidence that TV has affected the reproductive rate of humans than that DDT has...but DDT and it's functional equivalents have affected the reproduction of so many species that I don't just assume that chemical pollution hasn't affected human reproduction. They don't do testing for effects that are difficult to see when multiple different pollutants interact. And many of the people who do the testing have a positive incentive to not find any problems. So I'm not going to exonerate pollution without better evidence. Certainly we've got a lot of chemical pollution in chemicals that are called "estrogen mimics", and to presume that that has NO affect on reproduction is something that needs proof, even though I agree that proving it would be horrendously difficult.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday August 31 2017, @01:44PM (3 children)
As for population growth rate reductions, I'd say there's a far more relevant item than widespread use of DDT.
Widespread use of effective birth control.
Pretty much everywhere women have access to cheap (in local terms) reliable birth control and family planning education(to introduce the frankly mind-boggling idea that you can choose how many children you have), birthrates rapidly fall to approximately replacement levels. With the notable exceptions of some regions where religion holds powerful cultural sway and a strong anti-birth-control stance (most notably Catholicism)
Beyond that, there seems to be some correlation between birth rates and economic opportunities. If kids can realistically be expected to attain a notably higher standard of living than their parents, then growth rates trend positive. If on the other hand they're likely to experience a lower standard of living, as is the case in most of the developed world thanks to wealth concentration exceeding wealth production, then growth rates trend negative.
Almost as though well-grounded pessimism over the life your children will lead reduces people's desire to have children, even if many/most people don't think of it in quite such clear terms.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday August 31 2017, @03:00PM (1 child)
With the notable exceptions of some regions where religion holds powerful cultural sway and a strong anti-birth-control stance (most notably Catholicism)
Some. In Italy, where 87.8% of the population identifies as Catholic, the birth rate is 1.41 (children per woman) (2008), and that's only because they've had massive immigration; it had fallen to a low of 1.18 back in 1995. In Spain, the rate is 1.47, which also has been climbing since the 1990s. 76.7% of Spaniards are Catholic; however, 55.3% say they almost never go to any religious service.
The Latin American countries seem to take their Catholicism a lot more seriously; at a glance, Brazil's TFR (total fertility rate, children/woman) is 1.8-something, and Mexico's is 2.13.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday August 31 2017, @04:28PM
Yes, there are certainly plenty of areas where people tell the Church to shove it when it comes to birth control. My point was only that when it comes to places where people can easily afford birth control, yet don't use it, you can usually find the Catholic influence close at hand.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday August 31 2017, @05:43PM
Birth control *is* important, and *has* had a strong effect. But the change happened out of sync with changes in birth control. (Actually, it was most strongly correlated with TV. Perhaps "Not tonight honey, 'I love Lucy' is coming on." Although not precisely that as it was originally noticed in India.)
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