Abstract
The first thing we should do is to start saying to ourselves and our children: “We live on a planet that is a spaceship with limited supplies.” The human passengers have to live off the supplies of our spaceship has grown too large and too rapidly. There were 800 million people in 1800, 1.8 billion in 1900, and 6.5 billion in 2000. There will be perhaps as many as 12 billion of us in 2100. We humans are big eaters and garbage producers. We are starting to be in serious trouble as result of all the resources we consume. An even larger problem is all the waste that we are producing in the form of greenhouse gases that we cannot easily offload into space.
On a planet of nearly eight billion people with billions more on the way, natural limits simply don’t mean much.
Erle Ellis, author of Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Plato, The Republic.
- 2.
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994), Random House/Ballantine Books, N.Y.
- 3.
Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, (1971) Ballatine, New York. Also see Harrison Brown, The Challenge of Man’s Future (1964) Viking Press, New York.
- 4.
David Fahrenthold, “When It Comes to Pollution, Less (Kids) May Be More,” Washington Post, September 15, 2009, P. A3.
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
Futron, SIA Report for 2009.
- 7.
Raymond Kurzweil, The Singurality Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, (2005) Viking Press, New York.
- 8.
Washington Post, Nov. 14, 2008, P. A19.
- 9.
Futuring.
- 10.
R. Buckminster Fuller.
- 11.
Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pelton, J.N. (2019). We Need Better Planet Management Skills. In: Preparing for the Next Cyber Revolution. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02137-5_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02137-5_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-02136-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-02137-5
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)