The Doomsday Calculation: The End of the Human Race

By G. A. Mohr

The Doomsday Calculation

The End of the Human Race Our present population is at least twice that sustainable, resulting in excessive consumption, resource depletion, the energy crisis, pollution, global warming, environmental destruction, and evolution of new diseases. We face economic collapse and increasing war and terrorism. Causes of our problems include incompetent leadership in politics and business, corrupt capitalism, globalization, megacities built around cars, junk products and the bullshit and brainwashing used in religion, politics and business. Unless we take drastic action to deal with our critical situation the earth will be so ravaged by environmental destruction, pollution, and climate change that we will be reduced to a subsistence existence or made extinct altogether like the 50% of animal species expected to disappear in the next 200 years.

Industry and reader comment has included: Some provocative and timely issues. A huge topic. A prophetic warning This should be our bible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Sep 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781479719105

G. A. Mohr

G. A. Mohr, PhD, has written circa fifty papers for twenty journals. His two books on the finite element method (FEM)—A Microcomputer Introduction to the Finite Element Method and Finite Elements for Solids, Fluids, and Optimization—established him as a world-leading scientist. His recent books include the following: Curing Cancer & Heart Disease The Pretentious Persuaders The Variant Virus The Doomsday Calculation The War of the Sexes Heart Disease, Cancer and Aging 2045: A Remote Town Survives Global Holocaust The History and Psychology of Human Conflict He also coauthored with Edwin Fear the recent book World Religions: The History, Psychology, Issues and Truth, and with Richard Sinclair and Edwin Fear The Evolving Universe: Relativity, Redshift and Life from Space. The legendary J. H. Argyris, a pioneer of computer methods said of G. A. Mohr, “The greatest scientist in Australia,” “The hope of the future,” and “You are now number one.”

Book preview

The Doomsday

Calculation

THE END OF THE HUMAN RACE

G. A. Mohr, PhD

World hons mult.

Copyright © 2012 by G. A. Mohr, PhD.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Contents

Preface

PART 1 The Threats

Chapter 1    Overpopulation

Chapter 2    Excessive Consumption

Chapter 3    Resource Depletion

Chapter 4    The Energy Crisis

Chapter 5    Pollution

Chapter 6    Global Warming

Chapter 7    Environmental Destruction

Chapter 8    Evolution of New Diseases

Chapter 9    Economic Collapse

Chapter 10    War

Chapter 11    Terrorism

Chapter 12    God and Other Junk

PART 2 The Fundamental Problems

Chapter 13    We are Brainwashed Animals

Chapter 14    Incompetent Leadership

Chapter 15    Corrupt Capitalism

Chapter 16    Globalization

Chapter 17    Miserable Megacities

Chapter 18    Junk Products

Chapter 19    Bullshit and Brainwashing

PART 3 The Solutions

Chapter 20    Real Democracy

Chapter 21    Ethical Management

Chapter 22    The Right Objectives

Chapter 23    Sustainable Practices

PART 4 The Probable Outcome

Chapter 24    Prognostications and Predictions

Chapter 25    The Doomsday Calculation

References

Books by G.A. Mohr

A Microcomputer Introduction

to the Finite Element Method

Finite Elements for Solids, Fluids,

and Optimization

The Pretentious Persuaders,

A Brief History & Science of Mass Persuasion

Curing Cancer & Heart Disease,

Proven Ways to Combat Aging,

Atherosclerosis & Cancer

The Variant Virus

Preface

Scientists warn us every day that human society

cannot continue on its present, unenlightened course,

that our habitual way of doing things will ultimately overpopulate the planet, destroy our natural ecosystems, poison our bodies, and catastrophically alter our weather patterns.

Science is predicting a cycle of massive earthquakes

and increased volcanic activity.

At the same time economic disruptions and limited

government budgets would seem to indicate increased

violence and crime and alienation.

(James Redfield, The Celestine Prophecy (1997))

This story is about something like Armageddon, that Biblical place where the prophets said that the last judgment of we sinners would take place. The quotation given on a preceding page should remind some readers of the kind of things that were forecast in the Christian Bible as happening in this place. Mohammed told much the same story.

If you don’t happen to believe in God, the story might seem a little far-fetched.

In fact, the fate which awaits us is far, far worse. There won’t be angels to save our souls, nor God to recreate an earth ravaged and ruined by blind stupidity, war, and greed, and then resurrect the virtuous to live on it.

We, Homo sapiens sapiens, are on a collision course for extinction.

The trouble is that to all intents and purposes, we are less intelligent than many other animals. Our real intelligence balance tends to be negative because compared to our rate of consumption of finite resources, we have reached plague proportions.

