Of all things that have surprised me recently — and a lot of them have — the one that almost shocked me was my first reaction to Paul Ehrlich’s death.
For those who’ve been asleep for the last fifty years plus, Paul Ehrlich was the man who hated humanity and was never right. Ever. He wrote the Population Bomb, a book that pushed Malthusian ideas to the criminal degree and was almost single handedly responsible for things like forced abortions and sneaky sterelizations in Africa.
He convinced people — and perhaps himself — that human population was going to continue exploding until it overrun Earth resources. I remember being scared spitless while reading him in the seventies, about how we were going to run out of potable water and food in less than a decade.
He painted a vivid, compelling picture of a world where you’d have to ask your neighbor to breathe out so you could breathe in. And being a kid, I had no way of knowing that some of those predictions were already outdated, and others were outright bloody impossible.
Anyway, if human population crashes to the point that civilization falls in the next 100 years, it will be Paul Ehrlich who is the most responsible for it. (Not the sole responsible, mind. Governments that pushed all women into the work force in the name of maximizing their tax revenue and corporations that encouraged same in the name of lowering salaries (before they found third worlders to lower it even more are there on hte same pillory.)
And yet I felt — immediately — a pang of sympathy for the man, and said a prayer that he might have found mercy on the other side.
This surprised me, and I had to think through it. The answer, of course, is that I felt quite a bit of fellow-feeling with him.
No, no, I never thought that the human population is increasing exponentially. Nor do I think we should control human reproduction. Nor should we be putting sterilizing agents in the water. And if I’d gone to India, I might have been appalled at the crowding and some people’s living conditions, (supposedly his trigger for the Population Bomb) but I’d have realized a lot of it was cultural and also that the countryside would be far emptier.
However, Paul Ehrlich’s real talent was …. persuasive writing. Something for which I have some little talent of my own. And I know the pitfalls. And could see it getting out of control.
Every talent has its own danger. Like, if you have a talent for balance, you might decide that tight rope walking is your metier, and might eventually meet your demise that way. If you’re really good at sales, but you’re an artist… well…. I envy you to the point of (almost) hating your guts. But more importantly, there’s a danger you’ll get really involved in the sales and forget to produce a worthy product.
But in my case, if you have a talent for creating plausible story lines, compelling motives, and to write persuasively, it’s quite possible you’ll find yourself buying into your own stories. Particularly since, inevitably, they are targeted at your strongest interests and most profound fears.
So a man who got utterly panicked over the crowding and living conditions on the streets of Indian cities, and who was naive enough not to realize that the countryside is not that crowded, could conjure an elaborate pseudo-scientific nightmare vision that convinced various governments to limit their own populations, sometimes by draconian means.
The point is, he probably believed it himself. Even the NYT who bought into it lock stock and barrel, because they hate humans, reported that Ehrlich was “premature” in his predictions and not wrong, wrong, wrong, so far steeped in wrongitude to the point of no come back. (This is because they too also hate humans and want us to go extinct.)
So? So, be aware of your talents, and their pitfalls. I continuously test my own perceptions and theories against the real world, so that I don’t con myself (much less others) into something stupid. I’ve learned — through hard experience — the feel of when I’m diving into my fantasy. There’s this “slippery/excitable” feeling. And I stop and examine things.
I have no idea what your talents are. I know someone who reads here occasionally has the same talents I do, which means she’s really good at talking herself into crazy stuff.
This type of talent, if you’re in a good situation, can convince you you’re invulnerable and leave you wide open to attack. And if you are in a bad situation can amplify “uncomfortable and somewhat depressing” to the level of a frontal attack and an horrendous torture. And it feeds on itself with each level of self drama amplifying things and making the next level worse.
Do not fall for your own stories. Make up stories about whatever you want, but NOT YOUR OWN LIFE. That way lies madness. Particularly because if you’re good enough at it, you’ll take others along for the ride, including everyone in your orbit.
Always, always, always reality test instead of feeding either euphoria or panic.
Use your powers for good. They’re all double-edged. What can take you to success, can also destroy you.
Remember that and stay in control of your abilities. Don’t let them control you.
And more importantly, don’t use them to set the world on fire, lest you get burned.
According To Hoyt 
C4C
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Even Heinlein had a fear of Malthusian predictions, though not to Ehrlich’s level. Many of his works mention overcrowding and food rationing, often as a way to set up his protagonists willingness to emigrate to colonies. So, it was a common fear, though all the predictions seemed to be tied to the end coming by the year 2000. Zeroes scare people.
