17-08-2011, 02:57 AM
2/3 of the planet is water. That leaves 34% for humans to live on. But when we eliminate about 20% of the 1/3 of the land for deserts and ice caps we have, lets say, 10% left of the planet's surface for humans. It seems we could run out of land doesn't it? When sea level rises we'll lose much of what we gain from land we gain from under melted ice caps. I think the point here is that we have so little land to both produce food and live on that we need to pay attention to Malthus. Think of our situation as the condition of the Easter Islanders. They were in effect on an isolated island with only so many resources. They cut down all their trees because they needed them to roll the carved stone heads to the shoreline to honor their gods. They didn't understand the island would become uninhabitable when the trees were gone. No more wood for boats for fishing. They went extinct as a culture. Obviously our planet is like an island in space and we are cutting the trees that help keep the atmosphere's gases balanced. Maybe the overpopulated islands of Japan,Italy & Britain are like the Easter Islanders and when they saw they were short on space they expanded as empires and raised holy hell with the world. Include America as a phase in that dynamic as Britain expanded to N.Amer. When we realize we have only about 10% of the planet to live on we should see how precarious our existence is.