Moonbats over Boulder

Yes, yes, I realize the title is redundant, but this was an unexpected bit of moonbattery that surprised even me.

This afternoon, I attended a presentation by one Brad Jarvis, titled “Population Growth and the Settlement of Space”. For some reason, I thought the presentation would concern the growth of population on Mars via settlement…limiting factors on population growth, estimating how many people you might have there at some target date due to settler influx and birth rates, etc. Census and demographic issues, that sort of thing.

Well, he talked about the limits to growth, all right. In fact, it was one of his sources.

Jarvis started off by stating he was a physicist, before announcing that he would be speaking on overpopulation and natural resource issues. He then proceeded to demonstrate why expertise in one field does not necessarily mean one has a glimmering of a clue about others.

His presentation started off with a graph depicting the state of the world since 1970 and projected through 2070. The graph was a series of three neatly superimposed bell curves representing oil production, energy usage, and world population. Naturally, the premise of the graph was “peak oil”, a topic all the rage among the doom-and-gloom set of late, and the read of it was that reaching the Hubbard peak between now and 2010 will result in rapidly decreasing oil production, followed by rapidly declining energy production, followed by rapidly declining world population levels. The graph was bogus at first glance, as it clearly suffered from the same pitfall as other malthusian prognostications: it failed to take account of technological development and changes in behavior over time, especially those prompted by the shortage of the purportedly critical item. Specifically, the premises behind the graph as drawn were clearly that all or nearly all energy comes from oil and that there are no alternatives to getting energy from oil…large alternative sources of petroleum or petroleum-like substances (tar sands, oil shale, etc.), non-oil alternatives such as nuclear (fission), coal, deep-sea methane hydrates, etc., and technological innovation such as commercially-viable fusion, seem to have been taken off the table up-front, along with changes in consumption behavior prompted by social changes or technological innovation outside the energy sector. Of course, taking such things into account would have undermined his thesis: “Business as usual means the end of civilization!”

No, I’m not making this up.

There was another curve on this chart, one which in my astonishment with the other curves at first escaped my notice: it was labeled simply “Species”. Jarvis explained that this curve represented the number of species in the world, normalized to 1.0 at 1970. At around 2005 — that’s, y’know, now — the curve showed that fifty percent of all species around in 1970 will have disappeared. The curve disappears off the chart below the 0.5 level due to scale, to return to the chart around, oh, 2050 and be nearly back to 1.0 in 2070. Either I’m misreading the chart, or there’s going to be a lot of frisky Darwinian speciation action going on in mid-century, after human civilization collapses because it isn’t smart enough to think of using the other energy sources already at its disposal.

Surprisingly, this bit of malthusian foolishness was only the warmup…the foundation on which Jarvis would build his chiropterarium of moonbat eschatology.

Brushing aside the impending post-peak-oil collapse of civilization, Jarvis shifted his time scale out somewhat to the right…seven orders of magnitude to the right, actually, to the estimated death of the sun several billion years from now. It was necessary for us to go forth and populate space, he explained, because even if we survive the end of civilization in mid-century, there are other large problems to contend with if our species is to continue whose probability increases over longer time scales. That is, every so often, something is bound to happen to wipe us out for good, even if we become good stewards of the globe over the next few million years. For instance, we are overdue (he claimed) for the “last ice age ever”, the one which will freeze the planet over for good. If that’s true, one would expect “global warming” might actually be desirable as a means of countering the random murderous impulses of our Medea-like Mother Earth, but Jarvis didn’t seem to make that obvious connection — he had already moved on to a description of how the carbon cycle was going to come to a screeching halt due to the re-merging of the continents into Pangaea II: The Sequel, at which point all tectonic action would cease forever and plant life would die.

Unfortunately, I missed the remaining catastrophes awaiting us due to the need to stifle a sudden bout of horselaughter.

After (I guess) making the point that after civilization collapses due to our energy supplies running out, we’ll still face species extinction if we don’t get off the planet, he threw up a whole bunch of unintelligible graphs showing estimates of the total human population over time based on certain assumptions about technologies available, growth rates, etc. The only thing I gleaned from this was his repeated assertions that “this is going to take a lot of energy”, which struck me as odd considering we ran out of energy in the first slide. We have no energy and civilization is in ruins, and technological innovation is off the table, yet he expects humanity to colonize the planets, and then the entire galaxy? Um…how?

None too soon he came to his conclusion: the galactic human population total over time. Or something like that (I was strangling a laugh again, this time accompanied by the guy next to me who had also picked up on the nonsense, so I might have lost the thread here too). Whatever it was, it was a log-log graph with a widely-swinging curve covering billions of years. Oddly, the trend was downward, apparently showing a declining birthrate from now until the heat-death of the universe, despite humanity spreading like an infection from planet to planet.

Finally, the time came for questions. The first couple of questions brought Jarvis back to the near term, and he went off in the usual malthusian/ehrlichian vein about how resources are finite, there are no alternatives, and only recycling, “sustainability”, and renewables will save us — oh, that and reducing our global population to year-1800 levels (~1.8B) by some unspecified means. Regrettably, he wouldn’t call on me (he was clearly avoiding doing so, perhaps because he had seen me doubled-over laughing), so I didn’t get to ask any follow ups of my own.

The punch line in all this is that I wasn’t expecting this presentation to be nutty at all, but I had expected a later presentation on weapons in space to be the loopy highlight of the conference…and that presentation turned out to be informative and balanced. Indeed, though it was given by someone who confessed to having qualms about putting weapons in space, it was an excellent review of the issue, and a much more rational treatment than anything I’ve seen coming from Bruce Gagnon (who is distracted at the moment by the Mother Sheehan farce).