The size of the human population

There was a lot of talk this week about Eric Pianka, who suggested that the planet would be better off if there were less people alive to enjoy it. This article is typical:

FBI Interested in Texas “Doomsday” Ecologist who said Ebola the Solution to Human Overpopulation

A quick summary of Pianka’s statements from the article:

All of which is why the FBI is interested in talking to Texas ecologist and herpetologist, Dr. Eric R. Pianka, who suggested at a meeting of the Texas Academy of Sciences that an airborne version of Ebola that would wipe out 90% of the human population was the solution to the human “overpopulation problem.” ... On the day he was named by the Academy as 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist, Pianka declared that AIDS was not killing off the surplus human population fast enough. What is needed, he said, is Ebola to kill 5.8 billion of the world’s 6 billion plus humans. The speech received a prolonged standing ovation at the Academy’s annual meeting at Lamar University in Beaumont.

The problem, of course, is that most of us have an aversion to dying. And we especially don’t like someone else making plans to kill us. 

I wonder if this problem won’t solve itself, without having to resort to killing 5.8 billion people. The way that it would solve itself is by people happily and willingly deciding to discard their bodies and permanently live in virtual worlds instead of the real one.

I am not sure why, but the book entitled The Day You Discard Your Body is starting to get more and more traffic recently, and it is generating some really interesting questions in email. The biggest question, obviously, is “when will the technology catch up with the idea so that people can actually do it?” But there are lots of others, like “how will people have children?” and “Will NASA ever send real astronauts to Mars, or will they actually send body-free astronauts as you suggest?”

Here is the TOC for the book:

• Chapter 1 - Is our science fiction right?
  
• Chapter 2 - Your fragile body
  
• Chapter 3 - The power of beauty
  
• Chapter 4 - Other traps that your body creates
  
• Chapter 5 - Saving Christopher Reeve, and you
  
• Chapter 6 - The pull of video games
  
• Chapter 7 - The problem with video games
  
• Chapter 8 - Understanding Vertebrane
  
• Chapter 9 - Experiencing the in-game world
  
• Chapter 10 - A fateful call from Clarissa
  
• Chapter 11 - The proliferation of game worlds
  
• Chapter 12 - The lure of porn
  
• Chapter 13 - Meanwhile, back at the ranch…
  
• Chapter 14 - The day you discard your body
  
• Chapter 15 - Who will be first?

Speaking of the Mars mission, this article has an interesting take on the amount of money spent in Iraq on the war, pointing out other things we could have done with the money that has been spent. One of the ideas is two manned missions each to the moon and Mars, at a cost of $240 billion. Most of that, obviously, would be spent on the two Mars missions. It would be interesting to calculate the cost reduction if we were to send body-free astronauts.