#21 the Club of Rome's book "The Limits of Growth," which prophesied all sorts of doom and gloom
I read this back when I was learning FORTRAN and was enchanting with the awesomeness of computer modeling.
tl;dr: Some guys made a model of Earth and its people, and their resource consumption - food, water, oil, minerals, the whole nine yards. When they ran it, things looked grim. We ran out of *everything* except people. Waaay to many of those. Bottom line: over-population, famine, severe shortages of everything. Pretty scary, but it fit in with the general gloom & doom of the time.
The cool thing about a good model is it lets you play "What If?" and explore various scenarios. In an appendix, the Club of Rome guys did just that. What if we twiddle the parameters? - population control, green energy, limited economies? No dice. Whatever we did, we were boned and there was no way around it. That made me suspicious. I don't think "attractor basin" was a word yet, but it sounded to me like the model was stuck. Think of a marble in a bucket. You can swirl it around, but it can't jump out unless you give it a big kick.
I hate to spoil the ending, but none of the gloom & doom happened. Maybe the model lacked "predictive skill", maybe there were things the model didn't include like Norman Borlaug's Green Revolution or improved energy production. In any case, that was back in the '70s and we ain't dead yet. Like the man said, it's tough to make predictions, especially about the future. |
[Mail] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on Monday that ’the world is gonna end in 12 years’ if laws aren’t passed to address climate change and that it was ’immoral’ for billionaires to exist in the same country where people struggled to make ends meet.