cc: file, Andrea, Tony Hafen, Sara and Des Penny, Pauline Nelson via Aunt Sara, & Maxine Shirts
"It is interesting how different the world can look, depending on what color of glasses we put on. Mine are typically rose colored, and so I accordingly see the glass as half full. However, in times of stress, the polarity of the lens can shift and give everything a gray depressing look. And this can come across in what I say on the telephone. Rachel, I'm sorry I was not clearer in my description of the Income Tax information. I had no intention to imply or say anything other than good information. In addition to you getting some money back, we will get some back also. There are some nice surprises when other financial things don't go as planned.
As far as my week, the week March 16-March23rd, there isn't all that much to report. I was very busy, particularly in contacting folks who could hire me as a consultant. I haven't found that group yet, and I have no concerns about everything not working out right. I wish I knew how to help Andrea not worry about how everything will turn out. It was Matt's Spring Break, and he was really content to mostly hang around the house. We had an all out wrestling match late in the week, and he is getting a lot stronger. I didn't realize one could build up such big muscles with the channel changer and computer game controller. Maybe it is my TV muscles which have been developing.
Of course, we watched the beginning of the war: Iraqi Freedom more than we needed to on TV. I find all of the television detailed coverage very interesting. It gives me a whole new slant on the Viet Nam War, and what folks I grew up with and their families went through watching all of this stuff on TV. I went out with the missionaries on Thursday night. The only place we got in was to the Burnham's, and we had a very nice visit. Harold is also out of work. Tough times in the oil patch. Friday morning there was a good meeting with Rod Fries, my Landmark salesman, and Gene Mennich, the Marketing Director for Magic Earth. They are interested in working with me in China, in Nigeria, and at Magic Earth. Now I just need to get customers to commit to pay for the work. In the afternoon I went to the University of Houston to listen to a talk. It turned out to be a different talk than I expected, and it was good to see my friends again. Had a nice talk with Bob Sheriff and also with Chris Harding. I got back to the house about 6:00 PM. We watched a James Bond movie on TV.
Saturday morning Matt had a ward basketball game at 8:00, which we watched. Their 11:00 game was won by forfeit. We left shortly after this was scheduled to start to go through a session at the Houston Temple. The Barrs in our Ward were going through for the first time, and to get sealed. Gary and Roetta Jones rode up with us, and we went to a Chinese Restaurant afterwards. My fortune read `When one door closes, another opens.' Andrea taught her debaters in High School to add the words `in bed' after each fortune. We had some good laughs over some of the fortunes. I spent the rest of the afternoon and until about midnight getting material ready for a meeting with Fusion Geo first thing Monday morning in The Woodlands (0313.html).
Sunday morning came early. It was the annual Stake High Priest Quorum Meeting at 7:00 AM. I was very touched by each of the four talks. There are some really good men in our Stake. One man and his wife just extended their service as live at home mission knocking on doors in the Houston 5th Ward for a second year. Another just returned from a 1 year mission in Ely, Nevada. There isn't much in Ely! A third talked about his mission at the Houston Temple since it first opened (../0034.html). The fourth talked about the abundant life. He quoted Brigham Young's worst fear, `that this people will become wealthy and forget the Lord their God.' He pointed out how many children grow up with distorted values because we give them too much. He pointed out how we must deny children, and how all play and no work makes the abundant life more difficult. He pointed out how there are youth in our stake who are willing to go to an `R' rated or other inappropriate movie. And the importance of doing our best to teach the gospel to those we have any influence over. These few words do absolutely nothing to capture the feelings in that meeting, the tears of joy in hearing truth, and the spirit of the occasion. I wish I knew how to provide each of you kids, and those who do not read these Thoughtlets, with my feelings of that hour. Guess that is not possible, especially since there are 10 of you, and of course Bridget, Justin, and Brian, whom I like to think I have some positive influence on.
Ten! Way too many kids, according to many in today's world. Just think if we lived in China under the rules in force now, only Roice and Heather would be alive. It is a good thing Roice and Heather are with us. And as some of you have been told, and as most of you will be taught, either in college or from some other liberal know it all, one child per couple is the way it should be. The direct implication is that none of the rest of you should be alive. And although they see nothing wrong with killing you as a fetus or an embryo, and calling the baby murder of abortion a choice, if someone is alive, and kills someone else, they believe society should pay for that person to live out their life comfortably in prison rather than to face responsibility for their crime with their life, which is largely a deterrent for others repeating the same crime.
And these liberal know-it-alls further teach the United States has absolutely no right to go into Iraq and remove a regime which sponsors terrorists who killed thousands on September 11th (../0138.html) and who kill thousands of their own people to retain power. For what it is worth, even if I don't see you as often as I would like, even if I don't show you how much I love you as well as you would like, and even if sometimes life seems very hard, YOU EACH SHOULD BE ALIVE, I AM GLAD I HAVE BEEN ABLE TO HELP YOU GET STARTED ON YOUR OWN LIVES, and I LOVE EACH OF YOU MORE THAN YOU NOW REALIZE. Just as I know our mutual Heavenly Father loves each of us, and each of his other children. Including those who exercise unrightous power and authority over others.