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Yes. EVERYONE believed Ehrlich. even Heinlein.
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Then there was Neil Smith, who pointed out that the entire world population (at least at the time, a few decades ago) would fit in Rhode Island — though they’d have to stand up. If you move them to Connecticut, they can sit down.
No, the world isn’t all that crowded. That’s really obvious to this immigrant from Holland, a much more densely populated country than the USA, which nevertheless has many large open spaces.
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yep. Same for this immigrant from Portugal.
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I live in Georgia, a state which for decades has been flooded with in-migration. It’s hard for me to visualize dropping populations.
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I understand. But they DO seem to be dropping worldwide.
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Seeing it locally. Just about every school district is contracting. Both districts here, niece in Vancouver WA area school districts is seeing it (she is a teacher). Her job appears to be safe, even though she is going on maternity leave for 6 weeks, summer, and next year. Not enough projection on the numbers of kids. Our district is officially down three grade schools and two middle schools.
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One of the big things – when I was still on the “but the modern world is so built up and crowded” thought train – that shook me out of it was, “What would happen if an EMP hit while I was on the road this evening?”
I live in the ultra-crowded, built-up East Coast. I was 20 minutes from home, on a bridge. I did a quick look around.
Hills, empty fields for cattle to graze, a river under the bridge, and me with no certain idea which direction would take me back to what civilization remained if that theoretical EMP hit. Add in four-legged predators, pitch black darkness, and of course possible human predators, and I realized that even if I didn’t kill or injure myself stumbling around in the dark that getting home wouldn’t be near as easy as certain storytellers liked to pretend.
Sure, the East Coast is built up. You can still die by the side of the road and no one will notice even if the vultures find you. We’re not so cramped and crowded here that you can’t get lost and never be seen or found – alive or dead.
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Should have said “no certain idea which direction would take me safely back to what civilization remained.” Oops.
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At least most of the East Coast it is not hours before someone comes along to rescue stranded motorists; baring EMP or natural disaster. West Coast, pretty much most states west of Mississippi, this is not true. Even in these cell days, can’t even call for help. We came on a 😒hit-and-run black bear on the road in Yellowstone (did not witness). But we did stop, put on blinkers, to wait for the next vehicle … An hour later. They went on to report it. We sat there another 90 minutes before a ranger showed up. The ranger had started as soon as word got passed through. Enough vehicles had been informed and wave through that the ranger had gotten multiple reports off and on through the radio (radio is hit-and-miss too) before arriving. Now that satellite emergency access is available through cell phones, being without communication is getting smaller and smaller. But not nonexistent.
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I think it was Mary who pointed out that East Coast towns tend to be a stagecoach day apart, and that villages tend to be at the break times for stagecoaches. (Or wagons, or whatever it was.)
So if you’re on a main road, you can probably get to civilization in a few hours’ walk either way, and that’s pretty easy compared to being anywhere further West.
The main thing is to avoid falling into ponds, lakes, canals, rivers, etc.
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Heinlein may have believed in Ehrlich’s work, but RAH’s concerns about overpopulation long preceded The Population Bomb (circa 1968). Case in point is Farmer in the Sky, published in 1950. [Muses about Heinlein’s time travel stories, and wonders how he might have acquired a machine.]
Farmer wasn’t the first Heinlein I’d read, but it had a strong impact on me.
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But even in Farmer’s in the Sky, there are signs that productive land has been removed from production. There is mention early, before the caloric rationing tracking, of flying over the “restored Great Plains with restored ecological systems, including huge herds of Buffalo, Elk, Pronghorn, and Grizzlies, to the prairies”.
Would have to check on when first published, but may have been with the Great Dust Bowl still in the rearview mirror horizon.
There is a reason why US is the breadbasket of the world. It isn’t just the fertile land east of the Mississippi. May be acres to the cow, or fewer bushels per acre, but still better than most of the world. Plus, US farmers do not exhaust the land.
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In the 1923 (25? I don’t have my notes on hand) Yearbook of Agriculture from the D of Ag, there are long selections about the need to depopulate those lands (the Great Plains) that shouldn’t be farmed and putting people in wetter locales where they won’t starve.
