Digest 715 - Population Control Policy Issues

> Message: 2
> Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2003 13:48:13 -0700
> From: Al Globus
> Subject: Re: Re: Habitat Population Control (LONG, Sorry)
>
> On Monday, September 22, 2003, at 12:38 PM, panamabob wrote:
>
> > Why would it level off? Better education, more women working which
> > leads to less procreation?
>
> Yes. The data are overwhelming. No question about it.

Hi Bob. Though I do not agree that women acheiving high education
magically makes a population go to zero (or negative) growth, if it were
true then it would seem to indicate a real need for a population policy -
just to keep the habitat sustainable. After all, if you gene pool gets too
small you are in serious peril as a species. Immigration could solve that,
but if immigrating away from the habitat is going to be out of bounds for
the pressures of a large population, the allowing it to releive the
pressures of a small one is a bit unfair. I believe the lower-growth as a
function of higher education effect you are looking at is most pronounced in
areas where education and standards of living is abysmally low. Is the
effect as powerful in industrialized nations? Places with strong public
education systems? Which societies would be better models for orbital
habitats?

> > results from AIDs die off of breeding age humans?
>
> This is happening in sub-sahara Africa, but Africa is a low-population
> continent in any case.

Again, is sub-saharan Africa a good model for the population of a proposed
space habitat?

> > From: Al Globus
> > Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 2003 3:39 PM
> > Subject: Re: [spacesettlers] Re: Habitat Population Control
> >
> > > On Tuesday, September 23, 2003, at 08:33 AM, Andy Goddard wrote:
> >> Today human population growth is around 16% per decade, just about the
> >> highest ever seen on the planet. I make it at least 540 years before
even
> >> this rate (which is clearly unsustainable on Earth, and is bottlenecked
> >> before the asteroids are available) would result in a population of 18
> >> trillion.
> >
> > Best estimates of Earth's population show it leveling off at 9-10
> > billion within a couple of decades. It's not a simple exponential
> > curve.
> > Al Globus

Good points. And don't forget that there really isn't a 'Human
Population' - rather, population is a local phenomenon. It is doubtful that
people in the Kalahari are having more children because some people in
Chicago are eating well - population growth is a function of people acting
locally, and responding to pressures where they stand at the moment. So
even if a simple logarithmic growth curve did fit, it wouldn't fit for all
of Terra.
But once again guys, not what I had really wanted to focus on - the time
span to get to a population crisis isn't important to me right now. The
issue I had hoped to focus on was what to do once we are there.

> Message: 5
> Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2003 20:58:23 -0000
> From: "Xenophile"
> Subject: Re: Habitat Population Control
>
[Big Ol' Snip]
>
> Xenophile (who has trouble taking *but what if you can't build
> another habitat* very seriously)

Hi Xenophile - sorry to be responding to your sig, but the message
didn't appear to be addressed at me, and I wanted to weigh in. My point is
to focus on dealing with the potential crisis issues now (at least to the
extent of thinking rationally about potential policies). The assumption
that building another habitat isn't necesarilly a big one; resources are
never free, and are limited. How many Island Threes can you safely put at
the the Lagrangian point between Terra and Sol (L5 I think)? How could you
convince people in existing habitats there to make room for the one just
above that number? Sure NEOs are a cheap source of materials, but some have
lower delta-Vs than others - would you expect the prospectors to sell steel
from different NEOs at the same price? What about if they have to haul in a
main belt asteroid? Once habitats are well established, then the assumption
is that the numbers will grow exponentially - an assumption I disagree
with - does that mean that consumption of space resources becomes
exponential? What happens to prices? Will build an Island Three ever be a
weekend project for the guy with a couple hours worth of wages in his
pocket? Or will there be folks who want a habitat, but cannot afford to
build a new one?

>
> Message: 6
> Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2003 21:27:44 -0000
> From: "victoriatangoman"
> Subject: Re: Digest Number 713
>
> Your opening sentence summarizes our issues very succinctly. You
> want the axioms to restrict the range of debate to a very narrow set
> of circumstances that FORCE population control to be practiced.

Yes. That is the issue I want to examine; how we imagine we arrive
there isn't really relevant.

> I tried to play along, in the spirit of debate, by finding a situation
> where I thought this could be an outcome. That would be the
> temporary worker scenario.

I respectfully disagree. The temporary worker scenario has its own
issues; but facing a crisis of "too damn many colonists and nowhere for them
to go" isn't one of them. And the interesting issues could probably be
legislated out of existence by truly draconian labor contracts.
Example "In the event you are involved in conceiving and unlicensed
birth, you will immediately be fired. You will clean out your desk and
apartment and return to Terra at your own expense, paying for the return
ticket of the child(ren) as well. To insure compliance with this policy,
you agree to have you wages garnished and put in escrow from the day you
arrive until a sufficient amount to pay for the requisite number of tickets
is reached."