With this introduction to my thoughts about population, I'm going to write some details behind the philosophy. Since the war in Iraq has everyone's attention, I am going to start out with brief comments about Saddam Hussein. One of the really sad results of history comes out of the Munich accord, which was when Hitler was not stopped while his power was still limited. The summary statement is:
As the war named `Operation Iraqi Freedom' broke out we
were reading in the Book of Mormon. I won't quote the
entire relevant chapter, just the 20th verse of Heleman 6:
It is not my intention to use religion or scripture as
justification for this war or any other war. It is my
intention, in writing thoughts about population, to point
out the fact, illustrated throughout history, that when
populations rapidly get large and there is a wealthy
class and large disparities in ownership of this wealth,
it creates problems. When some folks are not consigned
by circumstances to eat by the labor of their hands,
they seem to fall apart. The worst way society falls
apart is Satan places in the hearts of men that they
deserve to be taken care of. This pride makes it
appropriate for them to lie, to cheat, to steal, and to
murder in order to get gain. This type of activity is
the basis of the secret societies. The Book of Mormon
calls these secret societies Gadianton Robbers and
describes their formation and activities very thoroughly.
Hitler and his associates, and Saddam Hussian and his
associates are really bad end-member examples of this
type of secret society.
What do I mean by when populations get large? I mean rapid population growth has exceeded infrastructure development, there are some that are very well off, and some that are very poor. The disparity in wealth creates the issues. This is shown when there were the gangs of New York 150 years ago, or the Chicago mobsters 75 years ago. And today it is certainly shown in the lifestyle of Saddam Hussein, and he and his colleagues totalitarian means of protecting that lifestyle.
As a geologist, I have built a model in my mind, a model which explains population issues as part of natural processes. In my mind there is a direct comparison between population growth and to the processes involved in filling a sedimentary basin. To fill a basin with sediment, you first have to have a basin. To fill the earth with people, you first have to have the earth. Basins then need a sediment supply. With population, this supply grows exponentially as a function of the number of males and females there are. In a basin you then need to have a mechanism for moving the sediment supply into the basin. These physical mechanisms includes volcanos, earthquakes, erosion, etc. In sequence stratigraphy terms we refer to these processes as accommodation space, sediment supply, tectonic control, and eustatics, or sea level raising and falling. Populations run on food and water, shelter and security, sociality and self-esteem, and most importantly on love.
Let me struggle to use words and the spread-sheet to the left to describe the picture
in my mind. As Earth and the Solar System travel
through the galaxy, about every 20,000 years there
is a significant cooling of the planet. These cycles
are called Milankovich Cycles. When the earth cools,
a lot of ice is built up on the poles, and we have an
ice age. When the ice is built up on the poles it is
taken out of the oceans, and sea level drops up to
200 feet. With sea level dropping this much, the
rivers rapidly cut down to a new base level, and large
canyons are created. This provides rapid sediment
supply into the basin. It also creates erosional
surfaces, which cut across exposed rocks. As time
passes, the atmosphere heats up, the ice caps melt, and
the shoreline moves inland. As the shoreline moves
inland more and more of the earth is covered with water,
and more and more of these ocean areas have sediments
from erosion deposited on them. Then the earth starts
to cool again, and the process repeats.
Populations have been expanding and contacting as long as Adam, the Hebrew word for mankind, have lived on the planet earth. Expansion is like deposition. Contraction is like erosion. War is a largely unnecessary type of contraction. Prosperity feeds a rapid expansion. When the basin is full, there is no accommodation space for new sediment, and there is a resulting erosion. When populations are too large there are similar processes which take place. However, people have the ability to think and reason, and there is no reason to allow erosion. We have the ability to create more accommodation space. And frankly, this ability is unlimited. This was so clearly revealed to Joseph Smith in Doctrine and Covenants 104:17
So I have prepared the spreadsheet to the left, Population.xls, for those of you who are interested in thinking through the issue of population, even if just a little bit. For those not interested in working with a spread-sheet, there is a gif image screen capture of the spread-sheet to the right. The data is for Cedar City, Vidor, Iron County, Utah, Provo, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Utah, Texas, Iraq, the United States, and the World. The first column lists the area of each of the above entities. It was interesting to me I could not find accurate areas for Cedar City and Provo, although I estimated the areas. The second column gives populations. The third column divides these to provide the population per area. This is were the data starts to get interesting. Utah and Iron County are both less populated than the world.
Now this gross data doesn't take into account the amount of the world covered with water. Salt water covers 71% of the earth. So taking 29% of 197 million square miles means there is 140 million square miles of land. This means the pupation in people per square mile worldwide increases from 30 to 43. If half of this land is mountains, ice caps, rivers, swamps, and otherwise uninhabitable, it means there is 70 million miles of land for 6 billion people, or 86 people per square mile. Of the areas I described above which are not currently this densely populated we now add Texas. Note, we do not add Iraq, which has 131 people per square mile, nor do we add the United States, which has 782 people per square mile. We are closer to Cedar City and Vidor, which have 200 and 190 people per square mile respectively. The bottom line is, taken as a whole, there is enough to spare for 2 or maybe 3 times current human populations, if availabLe space were used better.