The guy who wrote that got a job with FDR in 1932. Cue the Resettlement Administration and the plans to strip the West of most population “for their own comfort” and return it to grass and perhaps ranching. The National Grasslands in NM, TX, and CO are a legacy of that effort.
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And it didn’t help that for a while at least he believed that a world government was inevitable.
Such a government would at some point, if not at it’s inception, devolve into a collectivist world view where people are widgets and everything can be solved with the right numbers in the spreadsheets and the proper programming of the computers.
Of course such a world would be so mis-managed as to generate resource shortages such that they can’t support the population, no matter how large it actually is.
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To be fair. World government makes sense when the world is a small colony on a world, moon, asteroid, or even space station habitats.
I took more the approach of Andre Norton in Time Trader’s series. Each country, or country coalitions (voluntarily or not, ex: USSR and Mongol), having gotten access to spaceship plans, propulsion, and target planets, each sent their own colony ships.
Controlling said space colonies makes about as much sense as it did for England, French, or Spanish, controlling the colonies of the new world west of the Atlantic. How’d that work out for them long term?
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That’s only a stopgap until they figure out how to program the people. ☹️
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Early Heinlein, early Poul Anderson; even H. Beam Piper had a rule, “one world one government” at least in his Federation timeline… after a huge but civilization-survivable nuclear war. (For how and why it started, see “The Answer” — likely not what yoiu’d think.)
Of course then the ideas were “in the air” or even in the water; almost ubiquitous, almost invisible. One World Rule to combat bomb-o-phobia (though who would a world government use its bombs on? For obvious answer see Swalwell, Eric). “Logical” and “efficient” rule by or with the assistance of Enlightened Machine Intelligences, or even just centralized computer banks running programs. Plus, and as already spotlighted, that “efficient” use of “resources” to combat “looming” shortages and famines and whatnot, see everyone from Malthus on to the 1970s “Club of Rome.”
(Robert Zubrin makes the point that resources are created by an ability to use the commodity or substances involved. Uranium in 1900, heavy water today — not energy resources. Likewise, with maybe a few exceptions, crude oil and natural gas before the 1800s. Also for materials.)
Jerry Pournelle’s “CoDominium” was based on an essentially Faustian bargain against a nuclear war between Russia and the U.S. — if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em and rule the world (which means tightly controlling research to avoid upsetting surprises; the system still failed catastrophically). His setting also features a “Bureau of Relocation” mass-shipping Earthlings to the stars to relieve “population pressure” — yet the same guy did that magnificent “Step Farther Out” essay smashing the doomeristic “Limits to Growth” stuff being peddled by the “Club of Rome.”
Perhaps some of this was more market or social awareness than pure unexamined groupthink. Though I have every reason to believe much or most of it was indeed the second.
Easy for us to see in hindisght; much harder to see clearly in real time… but see the OP on that.
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A lot of it, trust me, was what the market would take. I always wanted to write “the humans are the old ones of the stars” and gonzo science fiction, but no editor would take it by the early two thousands.
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Yes; and the nature of the thing is to hide itself. Jerry Pournelle is a clear exception because of his non-fiction, Poul Anderson used to at least sorta-believe The Collective Koolaid once upon a very young time because he’s basically said as much, not sure about H. Beam Piper because he didn’t seem to leave behind enough of that sort of “outside the spotlight” material.
It’s actually a little dizzying and daunting, to think that generations or centuries later, people (or even historians) might be sure someone was All In On That when in fact the real person was just trying to get along with/in a mania-befuddled world. Social gaslighting that endures long after the gaslighters are dust… yack!
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LOL! Especially programmers. “What do you mean I can’t divide by zero? What is this Y2K thing anyway?”
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Y2K: something my youngest sister really enjoyed, because it gave her several years of very lucrative consulting jobs updating COBOL programs. :-)
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Yep. One more of those mistakes I made in my self-education; I never learned COBOL. FORTRAN wasn’t all that useful (although slightly more so than Pascal…).
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Never did COBOL, but did FORTRAN for 12 years before moving on to Ada, C, C++, C#, Java, Visual Basic, Python, etc. Ah, the life of a programmer.
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High school programming (circa 1970), most of our stuff was in NCR’s assembler (NEAT/3), but the last program was in COBOL. Ran out of time before I could get a working program, and decided that COBOL wasn’t anything I wanted to use.
Used FORTRAN (both F/4 in CS 101 and F/2 in an EE class because the relevant computer time was free), played with and used a bit of Pascal, generally preferred C and Perl.
