Infinite growth

Since Edwin Hubble showed that the expansion of the universe in 1929, although in fact it was Georges Lemaître in 1927 who first discovered, the dream of unlimited growth was a reality. The twentieth century became the space age, humans will be covering interplanetary distances, we will travel to the stars and we colonize the universe as the times of the great discoveries of the modern age, it will become the human golden future. In the 60s of the last century we had certainly that we will be exploring Mars and the existence of human colonies in Moon or orbit around earth at the end of the century.

But we arrived at 2012 and there is only a space station orbiting the earth with a population of three astronauts. The space that we have it’s too far for humans. We dream in Martian exploration but we don’t dare go to the moon that is a challenge three or four degree of magnitude less difficult than a trip to Mars. As ever our perceptions have betrayed us and what we assumed them Moon trip seemed to travel of Columbus to America, however the current space travel are closer to travel across the Atlantic on a tree and paddling with hands.
It might seem a chimera the issue of spatial expansion, especially in view of current perspective of someone who lives his life and believes that spending on space is not available when humanity has major problems. And this point is where we are wrong. In a world growing once we pass a border jumping the next, if the Earth we have covered all borders the following is the universe.
Humanity only knows to do one thing: grow. At the end of the Middle Age, between the total occupation of the territory and the entrance to the Little Ice Age, Europe was saved to the disaster thanks territorial expansion, but the 30s it was not possible although there was who have tried and its consequence was the Second World War. The people grow endlessly until they exhaust their land, then they begin to expand to the neighbor’s house pacific or militarily way. Invasions or migrations are a solution to the problem, the first is planned and set up by the people who govern, the latter is spontaneous the result of not planning and subsequent collapse.
Growth is the ecological mechanism for excellence of living beings. The number gives strongly to challenges, it easily restores losses when there are and especially it gives more statistical variability, that is a larger number of individuals gives diversity among them and flexibility the species in front of difficulties (one of the main arguments against uniformity). The mechanism has only one trouble: the planet Earth has approximately about 510 million km2 and it has not changed much in the last 4,500 million years, meaning the land is finite and does not grow. Crises are offsetting the fact that space is fixed. Species grow until they reach a balance between predators, competitors and available resources, reaching a steady state. However conditions evolve over time and some of these species gets an advantage that cannot be offset from the time, it begins to grow without control until it exhausts its ecological niche and then become the crisis. A species that has gained an advantage was human and therefore go from crisis to crisis.
Malthus postulated that resources and wealth grows arithmetic while the population of geometric kind. This postulate was a justified of why human societies the suffered cyclical crises. But the arrival of the industrial age would bet the end this biblical plague. The real premise is that the population grows exponentially growing that is equivalent geometrically kind, but resources do in logarithmic form. The resources that do not grow of linear form because with increasing the capture of resources sources are saturated forcing improving methods. When the function of population crosses the function resources is inevitable crisis, the crisis is perceived after crossed the intersection and inertia makes the difference grows rapidly making all measures are useless and the system disintegrates. But we must add another trap more to the growth of resources, logarithms have an asymptote at infinity instead the resource has a finite asymptote for large it may be. The postulates of Malthus were rejected that it was pre-industrial but it were much more optimistic than the reality.
There isn’t exist the sustainable growth is an oxymoron because we are living in a finite world. A demographer told the story of a colony of bacteria living inside a soda bottle (it was a very well-known black soda) which grew 50% in each generation, when the colony occupies 30% of the bottle a bacterium made calculations and warning that if they stop growing they will occupy sunner the whole bottle, the rest laugh because they need millions of generations that they get to occupy the current space and remains to occupy double the space now occupied, but only remain three generations until the collapse (0.3 - 0.45 - 0.67 - 1). The human population reached 1,000 million inhabitants around the first third of the nineteenth century, the beginning of the Second World War started world has around the 2,000 million people but in only 60 years later we are already 7,000 million and 8,000 million will reach in 2025, in approximately 250 years people will increase 10 times and we still have only one earth and not 10.
Not long ago we celebrated the arrival of human 7,000,000,000 in worldwide economic crisis, with mass migrations and conflicts of all kinds, but it seems as if no one find any relationship. Meanwhile it is supportive of growth is what will get us out of the crisis. Devastates forests and jungles for more cultivation fields, more oil wells, and more minerals for industry; and more, more, more.
But worst of our myopia is that we only see what interests us. Just as we believe in a world greener home but do not want to lost any of our facilities, the rich and powerful do not want to lose their power. The rich and powerful know that stop the growth weakness them in their particular struggle to be more rich and more powerful. So they deny the evidence and not only that. Canada has a growth plan in the northern using melting caused by warming, in the same way as Russia dreams of a stable path to the north and the consequent revaluation of lands of northern Siberia: resorts, natural resources, important port cities ...; companies and countries with rights to Antarctica await impatiently the ice melt for remove the Antarctica moratorium and to exploit the resources under ice; obviously they are ignoring this rising about 150 to 200 m above sea level, it is are only a collateral damage and an opportunity for the owners of the parcels of the new coast.
Besides the demographic problem difficult to solve, we are facing climate change. Climate change would have devastating results in favorable conditions for the economy and humanity, we just think with the Roman Empire and its fall caused by cold witch reduced crop. We are depending on the weather that feeds our food and we can live without oil, but we give more importance to the contribution of the second while the first is interesting only if it can also hold events. Humans continue our futile lives outside the disaster that falls on us, which are knocking on the door but we ignore it like when it rains outside.