> The reason I had trouble playing along is that I think that your
> axioms don't account for some real-life dynamics. Try and find me
> any business that has as its goal no revenue growth. Try to find me
> a national economy that looks for no growth - that is striving for a
> static level of production, population, resource use, etc. This just
> doesn't happen.

I disagree that economic growth is synonymous for population growth.

> This human characteristic will also be in orbit. If you've sunk
> billions into mining, refining, fabricating infrastructure for
> Habitat construction your going to want to use it more than just
> once. If you have a factory to make refridgerators in orbit, then the
> prospect of more consumers will be appealing, the costs of the
> appliances can be lowered,the volume produced will increase, etc.
> This is a hugely important dynamic at work that your axioms ignore.

Actually, my axioms embrace this - if you have a business of any sort,
then you will want cheaper labor and lower production costs, sure. You will
also want to SELL your products or services -so the habitat building service
will charge money. How much? Will a business which costs billions to
establish try to recoup the money spent? Will it have to pay its labourers?
Maintain its equipment? Provide medical, dental, retirement or other
benefits? Pay for energy and material consumed in the manufacturing
process? Will habitats ever be free, or will they continue to cost money?
How much money, considering the value of (how much people are willing to pay
for) the land being constructed?
As I have said, construction of new habitats is really outside the scope
of what I want to focus on; but positing a situation where a new habitat
cannot be built to solve the population problem isn't really a big stretch.

> > In the case of families, would childbirth be forbidden, or controlled?
>
> I'd say controlled. Probably worked into the terms of your 5 year
contract.
>
> > And if controlled, then controlled how?
>
> Perhaps you bid for the right to have a child? You do this in the
> contract negotiation stage before you go up to the Habitat. This way
> management can control for growth over time.
>
> Perhaps the "child clause" is relaxed for those workers who are
> getting older. But it still has to be planned if the Habitat is
> going to be operating at the edge of its resource limits.

AHA! Here's the good stuff! Bidding for the right to have children,
rerlaxing breeding restrictions on the elderly, pre-immigration breeding
contracts, all thoughts which are right on target for the subject! But
bidding - at least in the paragraph above - presumes a corporate habitat.
Quite aside from the ethical issues, how does this work for a less
structured environment? And does this represent a barrier to immigration?
Should this barrier be lower for some higher for others? Should breeding
contracts be assumed to be a life support bill? Should you have to buy
yourself off, and how long should such contracts last? There's a bunch of
ways to go on this - any thoughts?

> > Would population control even be an issue - if your temporary population
is much
> > smaller than the maximum population, and has a staggeringly huge growth
rate
> > of 5%, you won't hit the limits before you sent them all home. What
about
> > the expense of the return tickets though? Who pays? And what about
folks
> > who can't pay?
>
> These are good questions. I'm only advocating the temporary worker
> solution as a means of engaging in your scenario, not as something
> that I think is an ideal situation, for the very questions you've
> raised. I guess the expense of sending them home is built into the
> arrangement. The worker is sent up to the Habitat in order to
> produce X amount of economic value over a period of time. The costs
> of maintaining that worker have to be less than the value of his
> production or the whole rationale for the Habitat falls apart.

Ok, so scrap the temporary worker scenario. What about settlers? Given
that a family has bought the rights to a plot of land in the habitat, what
sort of arrangements need be made with regard to future population growth?
Do they have the right to encourage an infinite number of squatters to live
in a shantytown on their property? Does territory ownership equate to the
right to have an infinite number of chilren? Do people who own more have
rights to more descendants? What about owning two square feet of space? Do
you see what I'm trying to get at?

> > > At the other extreme, an Island 3, with a population limit of
> > > 10,000,000 will take a long time to fill up.
> >
> > []
> > True, it IS a longer term process on larger habitats; but it will
reach
> > the limits in finite time. So I hope that our discussion here will be
> > fruitful, even for them.
>
> Yes, it will fill up over time. Once again I come back to the human
> dynamic. Why would they purposely seek to prohibit growth beyond the
> original Habitat? Your axioms lay that out but don't explain why.