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COBOL is why “spaghetti code” was coined. COBOL has no concept of multi-line embedded IF/WHILE/UNTIL blocks. Must be a procedure called to have multi lines work. No begin/end (Basic, Pascal/Delphi), no {} (C/C++, etc.). Not only that, but ending lines weren’t easy to see semicolon, but a period.
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IMO Spaghetti Code was caused by idiot COBOL programmers not by the COBOL Programming Language.
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Also see, “Those whom the Gods would destroy, They first teach BASIC.” (Convention button from the circa-1980s.)
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Won’t disagree. But it takes real discipline to prevent doing it. It is almost impossible to unsnarl.
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Well, when writing from scratch, I found it easy to avoid.
But I agree about the unsnarling it.
Especially when the boss said “I want that program working NOW, not after you rewrote it.” 😉
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And that work began around 1990 … my employer at the time had that project running for years in advance: anytime a file was touched, the y2k update was made. By the time the date rolled around, it was not a problem. What kind of engineer or programmer would fail to see that one coming? Grrrr at the exploitation industry.
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I was one of those who didn’t see it coming. I figured it was a COBOL thing. All our code was FORTRAN on UNIX. Then in ’97 an admiral involved in the Trident Warrior exercise decided to set the calendar ahead. The UNIX systems wouldn’t boot. Whoops! Y2K was an unknown success story. Most people only thought, “Nothing happened. What was the big deal?” But that was only because a bunch of folks spent 4 years fixing stuff. If you prevent the disaster, you get no credit.
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Date format problem. Could be any language, any OS. Default was yymmdd. Could force it to yyyymmdd. But not without converting records from first storage format to second. RPG, or any variable field size field file storage, with no delimiter, could have the same problem.
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My first task in 1990 with the new employer was Y2K, COBOL. Ten year growth model and logging plan was overdue. You’d have thought this would have hit from the beginning. But the < ’99 established areas had been carved out and ignored. That is < 1899. Solution was multi, until data got move out of COBOL and into SQL, where dates wouldn’t matter under Y2K. Not that I got to see or participate in the data transfer (dang sale).
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How about the developers that built a Y2K software tracking for all the different systems in a company I worked for, in late 1998, that used 6 digit dates because “that’s what you do for dates”.
I argued that they should at least be fired and never allowed to touch a computer ever again for such gross malpractice since I was overruled on hanging them from the flag pole out front as an example. Didn’t happen.
The number of short sighted coding I’ve run across in my years of developing has been astonishing, to the point where when I run across something that wasn’t just a short cut is a wonder.
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The problem wasn’t the programmers (computer professionals) but was Upper Management refusing to listen to the computer professionals.
I wasn’t the only programmer in the 1980s who saw the problem.
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Zeroes worried Jimmy Thach, but that just drove him to devise tactics to minimize their strengths and maximize the Wildcat’s strengths.
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And zeroes did not worry Gen. MacArthur at all, not even one little bit, which is why his entire scrimped together from meager stateside production air component of P-40 fighters and state of the art B-17 bombers was “surprised” and destroyed on the ground by Japanese zeroes and level bombers flying over from Taiwan NINE HOURS after he had been notified of the Japanese air raid on Pearl Harbor.
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How did he manage to avoid a court martial? I guess the GO pool was pretty thin at the beginning of the war.
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Yeah.
They relieved both the Army General and Navy Admiral in Hawaii for being in charge during the Pearl Harbor attack, which, no matter what else one assumes about the pre-war leadup intelligence, was in fact an actual surprise, but the guy with NINE HOURS WARNING was not relieved, either right away after the destruction on the ground of his entire air force or even later after he lost the Philippines and his entire command in a truly incompetent defensive campaign, at the end of which he had to be smuggled out at night in a PT boat before he became the most senior U.S. general officer captured in the entire war.
The excuse at the time was MacArthur was too famous back home, and after a string of defeats home front morale would be hit too hard were he cashiered.
I have strong opinions about this choice.
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Bob: We wrote our latest software using ones and zeroes – none of those pansy ‘languages’!
Sally: Wait – you had ones ?
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Ones were a singular innovation.
On a related note, at the Army course from which I recently retired, my coworkers would joke about my age. The more generous would ask me what it was like to work with Benjamin Tallmadge. Others would ask about writing reports on clay tablets. I rolled with it.
