They sent me a video on a topic that has been disturbing the contents of my skull for more than one year. I must say right away that no matter from which side I try to crack this nut, it does not give in. Most likely, a problem from the category “What appeared first, a chicken or an egg?.. Searching for the correct answer is most likely pointless, but the topic is so interesting that it is simply impossible to refuse to study it. For me personally, this is probably the same as putting a bottle of vodka on an alcoholic's table and hoping that he will not drink it.
So, let's start with the video that opened my old wounds.
I'm afraid to be mistaken, but in my opinion, I watched this program around 2001 or 2002. I still think that this program, which could only be seen at night, (hence the name "00:30", according to the time it was broadcast) is the best creation of NTV, and of Russian television, in the field of popularizing science, in general. I waited for each issue as a holiday, and received tremendous pleasure.
Now I already know what exactly I do not agree with the respected academician, but this is not about that either. I propose to speculate from the position of an "absolute teapot". Forget everything that is known from official sources about the history of changes in the population of the Earth, and leave only elementary knowledge and basic principles of logic. To begin with, I suggest taking a look at the graph used by demographers around the world, without even trying to doubt its fidelity. This is DOGMA:
What's the first thing that catches your eye?
Well … And who among us has forgotten about the criteria of scientific character? Me, the teapot, or those who wrote this nonsense? For those who have forgotten or did not know about the criteria that allow to unambiguously classify the phenomenon as an object of scientific knowledge, and not mystical:
Promotional video:
If it seems difficult to someone, then we can restrict ourselves to such a classification, which makes it possible to more or less objectively assess whether the information under study is the subject of modern official science:
- Objectivity, i.e. reflect the object as it really is (the criterion of truth according to Aristotle);
- Rationalistic validity (according to Descartes);
- Systematic knowledge, i.e. has the form of a theory or an expanded theoretical concept;
- Fundamental verifiability, where the means of verification are scientific observation, experience, logical reasoning.
- Repeatability, or the possibility of obtaining the same result by independent researchers.
1) Now tell me, teapot, is it possible for humanity to begin its development with only 14 individuals? I am generally silent about the "Holy Book of Books". If God created only one man and one woman, then in two generations humanity would cease to exist due to complete degeneration without reaching the number of one hundred to one hundred and fifty people. So how, according to official science, five thousand years ago, only 14 people could exist? After all, science itself dates the first stone tools created by man at 2.6 million years!
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ADDITION
Thank you friends for the corrections. Of course, the histogram shows not 14 people, but 14 million. I admit, I screwed up, my behavior was unworthy of a Soviet officer! My apologies! However, this is not a reason not to read further.
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Is this not the delirium of a madman? What kind of scientificity are we talking about if science itself claims that in the "minus third millennium" there were only 14 people, and then it recognizes that modern homo sapiens appeared 200,000 years ago?
2) But I hesitate, there are still questions for scientific science, which knows everything. Suppose that the whole world has suddenly become honest and fair, and has forgotten how to lie, and has forgotten what postscripts are, and refused to juggle facts to please certain circles. How much will then change the population of the planet, which is not questioned now, and is seven billion people? It is even difficult to guess in which direction the figure will change, but it seems to me that it will become almost half less, although I may not be right.
Sociologists lie godlessly, and this is a fact. If we are talking about genocide, then there are always more killed than there were living ones before the genocide began. The Holocaust data is a good example. The official history says that more than six million Jews were burned in concentration camps in Europe, while, according to the same sociology, at the beginning of 1939, only four million lived in all of Europe! Who, then, survived and founded the state of Israel? And where did they bring in another two million for destruction?
There is one more example, which is no less indicative of how statistics are manipulated to please the interests of certain influence groups. The great Russian writer Solzhenitsyn never lied. He was very fond of the truth, and objectivity. He very convincingly confirmed his not a LIE with figures. People trust statistics unconditionally, like Soviet citizens do the newspaper Pravda, so it never occurred to anyone to check the reliability of the statistics given by Solzhenitsyn. But there were people who made a detailed analysis of the "truth about the bloody Stalinist regime", and the result was, to put it mildly, shocking.
