PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

10. IF I CAN, I WANT
to sustain one trillion people on the earth without exhausting any basic
resource. If his calculations are right, we should expect this to happen
sometime in the future unless, of course, we encounter unnatural conditions,
such as a nuclear war or a collision with an asteroid. But no one
today would seriously admit of such a possibility. On the contrary, respected
contemporary studies concentrate on forecasting the date the
earth’s population will begin to decline, as if the niche were already
filled to capacity.
In order to accommodate one trillion people on the earth we need a
number of technologies that we don’t have yet, such as the technology
for harvesting large fractions of the sunlight falling on the earth, the materials
for constructing vertical cities, and the processes for massively
producing healthy staple food. But here again, such technologies seem
plausible, and if they can be acquired, they will be acquired some time
in the future. At that point in time, the earth’s population will be able to
grow, and so it will. A trillion people on the earth may not be pure
fantasy.
The law of natural growth in competition and the S-shaped pattern associated
with it are far more universal than originally thought. Even noncompetitive
human behavior, which at first glance seems completely
unrelated to natural growth, demonstrates links to it when closely examined.
Tourism, for example, has no life cycle associated with it; its
fluctuations are of a purely statistical nature. But tourism has its origin
in the law that says if I can do something, I want to do it; the same law
that makes S-curves proceed to completion. Statistical fluctuations are
an inseparable feature of repeated measurements. They are chaotic and
belong to no regular pattern. But one encounters similar chaotic fluctuations
during the early and late phases of a real-life S-curve. During the
phase of the steep rise, fluctuations play a secondary role; the limelight
in this period is on the steady rise of the growth pattern, which, unlike
the fluctuations, is predictable.
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