All I gotta say is that after yet another sleepless night surrounded by idiot neighbors with constantly barking dogs that no county agency is willing to deal with-----I just want them all to go away and NOT re-populate.
For those with the same advanced case of nerdiness I have, let me recommend (yet another) book: Rules Of The Game by Eigen and Winkler-Oswatich. It’s not new. What it looks at are non-linear systems and how they behave. Here’s a simple example:
There are wolves, rabbits, and cabbage. You start out with, say 100 rabbits, a field of cabbage, and a mating pair of wolves. Wolves eat a few rabbits, so they survive and make a litter of wolf pups. Surviving rabbits, meanwhile, eat a lot of cabbage and make a whole bunch of little rabbits. For the moment, then, more wolves, more rabbits, and a little less cabbage.
But wolves can eat a lot of rabbits, so if wolves start to multiply enough, they’ll eat an increasing fraction of the rabbits, thus lowering their numbers. Now we can get more cabbage.
But now there aren’t enough rabbits to feed the growing number of wolves, so their population starts to decline. Leading to more rabbits and less cabbage.
Rinse and repeat, mutatis mutandis.
Back in the ‘60s, a guy named Jay W. Forrester, then Germeshausen professor of electrical engineering at MIT, realized that even systems as simple as the three-component one I just described can’t be characterized by simple equations. They behave in non-linear ways that defy simple intuitive solutions. If you make systems more complex still, their overall behaviors become literally impossible to describe symbolically. To solve the problem, he devised a way to model system behavior on computers.
They way this works is straightforward: first, figure out whether and, if so, how each piece interacts with each other piece. Then do incremental calculations at successive points in time to find how the system behaves. In the above example, we began with 2 wolves, 100 rabbits, and, say, an acre of cabbage. At the next time point, say, a month later, you still have 2 wolves, one of whom is now pregnant, 95 rabbits, 30 of whom are pregnant, and maybe 99 acres of cabbage. Another month later, 2 wolves, 90 rabbits but 98 acres of cabbage. Another month later, still 2 wolves, but now maybe 200 rabbits, and 93 acres of cabbage. Another month, 4 wolves, 175 rabbits, 89 acres of cabbage. Another month, growing wolves eating even more brings rabbits down to 125, many of whom are pregnant, 80 acres. Next, she-wolf is pregnant again, so are rabbits, now down to 75, cabbage is stable- the field can grow cabbage fast enough to feed 75 rabbits.
The cycles repeat, but not exactly. Too few rabbits, wolves starve. To little cabbage, rabbits starve, and so do wolves, but then cabbage takes off again. Unless all of one thing, wolves/rabbits/cabbage go completely to zero, the system will keep going. And this is for a three-component system. Nothing is that simple in reality.
Forrester then modeled an industry, a city, and finally the world, and wrote successive books about them: Industrial Dynamics, Urban Dynamics, and finally World Dynamics. (Among others.) Software to do these things exists and can be used pretty easily. Lots of variables, though—sometimes hundreds of them. But you get to see how counterintuitive system behavior really is.
What does this have to do with depopulation? Population will come back. Where and when is probably unpredictable at this time. But remember that world population 75 years ago was only about half what it is today. I remember TV announcing 4 billion people. We’re past 8 today. I don’t know why population has started sagging, but it won’t stay sagged very long.
All I gotta say is that after yet another sleepless night surrounded by idiot neighbors with constantly barking dogs that no county agency is willing to deal with-----I just want them all to go away and NOT re-populate.
For those with the same advanced case of nerdiness I have, let me recommend (yet another) book: Rules Of The Game by Eigen and Winkler-Oswatich. It’s not new. What it looks at are non-linear systems and how they behave. Here’s a simple example:
There are wolves, rabbits, and cabbage. You start out with, say 100 rabbits, a field of cabbage, and a mating pair of wolves. Wolves eat a few rabbits, so they survive and make a litter of wolf pups. Surviving rabbits, meanwhile, eat a lot of cabbage and make a whole bunch of little rabbits. For the moment, then, more wolves, more rabbits, and a little less cabbage.
But wolves can eat a lot of rabbits, so if wolves start to multiply enough, they’ll eat an increasing fraction of the rabbits, thus lowering their numbers. Now we can get more cabbage.
But now there aren’t enough rabbits to feed the growing number of wolves, so their population starts to decline. Leading to more rabbits and less cabbage.
Rinse and repeat, mutatis mutandis.
Back in the ‘60s, a guy named Jay W. Forrester, then Germeshausen professor of electrical engineering at MIT, realized that even systems as simple as the three-component one I just described can’t be characterized by simple equations. They behave in non-linear ways that defy simple intuitive solutions. If you make systems more complex still, their overall behaviors become literally impossible to describe symbolically. To solve the problem, he devised a way to model system behavior on computers.
They way this works is straightforward: first, figure out whether and, if so, how each piece interacts with each other piece. Then do incremental calculations at successive points in time to find how the system behaves. In the above example, we began with 2 wolves, 100 rabbits, and, say, an acre of cabbage. At the next time point, say, a month later, you still have 2 wolves, one of whom is now pregnant, 95 rabbits, 30 of whom are pregnant, and maybe 99 acres of cabbage. Another month later, 2 wolves, 90 rabbits but 98 acres of cabbage. Another month later, still 2 wolves, but now maybe 200 rabbits, and 93 acres of cabbage. Another month, 4 wolves, 175 rabbits, 89 acres of cabbage. Another month, growing wolves eating even more brings rabbits down to 125, many of whom are pregnant, 80 acres. Next, she-wolf is pregnant again, so are rabbits, now down to 75, cabbage is stable- the field can grow cabbage fast enough to feed 75 rabbits.
The cycles repeat, but not exactly. Too few rabbits, wolves starve. To little cabbage, rabbits starve, and so do wolves, but then cabbage takes off again. Unless all of one thing, wolves/rabbits/cabbage go completely to zero, the system will keep going. And this is for a three-component system. Nothing is that simple in reality.
Forrester then modeled an industry, a city, and finally the world, and wrote successive books about them: Industrial Dynamics, Urban Dynamics, and finally World Dynamics. (Among others.) Software to do these things exists and can be used pretty easily. Lots of variables, though—sometimes hundreds of them. But you get to see how counterintuitive system behavior really is.
What does this have to do with depopulation? Population will come back. Where and when is probably unpredictable at this time. But remember that world population 75 years ago was only about half what it is today. I remember TV announcing 4 billion people. We’re past 8 today. I don’t know why population has started sagging, but it won’t stay sagged very long.