Re: Wertheim on extropians

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Sep 16 1999 - 21:19:51 MDT


Damien Broderick wrote:
>
> More tricky ... is her claim that if we
> double the human life span it will double the peak size of the global
> population. This strikes me as an obvious non sequitur, but I'd like some
> clever mathematics to prove it.

It's not a matter of math. If population is determined by reproduction,
it keeps expanding and expanding with no end in sight. If population is
determined by carrying capacity, it stops at the same number of
long-lived humans as short-lived ones. You're quite right, it doesn't sequit.

-- 
           sentience@pobox.com          Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
        http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS           Typing in Dvorak          Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians   Heading for Singularity   There Is A Better Way


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