Since the period of the industrial revolution, our population graph has been an almost straight upwards vertical line compared to the few thousand years of recorded history before that time. Indeed, this marked increase in the rate of growth in human population has been compared to a bacterial infection.

Following chapters discuss a number of factors that will combine, some involving positive feedback loops, to bring about our extinction or at least relegation to the population numbers and subsistence existence of our ancient ancestor Homo sapiens a couple of hundred thousand years ago.

Thus, total or almost total extinction within a thousand years, however, is on the cards, and most of those cards have been played and are clear for all to see.

You will see these threatening harbingers of doom in the next dozen chapters. Then a few chapters are given over to discussing just some of the fundamental problems that have brought us to this not-so-pretty-pass. Finally, a few chapters are spent suggesting ways in which we could deal with the fundamental problems of corruption, lies, and deceit that beset human society and have so often led us into wars and other misadventures so that a powerful few can profit and satisfy their ambitions and often insanely inflated egos.

In the last chapter, I take a final opportunity while still on this mortal coil to prognosticate a little and make a few final predictions.

I conclude that:

1.   Over the next hundred years or so our population, already at least double that sustainable with any level of quality of life for all, will double or triple again. Politicians will mumble the usual bullshit that all will be well and this and that problem will be dealt with.

2.   But they won’t be. Firmly run by rampant, greedy, and ruthless capitalists, the world’s precious resources will dry up or be hopelessly contaminated. All the rainforests will go soon. Half the arable land remaining will become desert. Global warming and thence rising oceans will render even more land desert and swamp most major cities.

War will continue, if not increase, as increasingly smaller and fractionated groups fight for scarce resources, if not just space beyond standing room only on the planet. Finally, nuclear, chemical and biological contamination from industry and war will render even more land and precious resources unusable. Most of the world’s wildlife species will become extinct. New viruses, such as Golden Staph, Hep C, VRE, Aids, Ebola, Marburg, and H5N1, however, will eventually spin out of control and further decimate both animal and human populations.

More than likely too, some of the exotic bugs ‘weaponized’ by the massive Russian biological warfare program on top of SS16s and SS17s like Marburg Variant U, much more virulent than the original, will one day find their way into the hands of terrorists. In the meantime, terrorists only need rotting food or a bunch of rats to produce botulinum, plague, tularaemia, and other nasty bacteria. These have been used since Roman times to ‘soften up’ the enemy in warfare, for example, by simply throwing dead people into water supplies.

Sometimes outbreaks of food poisoning in a careless restaurant take quite a high toll. Deliberately orchestrated infection of food and water is bound to take a much higher toll.

The Future is Bleak

There is no doubt at all about it, unless you are purblind, over the next few hundred years it is all downhill for our standard of living, a process that has already commenced in the supposedly more affluent parts of the world where both husbands and wives work longer and longer hours and incarcerate children in long day care centres.

Fathers might do better to visit some kind of brothel, the outcome of which would be children kept like battery hens and, as usual, supposedly educated in a similar fashion by long-winded morons who torture them with endless questions and tests.

One reason they have to work so much longer is in the increasingly vain hope of buying a house as, thanks simply to a global spread of unscrupulous marketing techniques, house prices have become absurd in already bloated megacities where transnational companies like to herd together.

Like vultures, these birds of a feather are looking for cheap labour, and, perchance, your children might look forward to becoming it when they grow up as, thanks to the transnational companies, their standard of living plummets as they are brainwashed almost into a stupor and have to stay in perpetual debt to keep cars more like tanks running and pay for mobile phones, booze, cigarettes, drugs, ridiculous clothes, and so on, just to keep up with their peer group. Similarly their parents, also brainwashed into zombies, must have 4-wheel drive cars and go on regular holidays overseas where they run the risk of catching serious diseases and being bombed, rather than visit somewhere far more pleasant within their own country.

Why do they have to buy overseas cars and trips? The marketing (i.e., brainwashing) of the transnational companies by advertising companies that have employed psychologists for a hundred years. Is this really sensible from the economic point of view globally? No.

So there you have it: population already far too large and increasing per capita rates of consumption, rapid resource depletion, very serious and sometimes permanent pollution, nuclear power and pollution, global warming, defoliation, viral evolution, war, and terrorism.

The Future is Bleak Indeed

In the last chapter, I guess that humans are beyond the point of no return on a path to self-destruction already, or will be in a decade or two.

What can you do about it?