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I was fortunate to grow up in a small town when all of this stuff was being pushed. Never believed that there would be apartments bored into the side of the Grand Canyon (one of RAH’s more outlandish notions).
Miles and miles of dirt, cactus, and prickly bushes in all directions from me. (Ninety miles to Tucson, the nearest “city” – which at the time was barely a quarter of a million. It has approximately doubled since then – in fifty years, far more than a generation. That is with massive in-migration, and not all that much “native” procreation.)
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Just like nobody would build on a beach in an earth quake/tsunami zone but California exists as does Japan, damn realtors. Face it if you let them the millionaire billionaires would build apartments in the walls of the grand canyon just for the view. Of course, they would all be environmentalists and decry the treatment of animals natural resources as they ate their caviar, hypocrite much. Sorry allergies going mad today, the sarcasm just flows as does my nose.
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Someday there may indeed be apartments and homes and stores bored into the sides of a yet grander canyon, Valles Marineris on Mars. For radiation shielding, temperature control (typical night on Mars’ equator is like Antarctica in winter), assorted other reasons.
Not the same thing at all, certainly not “population pressure” — though that might have been the excuse used in Heinlein’s world, to create such “lovely view” and likely ultra-pricey exotica.
(Not even sure if there are many “canyon walls” anywhere in the Mariner Valleys to bore into, that way; there’s not a whole lot of close-up pictures or data just lying around…)
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Seems we have a lot of software folks here. When people at work liked my graybeard stories, they told me I should write them down, so I did: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C3N2N14N. Feel free to peruse.
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It goes back to that Copybook Heading: Fire is a useful servant, but a fearful master.
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I try to make my stories about people, real people, and be true to them. People are nuanced. Propaganda is not. People with a zeal to save the world are the most dangerous people. Just tell the truth as fearlessly as possible. Yes, the stories you pick with show your preferences, but don’t manipulate your characters.
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Don’t manipulate your characters, just the world around them.
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There’s a reason i try to set my stories a loooong way from the real world.
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I’d like to argue the point, but I ran out of Kleenex…
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If I ask what the kleenex was for am I going to regret it? :)
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I tihnk the allergies he mentioned.
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Ehrlich wrote persuasively, Sarah, but like you and others among us, he knew when he was writing speculative fiction. Had he truly believed his premise he’d never have lasted ~94 years. Ehrlich opened the door to today’s Culture of Death, from China’s one-child policy and Denmark’s stealth sterilizations in Greenland, to the abortion industry and Canada’s MAID “no-waiting” assisted suicide policy. He never authored any sort of retraction, though he had to know at least some of his work was proven wrong even if he didn’t fabricate it from whole cloth. He has much to answer for and I don’t think it will be pleasant.
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https://x.com/UAPWatchers/status/2034271197521661962?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
a) item: ufo stuffs would legitimately be clickbait, and may or may not be something Trump feels he promised to deliver on
b) criminal aliens. I just feel that ICE and deporting is probably not going away from Trump’s agenda, simply because of foreign policy successes.
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You do realize that UFOs and criminal aliens in the same comment made my head spin, right?
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I did not intend it that way, and I think head colds make stuff confusing even if otherwise simple.
My explanation can still be unclear.
The feds are apparently putting up a new website, aliens dot gov.
I have two explanations. Neither is outside of Trump’s character, but I feel that one is more consistent with his established policy.
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I thought it best to get over here quickly and light a metaphorical candle for Paul.
If I wait too long there won’t be any resources to remember him by.
Never forget: Ten years to peak oil! ALWAYS TEN YEARS!
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Oh, I’m so glad to see you. I’ve missed you.
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(mafia boss): the guys from out of town are back for their cut. You don’t want to disappoint them, do you?
(nervous thug): no…no, I don’t. Sir.
(mb): send in Luigi. He’s got the goods.
(Luigi): what, already? (sighs). OK, its in the warehouse. Ten percent, just like we promised. With a little extra thrown in for sweetener.
(mb): yeah. I still remember Hackensack. (shudders)
(Luigi): (stares into distance) yeah.
[they enter warehouse]
(Luigi): here it is, boss. Five thousand cases.
(mb): Hubba Bubble…Double Bubble…where’d you find Big League Chew? I thought it was discontinued.
(Luigi): I made him an offer..
(mb): good idea.
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Hating humans and wanting them to go extinct is Satanic.
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