The Crowded Scene

By Stanford S. Penner

The following excursion into a strange and not-so-pleasant world is fictional. What is not fictional is that a continuing population growth rate of 2 percent per year will rapidly lead to very large numbers of people. When sustained for four hundred years, a growth rate of 2 percent per year will increase the population by a factor of about 2,750. Thus, starting with a world population of about 3 billion not very many years ago, the number of people in the world will grow to 8,250 billion about four hundred years later. At the same time, the population in the United States will increase to 550 billion if it started from 200 million and also increased at the rate of 2 percent per year. Allowing for some minor calamities, such as a small nuclear war, we may not reach the preliminary goal for the world population of 8,250 billions of people until the year 2388. This small extrapolation has been made in our story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781503519978

Stanford S. Penner

Stanford S. Penner is a distinguished professor emeritus of engineering physics at the University of California, San Diego. During World War II, he worked at the Allegany Ballistics Laboratory in Cumberland, Maryland, on rocket developments before returning to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, to complete studies for the PhD in physical chemistry. He then worked briefly for Exxon before joining the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and then the faculty of the California Institute of Technology as an assistant professor of Jet Propulsion before advancement to Associate and then Full Professor of Jet Propulsion. After about 10 years at Caltech, he transferred to the newly founded University of California at San Diego as chairman of the newly founded department of aerospace engineering while collaborating with the distinguished Chinese scientist and engineer H. S. Tsien (who is now celebrated as the developer of Chinese rocketry in China) and also with Th. von Karman who came to America at Caltech as head of aerospace engineering from the University of Aachen in Germany shortly before World War 2. Penner is the author and coauthor of about four hundred research papers in the archival literature of aerospace engineering, of which more than twenty-five are mostly graduate textbooks on radiant heat transfer, rocketry, combustion, and propulsion for advance students in this field of research. He was the 2009 recipient of the National Academy of Engineering Founder’s award (awarded once per year to a singles recipient) and has received numerous awards for his research from various national and international academies and research prizes from US and foreign societies and honorary entities. His book on excessive human population growth is his inevitable conclusion that his subject will grow in importance until it will dominate the core concerns of thinking people everywhere a few hundred years in the future.

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Copyright © 2014 by Stanford S. Penner*.

5912 Avenida Chamnez

La Jolla, CA 92037

* Distinguished Professor Emeritus

of Engineering Physics

University of California, San Diego

9500 Gilman Drive

La Jolla, CA 92093-0411

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.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 12/08/2014

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

I. A DAY IN THE LIFE OF MILAS JONES (FRIDAY)

1. Milas Jones Gets Up

2. Milas Jones Goes to Work

3. A Morning at the Office

4. Lunch at the Office

5. Milas Jones Completes his Day’s Work

6. The Picnic

7. A Quiet Evening

II. HUBERT C. PESSY, CHIEF ENGINEER

1. Introducing the Pessys (Saturday)

2. Breakfast at the Pessys (Saturday)

3. Wise Talk on the Way to the Zoo and Strange Sights in the Zoo (Saturday)

4. An Important Conference (Saturday)

5. Milas Jones Visits Hubert Pessy (Sunday)

6. A Real Baseball Game (Sunday)

7. Hubert C. Pessy at Company Headquarters in Boswash (Wednesday)

III. MILAS JONES AT THE SOUTH POLE

1. Milas Jones Arrives at Amundsen City (Monday)

2. In the Pearce’s Amundsen City Residence

3. Early Evening at the South Pole

4. Milas Jones Returns

IV. THE GRAND CONSPIRACY

1. CCC Meeting at Pessy’s (Monday)

2. Judith Proust Jones, Experimental Animal

3. Limpid Myser Alone in His Laboratory

4. Frederick Neiss Gives a Lecture

5. Bryan Malkmus in High Councils

6. Another CCC Meeting at Pessy’s

V. ACTIVITIES AT THE HIGHEST QUARTERS

1. UN Debate on Fish and Nuclear Bombs

2. The UN Scientific Advisory Council on Apartment Instabilities (Tuesday)

3. Planning on Alderone

4. The UN Council for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals

5. Statistical Studies on F-Virus

6. A Ray of Hope

7. The Demise

PREFACE

The following excursion into a strange and not so pleasant world is fictional. What is not fictional is that a continuing population-growth rate of two percent per year will rapidly lead to very large numbers of people. When sustained for 400 years, a growth rate of two percent per year will increase the population by a factor of about 2,750. Thus, starting with a world population of about 3 billions not very many years ago, the number of people in the world will grow to 8,250 billions about four hundred years later. At the same time, the population in the United States will increase to 550 billions if it started from 200 millions and also increased at the rate of two percent per year. Allowing for some minor calamities such as a small nuclear war, we may not reach the preliminary goal for the world population of 8,250 billions of people until the year 2388. This small extrapolation has been made in our story.