I find it interesting that in 6 1/2 years of writing Thoughtlets I have not used the word Arcology. Arcology is the architectural theory behind Walden 3-D and the Intelligent Habitat Project (for example see the Barker Project at http://www.walden3d.com/w3d/design/W3D89A). The images below mirror the following the words of the architect who wrote the book:
  |
This definition is why I added the fourth column to
the spread-sheet; i.e. to show population density
if current building was on 2% of current land of
cities, states, countries, and the world. Note that
under this scenario of building on 2% of current land,
the world, and each of the other places where our family
lives are less dense than the current density of
Houston, Dallas, and Austin. So if we are dumb enough
to live in one of these three cities, we are already
living in a more dense city than I am proposing for
the typical Arcology or mini-arcology.
To take the numbers a little farther, I took some personal measurements and extrapolated them out to the world population all having using these same spatial measurements of personal space (5'x5'), office area (9'x9'), bedroom area (25'x32'), house area (3,440 square feet), yard area (12,600 square feet), car area (5'x15'), and garage area (25'x30'). I should have included driveways and such with the space required for cars. The bottom line is that if all 6,000,000,000 people on earth had this same set of space available to them, the only one that reaches 1% of the planet surface is yard space. If this were generalized to include the impact of the population of automobiles (highways and parking lots), there is makes two area issues with regards to current or much larger human populations.
Extending this same logic shows populations create less of an issue if the third dimension is taken into account. Take for example a city built on the side of the mountain from which Fiddler's Canyon is cut by Dad's farm. The city footprint might be 10 miles by 1/4 mile, and the surface area 10 miles by 1/2 mile or 5 square miles. With a population density of 10,000 people per square mile, this creates homes, each with a view of the most beautiful sunsets on planet earth, for half the population of Provo, Utah. Capturing melting snow on the mountains in back of here can provide sufficient water, and using hydroponics, the city could be self sufficient in terms of food. If I'm right about a geothermal source of energy near Enoch, then there is energy self-sufficiency. Climbing the stars on the face of the mountain would keep the population in good physical shape. Elevators provide quick vertical movement, and something like the Segway (which I also can't believe I haven't written about in a previous Thoughtlet - these are the two wheel scooters with gyroscope balance that look like a BC cartoon scooter) provide horizontal movement.
This logic can be extended to tensegrity cities (../0234.html), or 1 mile floating spheres. The area of a floor at the center of the sphere is 0.78 square miles, and there is the potential for 352 15 foot floors. Say 20,000 people lived in one of these floating cities. They do not take up any of the current surface area of the earth. Similar structures can be envisioned as floating cities, taking advantage of the 71% of the earth that is covered by salt water.
The bottom line is `the earth is full, and there is enough and to spare.' Population is not the issue. Selfishness, pride, and sin are the issues. Why are the liberal teachers who want to kill babies worried about population? Is it because they are not willing to step up to the plate and take on the responsibility of a family? I am the first to admit it is hard, and there was once when I felt like such a failure I considered giving up. However, those whom I write these Thoughtlets for make it worthwhile for me. And I'm glad I did not fall apart and take the selfish path in my moment of trial. I hope and trust each of you will make a similar choice to keep on going when life seems overwhelming to you.
It is inappropriate to talk about population, and not mention the first commandment given to Adam and Eve:
Mankind has done a good job of multiplying. However,
we have not done a very good job of replenishing. I
am an avid environmentalist, and recently read a
booklet titled `Winged Messengers, The Decline of
Birds.' Worldwatch Paper 165. It points out:
Sure it can be argued successfully this problem is a
function of human population growth. However, I believe
it can be argued more successfully this problem is a
function of packaging human population growth, and
specifically selfishness, land ownership policies, etc.
Think how nice it would be to live with nature and not
on nature. The automobile, and its attendant webs of
roadways and pollution, has created precarious habitat
islands. Society must identify precarious habitats
and expand them in order to undo our unbridled
multiplying and fulfill the second part of the
commandment, i.e. to replenish the earth. Frankly this
is not going to be done with peasant children in India
or Nigeria or China. It is going to be done by you kids
your friends and your kids. Oh that there were more of
you to take on the challenges ahead!
Will and Ariel Durant spent a lifetime writing 11 thick books describing the known history of civilization. Those of you interested in population would do well to take the time to read and understand these books. In 1968 they published a short summary book they titled `The Lessons of History.' I love one of their comments in Chapter III:
I have already written about the time I was accosted with
`What gives you the right to have six children?'
(../9945.html). The answer a friend gave is still valid:
`His kids are smarter than yours.' The more complete
answer is I'm not selfish, I am doing my best to replenish
the world, the earth is full and there is enough and
to spare if we will only use our heads in how we interact
with the earth, and the bottom line issue is not population."