An Absurd Scenario

"Perhaps the meaning of a doubling time of around 37 years is best brought home by a theoretical exercise. Let's examine what might happen on the absurd assumption that the population continued to double every 37* years into the indefinite future.

If growth continued at that rate for about 900 years, there would be some 60,000,000,000,000,000 people on the face of the earth. Sixty million billion people. This is about 100 persons for each square yard of the Earth's surface, land and sea. A British physicist, J. H. Fremlin, guessed that such a multitude might be housed in 2,000-story building covering our entire planet. The upper 1,000 stories would contain only the apparatus for running this gigantic warren. Ducts, pipes, wires, elevator shafts, etc., would occupy about half of the space in the bottom 1000 stories. This would leave three or four yards of floor space for each person. I will leave to your imagination the physical details of existence in this ant heap, except to point out that all would not be black. Probably each person would be limited in his travel. Perhaps he could take elevators through all 1,000 residential stories but could travel only within a circle of a few hundred yards’ radius on any floor. This would permit, however, each person to choose his friends from among some ten million people!

JULIAN SIMON'S WORLD OF INFINITE BLISS
( 60,000,000,000,000,000 HUMAN SOULS )

Could growth of the human population of the Earth continue beyond that point? We would have reached a “heat limit." People themselves, as well as their activities, convert other forms of energy into heat which must be dissipated. In order to permit this excess heat to radiate directly from the top of the "world building" directly into space, the atmosphere would have been pumped into flasks under the sea well before the limiting population size was reached. The precise limit would depend upon the technology of the day. At a population size of one billion billion people, the temperature of the “world roof”llion billion people, the temperature of the “world roof” would be kept around the melting point of iron to radiate away the human heat generated."

Paul Ehrlich, Ph.D.,1968,
The Population Bomb
Stanford University

*The world human population is now estimated to be doubling every 40 years.