I. A DAY IN THE LIFE OF MILAS JONES (FRIDAY)

1. Milas Jones Gets Up

Milas Jones awoke at 7:15 in the morning when his transistorized, flat color-television set, which was flush-mounted with the walls, turned automatically to the three-minute, early-morning chimes preceding demonstration of limber-exercises, in which all good people participated. At 7:17 AM, the air-filter-recirculating system accelerated its volume throughput to accommodate the increased oxygen requirements and carbon dioxide wastes that are associated with the physiology of a vigorously exercising human.

Milas jumped out of his 75 inches by 36 inches bed, carefully avoiding the wall which was only one foot to the side. Then he pressed the bed button on his master control and watched the air puff out of the mattress and adjoint pillows while the hollow cylindrical aluminum legs folded neatly into each other. Within 60 seconds, his 8 ft by 4 ft room was cleared, except for the tiny remaining volume occupied by the solid components of his bed.

Milas took a deep breath, faced the television screen, and followed the rhythmic exercises put on by the demonstrator.

The prescribed physical activities ended at 7:29 AM. At 7:30 AM, Milas turned the television set off and actuated the bathroom and lavatory compound. A small plastic toilet seat appeared, a panel slid aside from the wall to free a large mirror and allow access to a previously concealed plastic cabinet filled with such necessities as toothpaste, an electric toothbrush, a transistorized shaver, etc. A water faucet with adjustable thermo-regulator and a small wash basin came in view. The water from the wash basin drained into the storage compartment of the toilet flush-cabinet, where it was collected for use as needed.

Milas completed his early-morning necessities with customary efficiency and calm. Then he converted his small home into a breakfast room and used the modern ultrasonic cooker to warm his pre-canned supplies, including bacon, eggs and fresh toast. He opened the shades to allow the grey daylight to filter through the single 3 ft by 5 ft window into his thirty-eighth story, all-purpose living quarters. Considering the room size, 4 ft wide, 8 ft long, 6 ft high, there could be no question that Milas’ standard batchelor apartment was being used with considerable ingenuity to provide maximum comfort for the lone occupant. Except for room height, Milas’ standard batchelor apartment was the prototype of all batchelor apartments. Room height was varied according to the individual needs of roomers—the room height was always equal to the height of the lone occupant plus one inch. There were those who objected to this system, especially short males who claimed that it interfered with their opportunities to entertain tall girlfriends and that the present system of space allocation appeared to be designed to ensure propagation of small people with small mates to produce small offspring, and similarly for large people. That this presumption was false had, however, been abundantly proved by studies performed at the Social Adjustment Bureau: room size did not affect mating behavior in a significant sample of the population.

After breakfast, which Milas consumed quietly without even listening to the early-morning news program, he removed the food remains by appropriate button controls and then converted his quarters into a sitting room. He had followed this procedure for years because it assured him pleasant surroundings on his return from work in the early evening. Milas walked to the window and looked up. A small patch of untainted blue was barely visible between the tops of the one hundred and eighty stories of the mid-town apartment buildings in which his cubicle, number 1,104,732, was located. It was evidently a beautiful day.

Milas took a deep breath, as the air-filter recirculating flow decreased to the minimal sustaining level. At 8:15, Milas Jones, resident in cubicle (c) number 1,104,732 of the King Towers apartments in Prescott, Arizona, depressed the button to open the sliding door and left for work. He was a resident in one of America’s smaller megalo-complexes (actually, it was the eightieth in size with a human population of only twenty-nine million). He lived in a country with a population of 550 billion and in a world supporting 8,250 billion people.

The mean population density in the entire United States was more than seven times that of New York City in 1960!

2. Milas Jones Goes to Work

Milas always marvelled at the insulation against noise and the complete privacy which was provided for him by the corrugated and honeycomb plastic structures that served as sound insulation for the walls. Outside of his room, the endless conveyor belt with its narrow, staggered seats was already well filled by other early-morning risers who, like Jones, were on their way to work. Milas had to wait three minutes before finding an empty seat. People were silent, as usual, either just sitting and resting or else plugged in to the second repetition of the early-morning newscast through individual ear phones that could be found on each seat of the endless conveyor system. Perhaps the silence was the result of the fact that people living in