Thursday, January 04, 2007
Was Asimov exaggerating in his paper on "The Good Earth is Dying"? Comment critically. How many people do you think the earth can sustain?
Conserve water. Do not waste electricity. Reuse, reduce and recycle. These are messages that are constantly being conveyed to people nowadays through media and campaigns. Even students are made to do projects based on those messages as part of their school assessment. Furthermore, just by inserting those phrases above in the online search engine, thousands of websites, that gives ideas on ways to conserve our Earth's limited resources, will sprung up on the computer screen. Also, the fact that countries spread across the globe are chanting the same mantra to its people further shows the essential need for Mankind to go easy on the Earth's resources. Isaac Asimov's paper on "The Good Earth is Dying" has given a pretty good outlook on what the future would be like given our present increase in population and utilization of energy. However, although there are points that I concur, there are certain aspects such as the availability of food, population growth and energy consumption which, in my opinion, he seems to be exaggerating.
One of the points which is brought up in his paper was the way food is processed and delivered to its people once Earth has reached its population peak. The population peak refers to the maximum number of people Earth can provide for. When that happens, Asimov envisioned that there will be "world-girdling complex of high-rise apartments" with the roof as a place for plants' growth. I do agree with this idea if Earth was to accommodate that number of people. Then, Asimov talked about the way of living for humans at that time and has painted a rather negative picture of it. At this point, I feel that he was exaggerating. Actually, if global high-rise were to occur in reality, food processing would be almost the same as how food is processed currently. This is because he said that the roofs will be dedicated to plant growth and hence that area would be the same as the earth’s surface area. So, the growing of food will not differ from the present except that it is grown at extremely high places. By this time, hopefully, technology has advanced enough to produce genetically modified plants that are attuned to withstand various conditions such as high altitudes and extreme cold or hot weathers. I think this is highly possible as genetically modified plants have already been produced to provide better crop yield. Hence, food will not be in much poorer quality like what he has described.
The next point put forward by Asimov is his prediction for population growth. He has predicted accurately the Earth's population in the year 2000 at least six thousand million. Still, I do not believe that the population would expand at the same rate throughout the centuries to come. I think that if at one point, whereby the amount of resources is not able to support the majority of the world's population, United Nation, a world's organization, would take a drastic measure. Perhaps, there will be a time when everyone in this planet could not give birth to more than 2 children. If they do so, they will be penalized. This may sound absurd but birth policies to limit the population were already implemented in the past, for example in Singapore, and it worked well. So, I believe that the United Nation is able to control the population when the situation demands restrictive actions towards births. Many people would be infuriated by such policies but to ensure survival of mankind, most would finally, although reluctantly, agree with those measures. Therefore, population level will not be uncontrollable like what Asimov's have foreseen.
The third point, which is Asimov's calculations on energy consumption, is also exaggerated. He predicted the amount of energy consumption with the idea that humans continue using up energy at the rate they are consuming now. Then again, I feel that when Earth's resources is seriously depleting, Man have no choice but to cut down on their energy expenditure. If humans change their lifestyle and live like people of centuries ago, where not much energy is consumed per person, Earth could sustain more than what Asimov has predicted. However, Asimov's opinion is that human dignity is related to the amount of resources the Earth could provide for an individual. I think that cutting back on energy consumption will not cause human dignity to deteriorate that much. I do not think that humans will be barbaric when they have to go back to the 1800s era, where electricity and fuel were minimally used. For Earth to sustain much more population than what Asimov has predicted, all human beings just have to sacrifice the convenience which the world presently offers to the majority. So, I feel that Earth is able to sustain humans much longer than what Asimov has predicted.
When talking about how many people Earth can sustain, in my opinion, we should not calculate the number by taking into consideration the standard of living of the people. By doing that, the figures will tally with David Piementel, Professor of Ecology at Cornell University at Ithaca, New York, which is only 2 billion people. I think that in order to gauge that number, we just have to consider the basic needs of a human for survival. In that case, the number would be the same as Asimov's figures which is forty million million, when no animal life exist.
In conclusion, with regards to Asimov's essay, I agree with him regarding the ultimate number of human population Earth can support. However, I believe that Earth can support mankind longer than AD 2436 due to appropriate actions that would be implemented by the intellectual beings, namely humans, to ensure the existence of its own species. Mankind, although have been said to be cruel on Earth by polluting it and depleting its resources, will not be ignorant enough to kill it. Mankind knows that we need the good Earth in order to survive.
(993words)
7:06 AM
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