Part 1

Population evolution in different continents. The vertical axis is logarithmic and is millions of people.

Consider the different methods of making predictions that we went over in class. Pick the topic of your choice, apply them to that topic, and make some predictions about the future. You may focus on one scenario, or discuss alternative scenarios as well. You may write speculatively, or ground your discussion in facts and examples found on the Web or elsewhere. If purely speculatively without hunting down data on the Web, then more writing would make sense than if much of your time was spent finding data. A variation to a purely speculative essay would be to couch it as a short story, like a science fiction story. Alternatively, you can write a computer program that makes predictions, for example using the exponential curve equation or some other approach. In this vein, you could use Excel or another spreadsheet program to extrapolate. If you want to do something like that but aren’t sure how, let me know and we can discuss in class how to use spreadsheets this way.

• When will our species, Homo sapiens sapiens become extinct? Logically, the race must die out eventually (entropy must increase to maximum), but will that be years, centuries, millennia, or longer before that happens? And when it does, will it have been coming off a steady decline or will it happen sharply? Some (including Paul Davies and Martin Rees) think that recent advances in technology—without corresponding increases in sense of social responsibility—will be our downfall. Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question posits that the end of the race will happen at the end of the universe, when “the stars and Galaxies died and snuffed out, and space grew black after ten trillion years of running down.”
• Applying prediction methods, particularly the Plateau model, looks to work for this problem. What goes up, must come down, after all.  The included graph charts, logarithmically, the human growth rate. It looks like most (with the exception of Africa) are either trending toward evening out, or downward (Europe).  I think that the European curve is a bell-weather for the other continents, even though it may take decades for them to “catch up.” Eventually, the growth rate will trend down overall, and the human population will decrease (on Earth), peaking at around 9-10 billion humans near 2050, according to a 2006 UN World Population Prospects report.

Part 2

a)Estimate the doubling time of the software development productivity of the average programmer, if productivity increases at 6%/year.

• doubling time = 11.895 years

b)Estimate the percent per year of increases in the complexity of PC computers if this complexity doubles every 2 years. (By “complexity” we could say we’re talking about the number of transistors on a CPU chip, if you were wondering.)

• %/year = 1.4142

c)Estimate the percent per year of increases in the complexity of PC computers if complexity doubles every 18 months, as some think it is doing.

• %/year = 1.5874

d)What is the doubling time of your money if you have it in the bank making 2% interest per year?

• doubling time = 35.0016