Quote from: Basiley on June 15, 2011, 10:54:00 AM

Quote from: RonnieP on June 15, 2011, 03:08:57 AM

I am only reminded of the intro to the movie "Idiocracy". If I don't breed, 2 dozen hillbillies will outbreed me and then where will the world be?? I have to breed just to make sure we don't go extinct!!!

... I agree though, we should all grow patio gardens. the food would actually have nutritional value and not be 90% corn by-products.

right.
humanity is like cancer on planet surface.

Don't insult cancer. Its creation is really more interesting than the formation of its host.

In all seriousness, Malthusian predictions come around all the time. Unsurprisingly they often fail to to materialize. Humans have made great progress in the engineering of new strains of various foodstuffs and the development of techniques that make their collection more efficient. Don't tell the green freaks this, but humans have been making GE food for thousands of years. We will continue this process.

Further name one organism that grows logarithmically indefinitely? Bacteria come close in a sterile medium but they are limited by culture size. Throw some phage in and the curve is radically different. Human generation time is radically slower. A single E. coli cell could spawn 2^1281600 offspring in the average human lifespan of 75 years (I know this value varies). As unPC as it is to admit, human growth is checked by these same factors. Remember the SARS outbreak? It would have been unlikely to have occurred in the Wyoming for example. As population density increases, so will the likelihood of disease transmission, especially for one rising zoonotically. The question is not will a big outbreak happen, but when?