I will give just one example. Isaevich said that in Kolyma, in the camps of "Dalstroy", the fanatics have killed so many innocent citizens, we take official data from open sources, and we see that in Kolyma in 10 years in total there were not as many people as Solzhenitsyna has only among the departed innocent convicts. There are a myriad of similar “mistakes” in the “Gulag Archipelago”, but these figures are appealed to in their works by serious scientists as to indisputable scientific facts! Can you imagine? With the same success can be considered scientific facts about Winnie the Pooh's knowledge of bear anatomy. Have you come across the mention of sawdust inside the bears in scientific works?
3) Okay. Maybe we are not 8 or 5 billion, but still about that, it doesn't matter. But who will answer me the question of how you can get reliable data on the population of the entire planet Earth, well, at least in 1800? Where is the Egyptian census data? How many people lived in the Cayman Islands then? How were the Amazon Indians copied? But after all, any demographer, without batting an eye, without hesitation, will report to you that in 1800 there were nine hundred and eighty-two million citizens on Earth !
And should I believe it? But let's leave the nineteenth century. Who and how calculated that in year zero there were only 255,000 inhabitants on earth? Yes, if today there were so many people around the globe, then about a quarter of them would have died, never having learned that besides them there is at least one other person in this world. Tell me to an ignorant who has forgotten everything that he studied for 19 years in a row, why the hell is it to build cities in the world, in which an elephant is several times more likely to meet an elephant than a living person?
There can be only one conclusion here:
Scientists are calculating the number strictly in accordance with the scientific method of OBS (one woman said). Just like in the case of the history of the rulers of Egypt. They lined up all the found pharaohs in a ruler, gave each direction an average of 33.3 years, and performed a simple mathematical addition. This is how the many-thousand-year history of Egypt turned out. And okay, this is where the anecdote ends. After all, there is even no confirmation that the pharaoh is a monarch! Maybe at one time in Egypt there were 10, 20 pharaohs. Or maybe the word "Pharaoh" has nothing to do with the designation of the title. It can be a status (a deputy, for example), or a state of health (a deceased), and God knows what else.
So the calculation of the population of the Earth is carried out in accordance with some methods based on the identified patterns. Which ones? Not so important for a teapot. It is clear to the teapot that such data cannot be reliable and scientific.
However, there is one indisputable methodology that allows you to quite reliably calculate the dynamics of population growth at the present stage. I will talk about it below, but first, for clarity, let's look at the graphs that visually display population growth:
The start is noticeable in 1950. World War II died down, life improved, and began to breed in comfortable conditions of low mortality and high fertility. Medicine became available, there was more food, and there was less fighting. Everything is natural.
And now the 19th century:
Here we can hardly speak about reliability, but the key turning points still allow us to recall some facts that, perhaps, indicate that the picture could be similar to the real state of affairs. Note the 1870. Long ago I drew attention to the fact that this period became a turning point in the history of mankind, especially in Europe and America. It was at this time that a wave of wars and fires swept around the world. Thousands of photographs of the ruins of cities in Europe and America have survived. Destroyed to the ground, Paris, Strassbourg, and other cities in Europe are explained by the Franco-Prussian.
Paris. Ministry of Finance building. 1871
Paris catacombs.
And in America, destroyed by Chicago and Boston, they simply burned down …
Chicago 1871
In general, there is something to think about. At the turn of the seventies and the eighties of the nineteenth century, something ended that ceased to affect the decline in population, and its sharp steady growth was outlined, which could no longer be fundamentally influenced by revolutions or even world wars.
But in general, the picture of population growth over the past 200 years, in which at least some demographic information has been collected and systematized, at least in developed countries, looks quite plausible.
