11 /26/2005
Notes and thoughts from Stephen Hawking’s The Universe in a Nutshell, chapter 6, Star Trek or Not.

The world’s population plotted through time is a measure of our technological ability to preserve life. During recorded history, this measure has only increased. Of course, there are certain exceptions: the Black death etc. within the last 200 years, population growth has become exponential. Currently, the world population doubles every 40 years. Other measures of technological growth include power consumption and the number of scientific articles published. All three of these measures cannot continue to grow at the same rate that they are now. So what are the possibilities?


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