The Cutting Room Floor

I recently entered The Dupont Challenge with an essay about NASA Technical Memorandum 102102 entitled Lunar Production of Solar Cells. (I found a scan of the original document in a database my school subscribes to, but I have linked to a text version that is free online) I can't post the essay I wrote, but I found all this great content which I could not include in the essay for the contest. I also had to clip a section about population because it did not directly relate to science, it was more mathematics based. I also could not support the argument in this scraped section well. I hope in posting it, I will get feedback to make this argument stronger or disprove it. Here is the scraped section of my essay for The DuPont Challenge.

    In about two hundred years the earth will struggle to support humans. The earth has only so many resources. The Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Fact Book mentions that there are 6,706,993,152 living on 148.94 million square kilometers of land that exists on earth. Breaking this number down, that means there is .0222066724 sq km per person (5.48738825 acres) or about forty-five people per sq km of land. Of that, the CIA lists that only 10.57% of that land is arable. That leaves only .0023472453 sq km (.58 acres) of farmland per person. According to the executive summary of Food, Land, Population and the U.S. Economy, “at least 1.2 acres per person [are] required to maintain current American Dietary standards.”. With the remaining acres, one must provide living space, landfills, roads, workplaces, recreation facilities and health care services to each person.

    In the year 2200 the human population will stabilize somewhere just above 10 billion people. At that time there will be only .014894 square kilometers (3.68038755 acres) per person. The farmland shortfall will be worst with only .00152663496 sq km (.3772397139 acres) of farmland per person. There are ways to expand our farmland, projects like vertical farming are in development. With more food available, populations tend to raise as demonstrated in Human Carrying Capacity Is Determined by Food Availability and Human Population Numbers As A Function Of Food Supply. We could also change our culture to consume less food, but the trend in food consumption is going in the opposite direction. Increasing farmland and changing our culture are not viable solutions. These calculations are based on the assumption that all the land on earth will only be used by humans. In reality, there is less land available due to the large amount of non-human biomass.

    All population is based on a limited exponentiation growth model. The limits on population are determined by the resources available to that population. Should humanity grow to the point where our exponential population growth is limited by our resources then suffering will occur. Any growth past the limit will result in huge starvation rates. Humans will continue to reproduce, even if there are no resources to support a new life. In a world of ten billion people, the limit of our growth as determined by the UN report, we will see unimaginable suffering. Most of these problems can be solved with a space based economy.

I'll be looking around on the cutting room floor for more blog posts. Any criticism or comments are welcomed