Compare the graphs presented with the bar graph at the very beginning. It all fits together, doesn't it? So I deliberately made a histogram similar to the one with which I started, only made a sample for the last 200 years.
And now, as I promised, I will tell you about the only reliable method I know of for calculating the population size relative to a certain period of time.
It is based on common sense and objective statistics. See for yourself. So a man and a woman started a family. They had one child, then a second, a third, less often a fourth, and then how it goes. We know a lot of childless and large families, but it turns out that, on average, since the formation of a family, after twenty years, the family doubles.
There were only Sasha and Masha, and twenty years later they already have two adult children, and it is highly likely that the daughter has already had her own daughter, the granddaughter of Sasha and Masha. Taking into account all the errors and objective circumstances, such as illness and accidents, in one generation each family doubles. Generation - 20 years, but for the purity of the calculation, the duration of the generation change can be increased to 30 years. But even then, inevitably, in any country in which epidemics are not raging, and which does not fight with its neighbors, the total population doubles every 20-25 years! There are enough examples.
For example China. In 1955. there lived one billion eight hundred and ninety million inhabitants, and only 15 years later, in 1970. there were already two billion two hundred million Chinese! And this is despite the "Cultural Revolution" and other horrors. True, then, someone decided that the biblical slogan "Be fruitful and multiply!" is already outdated, like its time "All power to the Soviets!", and another slogan has become relevant: - "In each family - one child!" The result did not have to wait long, and in 1985 there were "only" one billion four hundred million Chinese left in China.
However, not all countries of the world apply population regulation. This is the law of the universe, if somewhere it decreases, then somewhere else it will definitely arrive. So if in Russia and Europe as a whole, the birth rate is steadily declining, then at the same time in Africa and the countries of the Muslim world, the birth rate has become explosive. The global law of compensation works no matter what. Therefore, it is logical to assume that on average, not in a particular village, but on a global scale, the population grows obeying the rule of doubling every twenty years.
And then there is a great temptation to apply the opposite method, in order to rely on the Rule to calculate the date of the appearance of the first person on earth. I did it. See what a curious picture emerges:
It makes no sense to clarify that such a crude anti-scientific approach cannot be taken seriously, nevertheless, I believe that this histogram can bring some benefit for the successful resolution of the paradox.
Without a doubt, a line on a chart cannot be straight along any one. Even in the most "greenhouse" conditions, when 100% of the offspring survive, and not 20, as it was in the 18th century, due to simple mathematics, there should only be a tangentoid on the graph. True, it is not clear what will happen when its final segment is as close as possible to the vertical line. And this “not clear” is the most exciting part of the reflections, inevitably leading to the conclusion that this process cannot be endless. And the end, apparently, is not far off. This is "BP", "Transition" or whatever else they managed to come up with.
But the funniest thing about the "wrong" histogram is the year the first people appeared on Earth. Early eleventh century. And if this is an accident, then a symbolic one, with a hint.
According to the calculations of Academician A. T. Fomenko, Jesus was crucified in the middle of the twelfth century. Independently of him, this date is confirmed by other sources, for example, the dating of the creation of the "Shroud of Turin". She, too, places the "biblical story" in the twelfth century. So, theoretically, something or someone, now called Adam and Eve, could have been away from Jesus for not such a long period of time in the past.
Now ask me why all this is written, if there is practically no benefit?
I answer. Any paradox makes you think. And where thought is born, falsehood dies. It is quite possible that this paradox is completely solvable. It's just that today we don't have something without which it is impossible to find an answer. So after all, a person did not always have a spyglass! Before its appearance, the possibilities of cognition were significantly limited. The same can be said about the invention of the chronograph, electricity, radio, etc.
But already now, if someone points out the nonsense that I made here, or can tell something that will help me understand the essence of the issue better, I will be incredibly grateful! And I will also be happy if, thanks to the shown interest, someone solves the problem as Grigory Perelman did. He took and decided what everyone thought was unsolvable for decades.
So … I'm waiting for a genius! Welcome!