Lippard.Multics 1986-05-08 14:35:59 mst Thu
Subject:  Population Implosion, Cloudfall
Date: 8 May 86 12:09 PDT
From: Pavel.pa@Xerox.COM
To: Info-COBOL@MIT-CCC@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU

Date:  8 May 86 10:50:32 PDT (Thursday)
Subject: Re: Terrorists, Meltdowns, Comets, Commies, & Tsunamis
From: Becker.osbunorth (Joseph D. Becker)
To: Whimsy^.PA
Reply-to: "Ted Koppel".osbunorth

If Professor Carl Lazlo of the Nevada Institute of Technology is right, the
human race may be headed for a dead end.  "All this talk about a population
explosion is nothing but nonsense," insists Lazlo.  "Anyone who has looked at
a family tree or genealogical chart recently knows how many people it took in
past generations to produce just one today." Lazlo points out that even the
simplest family tree contains two parents, four grandparents, eight
great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents, and so on.  He calculates
that for each person alive in the 20th century, there were 150 in the 19th,
and 5,500 in the 18th, and that the population of the earth during the latter
part of the Bronze Age probably exceeded 400 billion.  "This might account for
the extinction of the dinosaurs," sugests Lazlo.  The implications of his
calculations are clear.  If the present rate of attrition continues unabated,
the population of the world will have shrunk to 100 million by the end of the
21st century and to less than 8,000 by the year 2150.

Sir James Tirrell of London's Holyscone Observatory has devoted a good part of
his long career alerting the scientific community to the grave threat posed by
the "cloud crisis." An exhaustive study of meteorological data has led Tirrell
to the conclusion that the number, size, and density of clouds has increased
sharply in recent years and that if this growth goes unchecked, the sheer
weight of these monsters will overcome the natural forces which keep them
airborne.  Tirrell also believes that cloud growth goes in cycles, and the
great crater in Arizona and Lake Baikal in the Soviet Union may have been
caused by cloud impacts.  He has long opposed what he calls "the fluffy-white
psychosis." "People think these things are some kind of candy fluff covered
with angels.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  They're the icebergs
of the air, and when they fall, there's going to be a real mess."

-- by Nicholas Fish, from The National Lampoon "Paranoia" Issue, August
1970