(*Sigh*) It's a thought experiment; you set it up to see where it goes.
If you are familiar with the Schroedinger's Cat (spelling?) thought
experiment, there are a thousand or more questions that you can ask that
aren't within the givens.. like, 'Why a cat, instead of a duck? Or, why a
box instead of a sphere of two meter radius? Why a vial of poison gas,
instead of a high-pressure vaccuum or a high explosive?'. But these
questions don't lead to the interesting bits of the thought experiment -
they don't really help explore the issue under discussion. Here, I hoped to
have a discussion about a closed system reaching a population crisis. The
axioms were meant to delineate the issue to avoid the tired "Just move
everyone at no expense, into the shiny, new, better, and FREE habitat that
magically appears" handwave.

> Sure, but it's even simpler than that: there is money to be made in
> having a larger population if they are all productive. Growth is
> good for the economy and bad for pressures on finite resources.
> Growth is a big motivator and stasis is limiting and depressing.

Here I think you are confusing the meaning of growth. Population growth
and economic growth are not the same thing, and I am not satisfied that one
is always necessary and sufficient for the other.

> You'll need to come up with a good reason to choose stasis. The
> resources for Habitat expansion are already there, and the work of
> the shell construction is more automated and productive than all of
> the detail work that the interiors will require with all of the
> transportation, housing, etc requirements.

(*Sigh*) See about three quarters of my previous replies - you know, the
ones that start "This isn't the issue I wanted to focus on..."

[Snip my expanation about agri units being part of the habitat for the issue
I want to examine.]
>
> I'm all for playing "what-if" for it can be very illuminating so to
> follow your restrictions I would say that no matter the size of the
> Habitat under discussion, it will be designed for a maximum
> population size and it must be operated under those limits. If
> technology is developed that can increase the limits of one of the
> sub-systems, that in and of itself, may not be sufficient to
> increase the limits on the other systems. They all have to rise in
> lockstep to support population levels above the design limit.

Hooray! We agree on something! That something is that habitats will be
built to demand - as a result they are unlikely to have huge tracts of
empty, unowned land. Also, we agree that sustaining a population above the
original design limits of a habitat will not be a trivially easy problem to
solve. Still not really relevant, though.

> You could invoke magic to make all resources vanish, so now there is
> no choice but to live within the confines of the Habitat. Absent
> something like that though, I just can't see expansion stopping.
> Look at what's happened with oil exploration. A hundred years ago,
> who would have thought that we'd be drilling off-shore? Activities
> expand.

Yup - a hundred years ago, who would have forseen the extinction of the
passenger pigeon? Or the overfishing of our oceans to perilously low fish
populations? Or that we would switch away from using ultra-clean burning
whale oil, just because the vast, inexaustible, endless supply of whales
would run low? Still not on the issue I wanted to discuss though; wasn't
making one of my axioms / givens "Resources are limited" believable enough
to actually allow a discussion? (*Sigh*) Do we really have to go over this
whole "I really wanted to focus on a closed system approaching a population
crisis..." three times in every post?

> Again I'm taking the out that you're trying to restrict. Or I'm
> suggesting that a Habitat can't exceed a population limit.

[Huge snip]

>But all that aside, if you've
> eliminated the option of expansion beyond a set limit, then no
> matter whether on Earth or in a Habitat, social policies have to be
> established that limit freedom in a variety of forms. How do you
> think that freedoms will be limited?

This is precisely the question that I am trying to ask the group! What
ethical issues do you see being involved? What are the tolerable limits to
restricting breeding rights? Are breeding rights really rights at all?
What are appropriate responses to transgressors? What about illicit
children themselves - it would be barbaric to simply space them; is a state
run orphanage kinder? If the parents keep the child, is there any penalty
which is sufficient? If they do not, then who?

> > Of course selling land in a habitat being constructed is a major
source
> > of revenue for the construction of that habitat... but I'd hoped to
> > concentrate on other areas of discussion than habitat construction.
>
> OK, I hope you see that I'm trying to play along and just accept the
> scenario you've proposed. The rebuttals from my earlier post had to
> be stated, perhaps just to define the actual terms of your scenario,
> because IMHO, they are likely responses to the crisis that will be
> formenting in your scenario.
>
> > I am suggesting that we think rationally now about what to do when the
air runs out, just
> > as I think the pilgrims could have rationally thought about what their
descendants may
> > have to face when the land ran out - granted that very few of them
probably
> > thought much beyond their grandchildren.
>
> Sorry, I can't resist :-) LOL. What did early settlers do when
> things got too crowded in New Amsterdam? LOL.
>
> Seriously though. I think population control, state planning, career
> allotments, education allotments, tracking or channeling of
> childrens talents are all likely outcomes of a "limit to growth."
> Such State involvement makes the prospect of state-directed eugenics
> a more likely outcome. You probably have detected the freedom-
> depriving theme of my responses to the limit to growth scenario.

