Starship Asterisk*

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap081111.html



<<Professor Gerald Deemer has been working on a special nutrient (atmospheric CO2?) to help ease a predicted food shortage that is expected to come with the increase in human population. His experiments have been moderately successful but there have been some failures as a result. One day while he is gone two of his colleagues inject themselves with the nutrient with disastrous results and die a few days later. One however goes mad and injects Deemer with the formula. During a struggle, a giant tarantula injected with the formula escapes its cage and grows even larger and starts to attack cattle as well as human beings.>>

Prof. Gerald Deemer: The disease of hunger, like most diseases, well, it spreads. There are 2 billion people in the world today. In 1975 there'll be 3 billion. In the year 2000, there'll be 3,625,000,000. The world may not be able to produce enough food to feed all these people. Now perhaps you'll understand what an inexpensive nutrient will mean.

Dr. Matt Hastings: Well, not many of us look that far in the future, sir.

Prof. Gerald Deemer: Our business is the future. No man can do it on his own, of course. You don't pull it out of your hat like a magician's rabbit. You - well, you build on what hundreds of others have learned before you.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap081111.html

Don't ever get him wet. Keep him away from bright light.

And the most important thing, the one thing you must never forget: no matter how much
he cries, no matter how much he begs . . . never, never feed him after midnight.

neufer wrote:Prof. Gerald Deemer: Our business is the future. No man can do it on his own, of course. You don't pull it out of your hat like a magician's rabbit. You - well, you build on what hundreds of others have learned before you.

An appropriate message, considering ...

What's that little blob about a third of the way from the left, near the bottom of the picture? Looks like a flatworm or maybe a small star exploding.

[attachment=0]Little Nova.jpg[/attachment]

neufer wrote:Prof. Gerald Deemer: The disease of hunger, like most diseases, well, it spreads. There are 2 billion people in the world today. In 1975 there'll be 3 billion. In the year 2000, there'll be 3,625,000,000. The world may not be able to produce enough food to feed all these people. Now perhaps you'll understand what an inexpensive nutrient will mean.

Well, looks like the good prof had underestimated the world population for 2000. It was actually a little over 6 billion, and is projected to reach almost 10 billion by 2050. Humanity is multiplying faster than rabbits!

Gary

starnut wrote:

neufer wrote:Prof. Gerald Deemer: The disease of hunger, like most diseases, well, it spreads. There are 2 billion people in the world today. In 1975 there'll be 3 billion. In the year 2000, there'll be 3,625,000,000. The world may not be able to produce enough food to feed all these people. Now perhaps you'll understand what an inexpensive nutrient will mean.

Well, looks like the good prof had underestimated the world population for 2000. It was actually a little over 6 billion, and is projected to reach almost 10 billion by 2050. Humanity is multiplying faster than rabbits!

Gerald Deemer = Norman Ernest Borlaug?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug

<<Norman Ernest Borlaug (born March 25 1914) is an American agronomist, humanitarian, Nobel laureate, and has been called the father of the Green Revolution. Borlaug received his Ph.D. degree in plant pathology and genetics from the University of Minnesota in 1942. He took up an agricultural research position in Mexico, where he developed semi-dwarf high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties. During the mid-20th century, Borlaug led the introduction of these high-yielding varieties combined with modern agricultural production techniques to Mexico, Pakistan, and India. As a result, Mexico became a net exporter of wheat by 1963. Between 1965 and 1970, wheat yields nearly doubled in Pakistan and India, greatly improving the food security in those nations. These collective increases in yield have been labeled the Green Revolution, and Borlaug is often credited with saving over a billion people from starvation. More recently, he has helped apply these methods of increasing food production to Asia and Africa.>>
---------------------------------------------
Predictions based on population growth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

<<In 1798 Thomas Malthus incorrectly predicted that population growth would outrun food supply by the mid 19th century. In 1968, Paul R. Ehrlich reprised this argument in The Population Bomb, predicting famine in the 1970s and 1980s. The dire predictions of Ehrlich and other neo-Malthusians were vigorously challenged by a number of economists, notably Julian Lincoln Simon. Agricultural research, already under way such as the green revolution, led to dramatic improvements in crop yields. Food production has kept pace with population growth, but Malthusians point out the green revolution relies heavily on petroleum-based fertilizers, and that many crops have become so genetically uniform that a crop failure would be very widespread. Food prices in the early 21st century are rising sharply on a global scale, and causing serious malnutrition to spread widely.

From 1950 to 1984, as the Green Revolution transformed agriculture around the world; grain production increased by 250%. The energy for the Green Revolution was provided by fossil fuels in the form of fertilizers (natural gas), pesticides (oil), and hydrocarbon-fueled irrigation. The peaking of world hydrocarbon production (Peak oil) may test Malthus and Ehrlich critics. As of May 2008, the price of grain has been pushed up by increased farming for use in biofuels, world oil prices at over $140 per barrel, global population growth, climate change, loss of agricultural land to residential and industrial development, and growing consumer demand in China and India Food riots have recently occurred in many countries across the world.

The world population has grown by about four billion since the beginning of the Green Revolution and most believe that, without the Revolution, there would be greater famine and malnutrition than the UN presently documents.>>
---------------------------------------------