re: #365 Dark_Falcon

What is this equation you speak of? I got to this thread late.

The basic idea behind both Malthus and Ehrlich is that populations can grow fast enough to outpace the supply of food and other resources. These ideas have been shown in species other than humans, but both of those men applied it to human populations. They made predictions, which are not prophecies, that rely on conditions following a set pattern. If the pattern changes, as it did with food production, because our technology improved, and with population, because China enacted population controls and higher education in western countries resulted in smaller family sizes, then the predictions become null.

The modern application of the equation is that resources are limited, and use of those resources has a time limit that we are rapidly encroaching on when it comes to oil. We need oil to build the technology that will allow us to break away from oil use for transportation, heating and electrical production. If we don’t slow down on our use of oil for those uses now, we run the risk of not being able to produce alternative technologies to supply energy. This means we will be accessing oil that is increasingly difficult to get to and one of the consequences of that is damage to the ecology will increase.

There is a tendency for some conservatives to assume a prediction is a prophecy and to discount not only the use of the equation but the equation itself when that ‘prophecy’ fails.