If you live in a so-called democracy (i.e., oligarchy run by permanently powerful and filthy rich capitalist families), it won’t do you much good trying talk to your local member of parliament. If you can get an appointment, that is. Beyond regular booze-ups and other perks, these people have taxpayer-funded holidays and a great deal of fun in the house behaving like clowns.

Both sides of politics are in the pocket of major companies who do little more than put on a free lunch for a bunch of ‘pollies’ to talk them into selling off the government’s few remaining assets.

Will religion help? This keeps all too quiet on population, war, and other important issues. After all, they don’t want to offend the rich and powerful. So these hypocrites keep spouting the same old Bible-bashing bullshit week after week. Therefore, talking to your priest or whatever he calls himself won’t help you either.

You might organize a revolution? Not a bed or roses, as Fidel Castro put it, but a struggle to the death.

You can vote for the Green Party, if you have one. The more parties and points of view the better, rather than votes along party lines in which one or two party leaders, perhaps advised by a powerful and permanent member of a government agency, will see to it that their views hold sway.

But it will help if, just for starters, you think beyond the usual microsecond or two every now and then about some of the issues raised in this book, starting with that of excessive human population. With my assertion that it is excessive in your mind, it won’t take very long for articles in the mass media to resonate with that view.

Then you and your neighbours, your relatives, your children, and your friends should reflect on some of the consequences of our burgeoning population, for example, that we have nearly exhausted reserves of precious oil, from which hundreds of important products are derived, in only about a hundred years.

You should also try to be a more mindful and ‘green’ consumer. You may save a lot of money doing so and end up buying far more sensible, healthier, more logical, and more satisfying products in the long run.

Finally, you should campaign for real democracy as Aristotle and his fellow thinkers of his time saw it, that is, an opportunity for each and every person of age much more than twelve or so to vote on important issues, and this should be possible, especially with today’s information and communication technologies.

Geoff Mohr MMXII

But first the lawless Tyrant, who denies

To know thir God, or message to regard,

Must be compelld by Signes and Judgements dire;

To blood unshed the Rivers must be turnd,

Frogs, Lice and Flies must all his Palace fill

With loath’d intrusion, and fill all the land;

His Cattel must of Rot and Murren die,

Botches and blaines must all his flesh imboss,

And all his people; Thunder mixt with Haile,

Haile mixt with fire must rend th’ Egyptian Skie

And wheel on th’ Earth, devouring where it rouls;

What it devours not, Herb or Fruit, or Graine,

A darksom Cloud of Locusts swarming down

Must eat, and on the ground leave nothing green:

(John Milton, Paradise Lost, bk XII (1607))

I’m looking for signs of intelligent life on the planet and not doing very well.

The author in reply to a Cambridge UG asking him one day in 1975: What are you doing here?

In his book The Pretentious Persuaders (2012) the author points out that our IQ is decreasing and we are in reverse evolution.

In this book, he points out that not only are things getting worse, but we could become extinct as well.

Part 1

The Threats

Chapter 1

Overpopulation

In 1956 Professor W.A. Lewis calculated that if the world population were to double every 25 years (a rate of increase currently observable in some parts of Africa and Asia), it would reach 173,500 thousand million by the year 2330, at which time there would be standing room only, since this is the number of square yards on the land surface of the earth.

(John Carey, The Faber Book of Science (1995),

‘The Menace of Population’)

A Long Journey Coming to a Sad End

We humans have come a long way, but the end of the human race towards extinction is now in sight.

Evolution saw Homo erectus come down out of the trees somewhere in Africa.

As we became a little more ingenious than our chimp cousins, we harnessed fire and Homo sapiens evolved.

As we went from grunts not unlike the lallation of infants, we developed increasingly complex language, the tool that sets us apart from other animals and Homo sapiens sapiens evolved with a uniquely large cerebral cortex to store the semantic memory required for our language.

Weiss and Mann (1978) observe that as one moves northward from the equator, populations average lesser and lesser amounts of melanin pigment in their skin.

In addition, the author feels that as some early humans ventured further north, they were forced by an ice age to live in caves and lost most of the melanin in their skin and turned ‘white’ (Mohr and Mohr, 2006). While in the caves, they discovered the art of cave painting from which came hieroglyphic language and thence writing.

Just 10,000 years ago, the Agricultural Revolution occurred, and villages and then towns developed. Just a couple of hundred years ago, the Industrial Revolution took place and humans multiplied like a bacterial infection. That brings us to Mohr’s law of money.

Mohr’s Law of Money

The fundamental principle of capitalism is the exponential growth law of money ($) with time T,

Here, the rate at which money is made is proportional to the rate of business activity, this in turn being proportional to the amount of money available to fund this activity.

