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Choosing the Book over books : Comments
By Nina Johnson, published 12/6/2014If people are hungry for spiritual fulfilment at writers festivals, then they'll end up starving.
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>>Pericles, The problem of population growth is a real problem for the idea that people have been living in Australia for 40,000 years. The problem doesn’t disappear by suggesting that people are also dying.<<
Early civilizations were prone to mass annihilation, due to the fragility of their lifestyles. So we are not talking about any form of steady-state increase, but a fluctuation that includes a reduction to close-to-zero. In some parts of the world, this included a full reduction-to-zero.
>>I’ll try and put this simply. If more babies are born than people die in a year, then there has been a net increase. Imagine an increase of one percent. Such an increase over the years accumulates, a bit like money gaining interest in the bank.<<
That would seem simple enough.
However, let's exercise your model using the CIA World Factbook figures that the world annual birthrate, mortality rate, and growth rate are1.89%, 0.79%, and 1.096% respectively.
Starting with Adam and Eve, and allowing for your conviction that the Flood happened around 2350BC, there would now be a world population of 55 quadrillion people.
So that can't be right, can it.
If instead we reverse engineer the numbers, taking a starting population of 8 people following the Flood, we would arrive at our current population of 7 billion or so with a growth rate of 0.475% - not massively different from your own imaginary number.
Unfortunately, that leaves us with the unpleasant thought that when the Israelites arrived in Canaan around 1456BC, the total world population would be a massive... 548 people. Not a lot, really.
How would you suggest we handle this little problem, Dan S de Merengue?