（外文电子版资料）Benford, Gregory - Humanity as Cancer.pdfVIP

GREGORY BENFORD HUMANITY AS CANCER . . . still I have not seen the fabulous city on the Pacific shore. Perhaps I never will. Theres something in the prospect southwest from Barstow which makes one hesitate. Although recently, driving my own truck, I did succeed in penetrating as far as San Bernardino. But was hurled back by what appeared to be clouds of mustard gas rolling in from the west on a very broad front. Thus failed again. It may be however that Los Angeles will come to me. Will come to all of us, as it must (they say) to all men. Edward Abbey - Desert Solitaire In 1960 the journal Science published a short paper which is still sending slow-motion shock waves through the soothsayers of our time. Titled Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026, its abstract reads in full, At this date human population will approach infinity if it grows as it has grown in the last two millennia. Period. Its authors, Heinz van Foerster, Patricia Mora and Lawrence Amiot, were members of the staff of the department of electrical engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana. They were not population experts, but they noted a simple oddity of mathematics. The rise in human numbers was always studied in doubling times, the measure of how quickly population doubled. But real human numbers dont follow so clean an equation. For a species expanding with no natural limitation aside from ordinary deaths, the rate of increase of population is proportional to the population itself. Mathematically, the population N is described by an equation in which the change in N, dN, over a change in time t, dt, obeys dN/dt = b N with b usually assumed to be a constant. If b is truly constant, then N will rise exponentially. Fair enough. But if people are clever, the proportionality factor b itself will weakly increase as we learn to survive better. This means the rate of increase will rise with the population, so N increases faster than an exponential. In fact, it