Combining the two constants above as G = the product of the two constants, we have

where G is the growth factor.

This is separable which means that it can be integrated in the form

giving, with the inclusion of the initial values $1 and T1 (the latter often zero), the exponential growth law:

where Ln is the natural logarithm and Exp is the exponential function.

If, for example, the growth rate is 10% per year, that is G = 0.1, then over ten years, we obtain the growth ratio $2/$1 = 2.7 so that we have nearly tripled our money. Not bad at all!

The same law governs population growth (using a symbol such as N for population in place of $). For example, if every 25 years, 0.5 more children are born than people die, we have G = 0.02, and this will give a 22% increase in population every 10 years, or 2.7 times in 50 years.

Noting that old adage about suckers,

There’s one born every minute,

this population growth could also be factored into the calculation of Equation 1.4, further increasing the profits.

That human population has grown so much in the last few hundred years, therefore, has had the main beneficiaries of the industrial revolution, the capitalists, rubbing their hands with glee, opening another magnum of the most expensive champagne, and laughing all the way to the bank.

Their slaves have lived in increasing misery, the more so as growing out-of-control megacities, which form the bases for the offices and factories of multinational companies, house growing numbers of worker slaves living in tenement areas, shanty towns, or on the street.

Human Population Growth

In my view, the world’s (human) population is, as an intuitive guess, about twice the level that can be sustainable with any reasonable standard of living for all. The prodigious effects of unchecked population increase can easily be demonstrated by using Equation 1.4.

Equation 1.4 with G = 0.028 a little more than doubles population in 25 years. Currently, G is more like 0.014, giving doubling in just under 50 years, and this rate will give standing room only in about 735 years from now. In fact, the situation will be worse because

(a)   Global warming will have led by then to massive rises in ocean levels, reducing the amount of land left for us to stand on by perhaps 25% or more.

(b)   Much of the land is required for agricultural, manufacturing, and other purposes.

Thus, unless our population stabilizes, we will be running out of space in a century or two. Then, thanks to deforestation, global warming, and other factors, the amount of arable land remaining will be a fraction of that available today, perhaps half at best.

In addition, fish stocks already severely depleted in the 1960s will be gone, those remaining being far too polluted by heavy metals like mercury to be safely edible.

Cipolla (1974) shows that a graph of human population growth from the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution (10,000 bc) has a gently sloping line until the Industrial Revolution (c. ad 1750) and a population of about 750 million, at which point it ‘takes off’ almost vertically upwards to 2,485 billion in ad 1950. Now it is over six billion, far too many.

He notes that a biologist likened this enormous human population explosion to that of a microbe population in a body suddenly afflicted with an infectious disease!

One reason for this great spurt in human population are advances in medical science such as discovery of bacteria by Pasteur and Koch, the first use of antiseptics by Lister, and Fleming’s discovery of penicillin.

Cipolla points out that what we need now is an improvement in the quality of the human species, not growth in its quantity.

Wagner (1978) predicted that ‘if the world makes no effort to control population there will be 6 billion people by the year 2000. Two billion more people can probably be accommodated on earth, but adding 4 billion more staggers the imagination, for the earth is barely able to support its present population; indeed most people live at a subsistence level far below the embarrassing affluence of Western Europe and North America.’

Had the richer nations not indulged in the insanity of the arms race of the Cold War after World War 2, the massive amounts of money wasted on stockpiling weapons of mass destruction WMDs could have been spent on educating and improving the quality of life for the starving millions in the poorest parts of the world.

That, in turn, would have done a great deal to slow the alarming population growth. Why? Because if you fill a house with, for example, a TV and a PC for each member of a family of four [if we want zero population growth (ZPG)], there tends to be sufficient activity going on without the need to add further children or other distractions.

Now, however, our population must be drastically reduced as soon as possible because of an accumulation of such problems as resource depletion, pollution, food and energy shortages, deforestation, global warming, loss of arable land to deserts, and many more.

The Early Prophets

The prophets of doom have been around for much of recorded history and do their worst in the book of Revelations in the Christian Bible, as noted in the Preface to this book.

Around the critical time of the industrial revolution, there were others such as Thomas Malthus (Wagner, 1978) and David Ricardo (1817), English economists, who felt that the growth of human population would eventually exceed the food supply unless slowed by war and disease.

Their work influenced the thinking of Charles Darwin on the delicate balance between living things and their environment and led to the development of his celebrated theory of natural selection in which he held that only those species most fit for and able to adapt to their environment tended to survive and pass on the genetic makeup that had enabled them to survive to their offspring.

Interest in Malthusian scenarios of insufficient resources to sustain our