Star Trek: Star Charts by Geoffrey Mandell
- Thread starter EJA
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I rank the Chronology before the Star charts, because I use it more.
A meaningless statistic, like so many statistics. What about the land space required to feed them? What about the waste carbon and heat they dump into the environment? Hell, just that waste heat alone, in a population density that great, would render the environment unsustainable. Not to mention the immense amounts of sewage they would dump all around them.
You could also drown everyone on the whole planet in Lake Baikal in Siberia, but that doesn't mean you should. The hypothetical you pose is just as undesirable and just as ridiculous.
Nice for humans, perhaps, assuming near-magical technology to sustain it, but at the expense of the rest of the biosphere. There'd be no large animal species left alive, except maybe in zoos, and very little in the way of wilderness. All those humans would be sustained entirely by an elaborate technological infrastructure. What happens if it breaks down?
And it would be harder than you realize. Again it comes down to the sheer issue of heat, not only from all those billions of bodies but from the advanced technology required to feed them, sustain their material needs, and clean up their wastes. All that heat would have to go somewhere, and a planet's atmosphere and hydrosphere can only absorb so much at a time.
Besides, why this kneejerk assumption that a larger population is desirable or necessary? What's so great about bigger numbers, more crowded planets?
And Sci's right: increases in education and standard of living tend to bring about reductions in birthrate. The assumption of a huge population is simply inconsistent with everything we've been shown about Earth society in ST.
So what? FASA's first TNG sourcebook claimed Betazoids were from Haven and described a small-arms photon grenade as having an antimatter yield bigger than the largest nuclear weapon ever built. FASA got tons of things wrong.
Not at all. There is historical precedent for emigration playing a role in population reduction. There are places in America today whose population is falling as people migrate to other places. Give people enough incentive to migrate to other worlds and they'll do it.
You're assuming it's a one-time thing. That's as wrong as every other thing you've said. It would be a generations-long process. Steady emigration to other worlds combined with a reduction in birth rates on Earth (and presumably the lack of an equal reduction in death rates) would result in a gradual diminution of population size over the course of a century or two.
Speaking as one of the MB sysops: Memory Beta's "sphere of operation" is licensed works, which covers the Star Charts and the few similar products published previously. What you're proposing would be outside of that parameter, and probably wouldn't fly. However, there is some wiggle room (i.e., some authors have mapped some events of their novels on copies of Star Chart pages (thinking of "Buried Age" here) so you're welcome to take a proposal to http://startrek.wikia.com/wiki/Memory_Beta:Ten_Forward and see if there's enough of a consensus to agree to host it. (and just so there is no misunderstanding: I'd probably be among the "no" votes unless you are very specific about how this would be carried out. We try to avoid large image files, and I don't know that you could do this without them.)
Personally, I think that (1) there's no such thing as an "accurate" ST map -- too many sources making things up as they went along; (2) don't even try to correlate real astronomical objects with Star Trek counterparts that may use the same name -- too many sources that don't know enough about astronomy, not to mention the changes in what we know over the past 40 years; and (3) the only way you can get something even close to "accurate" would require a 3-D map, and those are HARD to present via static 2-D images.
You might want to try googling around for some other mapping efforts that may already be in progress.
With the technology shown in Star Trek, the population of Earth could be several times what it is today with everyone in luxury.
In regards to hunger and starvation, no one goes hungry in the world today because there isn't enough food produced in the world.
People go hungry for political reasons. Bad governments mismanaging economies and that kind of thing.
Since the mid 1960s, the worlds population has doubled but world food production has tripled.
The increase in food production is so great that one of the great rising diseases in the developing world is adult onset diabetes largely caused by obesity.
In regards to hunger and starvation, no one goes hungry in the world today because there isn't enough food produced in the world.
People go hungry for political reasons. Bad governments mismanaging economies and that kind of thing.
Since the mid 1960s, the worlds population has doubled but world food production has tripled.
The increase in food production is so great that one of the great rising diseases in the developing world is adult onset diabetes largely caused by obesity.
^^I'm sorry, but you're overlooking a great many inescapable facts of physical law and ecology. Yes, world food production has increased, but at great cost to the ecosystem. Large-scale farming is devastating to the planetary ecology in many ways. You keep approaching the problem from a human-centric perspective that ignores the rest of the species and ecosystems on this planet. You're ignoring the fact that the more humans there are, the more other species have to go extinct forever. Why would you want that?
And even ST's magic technology couldn't overcome the basic physical fact of heat. All work produces heat, regardless of whether it's the work of machines or living metabolisms. And heat can't be destroyed, only moved from one place to another. The Earth can only radiate heat into space too quickly. Too many people and too much technology means too much heat pumped into the atmosphere for it to cope with. It's a matter of fundamental physics.
