10 Sextillion! It May Be a Little Too Much Sex to Enjoy

It is a trivial difference, to be sure, but I rendered 10 to the 22nd power the other day as one sextillion (the number of people that will inhabit the Earth in 3400 if present population trends continue).

This figure of 10 to the 22nd power was supplied by Bud Zuckerman, a professor of astronomy at UCLA, and rendered as one sextillion by my son Curt, a very reliable mathematician.

But George H. Matter writes that the correct number is 10 sextillion, not one. As I say, the difference seems trivial to me, since I am unable to conceive of any number larger than a billion (and that strains me).

I am writing this mainly to exonerate my son, who insists he told me it would be 10 sextillion, not one. It shows that I am not to be trusted with numbers, even when they’re handed to me on a platter.

I suspect, however, that even one sextillion people is rather more than one would care to share the planet with. Matter himself calculates that, given the present population of 5,330,000,000, and a growth rate of 2% a year, the total in 3400 would be 7.13 sextillion, which he describes as “close enough to the 10 sextillion that Zuckerman stated.”

You will see how absurd the whole thing is when you realize that an error of 2.87 sextillion is “close enough.”

If there is any point at all in trying to get this straight it is to suggest that we must do something about our increasing population or one of these days there will be standing room only, and human beings will be the only animal life left on Earth.

I have been inundated with warnings of population doomsday ever since I summarized the theory of economist Julian Simon that we need not worry about increasing population, since technology will keep apace of it, and life will be comfortable.

Shouting doomsday is my natural disposition, so I want to correct any misapprehension among my readers that I do not dread the population boom. As far as I’m concerned, doomsday is already here, and we’re not even up to six billion yet.

My neighbor, Louis Mraz, delivers an essay written 30 years ago by the science writer Isaac Asimov, in which he calculates that, if unchecked, the population in 3500 would be so great that man would be the only animal left on Earth and that each human being would have only 2 1/2 square feet to stand on, including Greenland, Antarctica, the Amazon Valley and the Sahara Desert. Long before that, he said, mankind will have faced an intolerable crisis, no matter what science does.

“In our overpopulated world,” he said, “we can no longer behave as though woman’s only function in life is to be a baby-producing machine. . . . Since sex cannot be suppressed, it must be divorced from conception. Birth control must become the norm and sex must become a social and interpersonal act rather than a child-centered act.”

However, not every view is gloomy. Weston I. Van Buren refers to my recent column noting that five southern counties (Los Angeles, Ventura, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino) comprise 34,000 square miles, and he calculates that there would be enough room in those counties for each of the Earth’s six billion people (soon to be) to have 17 1/2 square yards to himself.

That isn’t exactly standing room only, but somehow I don’t think it’s enough space for me. I like elbow room.

Paul MacCready, the Caltech scientist-inventor who enchanted the world by building a dinosaur (the pterodactyl) that actually flew, phones to say that in a sense Simon may be right, that science and technology may permit a population of 100 billion; but he says he fears that kind of thinking and the kind of life it might produce.

Cy A. Adler, author of “Ecological Fantasies,” sends an essay in which he holds that “man’s pollution of air and water is still puny compared to the rumblings of mother nature.”

He points out that the Santa Barbara oil spill killed only about 200 birds, but that in the early 1970s the mighty Humboldt current veered farther westward than usual off the coast of South America, an erratic behavior that cost the lives of 20 million to 30 million sea birds.

He concludes, however, that “a balance between growth and decay, caution and invention, man and nature, is the prerequisite for sustaining a tolerable way of life.”

The key, I suspect, is the general recognition that the purpose of sex is enjoyment, not children.

If every parent would follow my example and have only two children, the world would undoubtedly be a better place to live 1,000 years from now.

We have to put the brakes on somehow.