Yes, and I can tell you that I wish you'd treat the issue with a little
more respect. I am not trying to build a vision of some sort of
totalitarian Reich in orbit, and I don't find fantasies of that nature
amusing - since that is exactly what I hope this discussion will help us
avoid.

> Further, I think innovation will wither because if you need x
> engineers in the waste control station, y agronimists for fruit
> production, z health care workers for the elderly, k teachers for
> 7th grade, etc, and everything is static, then there is no room for
> innovation, and even if there was, the economics of implementing the
> new innovation probably wouldn't make sense because there would be a
> very finite market with no prospect of expansion.

Where to start? Firstly, a lassiez faire (spelling?) economist might
say that such rigid job allotments would be unnecessary, because people will
choose to work at jobs that pay well; and supply and demand for specialized
labor will ensure that whatever specialists you run short of will be well
paid. Second, I disagree with the implicit assumption that the person who
does a job is unable to innovate; teachers in the classroom sure as heck
know how their class is responding to the material, and certainly do try new
techniques to engage their interests.... Third, as for marketing an
innovation, while it is true that innovation alone is not always enough to
sell a product, I think you veiw of the economy vastly oversimplifies - and
any pursuit that can become more efficient through innovation will pursue
innovation.
Again though, not really the topic I wanted to focus on. Closer than
habitat construction, though.

> Lastly, a likely
> outcome of this scenario would be enforced euthanasia for those who
> exceed their alloted time within the Habitat for to let them live
> would curtail the numbers of births that year, which would impact on
> school class size 10 years hence, and a shortage of some essential
> worker 25 years hence. So when your ticket is called, it's time to
> get it punched and you do that for the good of the society. Your
> personal dignity is not an issue and you've lived your life without
> the inalienable human rights you've learned that others possess.
>
> How's that for a pessimistic view of the future? :)

Look, you've raised a few good issues, why waste them on a deliberately
infantile 'Logans Run' fantasy? Forced euthanasia? As a leader of your
people, would you ever really advocate this as a solution? Certainly, the
age demographic of the population must be considered, but who defines who
lives and who dies? How could such a system NOT be rife with nepotism? If
you are to be euthanized, why must you die without dignity? Are the
inalienable human rights really inalienable, if they are so easily taken
away? For that matter, where do your rights come from? Are they a
construct of the society in which you live (the empiricist veiw) or are they
some essential thing, universal, fundamental, existing independant of
societies (the transcendentalist veiw)? In either case, what are a persons
rights with regard to reproduction (Notice: NOT sex - boink who you want, as
often as you want) and what reproductive responsibilities do they have?

> TangoMan
>
> Message: 10
> Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2003 00:55:15 -0000
> From: "victoriatangoman"
> Subject: Re: Digest Number 713
>
> --- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "Joe" wrote:
>
> > In expanding the habitat, how long
> > can you add on before encountering the limits of your engineering
ability?
> > Is a spinning cylinder which was originally designed as a spinning torus
> > have any limitations? Is it as stable? How many orders of magnitude
can
> > you increase the radius of the habitat? If adding agricultural areas,
what
> > sort of arrangements need to be regarding sunlight? Will you need to
add or
> > expand mirrors? How big can they get? How many can you have before
> > diminishing returns set in?
>
> I'm not so sure that you can add onto a completed Habitat. You can't
> stop the thing from spinning or there will be all sorts of mayhem
> inside. You can't start willy-nilly adding mass all over because
> thay might affect the balance, precession, etc.
>
> I tend to think of a Habitat as a completed piece of engineering. It
> would be interesting to contemplate how one could add onto a Habitat.

This was part of my reply to Ryan Z.; I do not express an opinion on the
practicallity of adding on to a completed habitat. I was trying to clarify
the idea that resources are limited, and when they run out you have the
situation that I'd like to examine... a closed system approaching a
population crisis.

> TangoMan
>
> Message: 11
> Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2003 01:47:00 -0000
> From: "victoriatangoman"
> Subject: Population Control Model
>
> Joe,
>
> If you want to model a static society in orbit and look into the
> nitty-gritty implications that fall out from such a scenario then I
> encourage you to play with the demographics model I uploaded last
> March. It's constructed in Excel.

I do not have access to excel.

> Go to the files section and look for "demographics.zip" or go here:
>
> http://f4.grp.yahoofs.com/v1/kOxwP01s-
> sJJSz7xJKk_EHgr2ElgMk1wKMBKmvi6XeEJ2lne4INlQqTFZm30oHAxINFEH688VIr90u
> sPF1nLCydIANqGAnMfQP6uV211jXHR-nUO/Demographics.zip

This link did not work for me.