And you've failed to answer a question I've already asked. Even if it were arguably possible to sustain such a large population, why in the bloody hell would you want to?? Why are you arguing so passionately against a smaller population as though there were something bad about it? Fewer people on the planet means more room to restore the wilderness, to have more parks and forests, to let people spread out and have abundant room to play around in rather than being stacked atop each other in huge cities. Just forget the question of whether it's physically or ecologically feasible: what is so bad about having a smaller population on Earth?
And even ST's magic technology couldn't overcome the basic physical fact of heat. All work produces heat, regardless of whether it's the work of machines or living metabolisms. And heat can't be destroyed, only moved from one place to another. The Earth can only radiate heat into space too quickly. Too many people and too much technology means too much heat pumped into the atmosphere for it to cope with. It's a matter of fundamental physics.
And you've failed to answer a question I've already asked. Even if it were arguably possible to sustain such a large population, why in the bloody hell would you want to?? Why are you arguing so passionately against a smaller population as though there were something bad about it? Fewer people on the planet means more room to restore the wilderness, to have more parks and forests, to let people spread out and have abundant room to play around in rather than being stacked atop each other in huge cities. Just forget the question of whether it's physically or ecologically feasible: what is so bad about having a smaller population on Earth?
But Christopher, didn't you watch the Star Wars prequels? Coruscant is just so friggin' cool, who wouldn't want that for Earth's future?
So, about those Star Charts....
What about other types of life?
Having parts of planet's left more or less untouched by humans would seem to be the rule anyway. Is it really worth it to mow down entire rainforests and level mountain ranges? Unless the population grows insanely large and there's a resistance to the 'verticalization' of urban centres or whatever, or there's some perverse need to change/destroy things, one may as well leave those parts of the planet to run wild.
(Then again, such widespread ecological change/destruction may very well be the ultimate fate of worlds in Star Trek, and their populations just haven't expanded so far as to merit it just yet. I just don't see those people being particularly enlightened.)
With some individual exceptions.
At reasonable population levels, yes. When the population becomes so large that the resources necessary to sustain it are difficult to come by or are damaging to other assets -- assets that people need -- then too many human lives becomes a liability, which is why a voluntary reduction in the population is the more logical option.
There's an old saying in show business: "Less is more." That's true of showbiz, and it's often true of life; that which is rarer is more valuable, and that which is lesser in number can sometimes achieve greater accomplishments. There's a reason that any sane person would rather live in New Zealand than the People's Republic of China.
'Cos it's good for us and for other species that also have a right to exist.
Everything. Removing human beings from nature so completely would be damaging to our mental health. There's a reason that cities go to great lengths to establish and maintain parks and to plant trees next to sidewalks. There's a reason that people put plants in their homes.
We need nature to survive, just mentally, let alone physically -- for all the reasons Christopher cited.
Lower population = Better. Period.
Among many other things, which have been mentioned by folks in this thread, there's the whole issue of the oxygen we need to breathe being provided by that wilderness.
(There was a short story in one of the SNW volumes called "The Last Tree on Ferenginar," and it was a perfectly good story, but I just couldn't accept it on any level because before I got past the title, my first thought was, "How do the Ferengi breathe if they've only got one tree?" and I couldn't make my mind move past that to appreciate the story because I didn't buy the premise.)
Why, of course they import oxygen! That's one of the most lucrative businesses in the entire Alliance. It's not the part where they send comets into the atmosphere to create the constant rain, or even the part where they crack the water to liberate oxygen. Insidiously enough, it's the part where they compact and haul away the CO2 garbage. That's where the big money really lies, and where the Syndicate takes its cut.
Speaking of Ferenginar, I wonder how much they pay the cartographers to have their world misplaced on every map... Ferenginar kept moving around quite a bit in those DS9 onscreen maps (apparently at least once just to give room to that neat AR-558 commlink symbol!).
Timo Saloniemi
Speaking of Ferenginar, I wonder how much they pay the cartographers to have their world misplaced on every map... Ferenginar kept moving around quite a bit in those DS9 onscreen maps (apparently at least once just to give room to that neat AR-558 commlink symbol!).
Timo Saloniemi
Brilliant! And since people are dumb, we could make 'premium' oxygen in cans, which is the same as regular oxygen but with a fancy label... something like "Perri-air"... maybe wear big, round, white hats (to look like oxygen molecules) to market the product... yes, I see this going somewhere...
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
Late to the party as usual but I love the Star Charts. Now if I could only create a 3D holographic one that you can turn on in a room, that would be neat. I'm not a computer genius so I won't be starting on that, but it's the thought that counts.
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