Talk:Albert Allen Bartlett

Biography assessment rating comment
The article may be improved by following the WikiProject Biography 11 easy steps to producing at least a B article.-- Jreferee 00:15, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

peakoil
Bartlett is a known peak oil advocate (an odd moniker, but it suits my descriptive purposes here.) Should the appropriate related internal wikipedia article links be added?
 * This man is NWO infinltrated to foment population control.It is stupidity, resource are vast... distribution not. Be carefull with desinformation. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 190.134.15.5 (talk) 03:51, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

Did you mean disinformation like statements that a person is "NWO infiltrated?" Or does your tin foil hat prevent you from discerning obvious contradictions in your own statements? 24.23.88.171 (talk) 02:22, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

What seems clear about Dr. Bartlett is that he is a scientist first and not at all being political. For me, Dr. Bartlett provides a sober picture of what we have in our hands, namely, we have this one planet and a social and economic system based on ever expanding use of natural resources. He has explained some most basic facts which I knew instinctively, but didn't have the math tools to explain. Now I do. Intuition is not enough, one needs the accurate numbers and graphs to show others, these Dr. Bartlett does provide in an impartial way. Calicocat (talk)

The Great Challenge
So, does anyone know of a reliable source containing one or more of the obvious responses to Bartlett's Great Challenge? "Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases in population, locally, nationally, or globally?" While I fully agree with Prof. Bartlett that exponential population growth must eventually slam into hard limits for the conserved resources of materials and energy, there is a third realm where more is always more: information. For all practical purposes, at present information is not a conserved quantity like materials and energy (the cost of duplicating information is very low, and getting lower thanks to Moore's law). One need only look at collaborative projects like Wikipedia or Folding@Home to see benefits of huge populations of participants, and the benefits continue to scale as the numbers increase. Of course I must massively qualify that statement by noting that population growth is a hugely inefficient means to promote further beneficial growth in information, if only because the most rapidly growing populations on Earth today are the poorest and least educated, and thus are the least likely to contribute much to the collaborative project of generating useful information. Even within the wealthy countries, only a tiny percentage of people have the ability and inclination to contribute usefully to the collective store of information. Prof. Bartlett came of age long before the Internet made Commons-based peer production possible, so we can forgive his apparent lack of awareness of the beneficial aspects of population growth on information. Especially as information, by itself, doesn't make a very good sandwich. I might point out that cornucopians make the opposite error, by misinterpreting the unconstrained growth in information to mean that material and energy are similarly unconstrained. If humans are to have a long-term future, it will be by consuming increasing amounts of information so they can use ever-decreasing amounts of materials and energy. --Teratornis (talk) 00:23, 17 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Interdisciplinary research is an area where having large numbers of humans is an advantage over having small numbers. Many of the advances in science, engineering, medicine, and economics in the 1800s and early 1900s came from diving deeply in a single discipline (like physics, mechanics, electrical engineering, etc).  Most of the easy-to-find improvements to human life have already been found in those disciplines -- which means that now, the easiest discoveries are happening in the intersection of multiple disciplines (such as at the intersection of electronics and optics, which produced society-changing innovations like fiber optic communication, liquid crystal displays, LED lights, etc).  But if you have 1000 disciplines, it takes 500,000 people just to have one person covering each intersection between them.  With many billions of people in the world, when for example the bee population declines, or a coronavirus becomes epidemic, we actually have a few humans who have spent their lives studying those niche issues; this would not be true with only a billion people on the planet.  See in general Interdisciplinarity.  Gnuish (talk) 06:40, 9 May 2022 (UTC)


 * It seems that what we must do as a species is to take some important next steps, or we too shall be just one more bell curve nature produces in the universe and come to a natural conclusion. The only choice we have to to stop the petty energy wars and learn to harvest new sunlight, as Dr. Sagan put it. Absent outward expansion from using just this one planet, humans have to learn to use other planets and solar system objects as sources of needed materials and living space. We need to grow would would be a little tender shoot on a new world. The space station sometimes reminds of a small flower bud just breaking the soil. Calicocat (talk)

Equation
this youtube video by him has an equation at 4:36 which differs from others here. its called the "Expiration Time or "T sub E", of a non-renewable resource whose rate of consumption is growing steadily". I think its highly relevant to all of the articles on peak resource use and limits to growth. If anyone else thinks his equation is relevant, can they transcribe it? the math is beyond me, and i cant reconstruct it from the image on screen.Mercurywoodrose (talk) 02:07, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

Assessment comment
Substituted at 07:04, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

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