September 21, 2019
Nobabies.net
Elon Musk
Corporate Secretary
Tesla, Inc.,
3500 Deer Creek Road
Palo Alto 94304,California
Dear Sir:
We have two interests in common: Information Technology and population collapse.
With regard to IT, I find it remarkable that Alan Turing proved that a computer can never do abstract reasoning, but people can although most seem to find it unpleasant and employ it rarely. I hope that you are willing to use it extensively. Resolving the question of whether a computer can really think strikes me as the most profound and most impenetrable question. Given the answer, perhaps one might know whether IT will be our excellent servant or our vicious master.
With regards to population collapse, it has been my greatest preoccupation for twenty or thirty years, and I can say with utter confidence that it is a dreadful danger far beyond almost anybody’s worst fears. Enclosed you will find a DVD (Windows 10 Word) with three files. One is called, “collection.” It has five independent proofs of the fact that kinship determines fertility.
In brief, Alfred Russel Wallace, who was the first to understand evolution (Darwin never really got it, but he got the credit because there was Wedgewood money in the family.) pointed out that once a new niche is occupied by a species, that species is under great selective pressure to divide in two, one to exploit the new niche and one to keep the old.
Speciation cannot be delayed indefinitely.
Given that fact, and applying the laws of Mendel, there is a limit on the size a random mating population can survive. There is intense selective pressure to keep a population at a moderate size. And species with a large number of members must, in order to survive, be effectively a lot of moderate size populations.
A man named Sibly demonstrated the mechanism in action. A team in Iceland led by a man named Helgason showed that human fertility is regulated by kinship, inverse of population size, and nothing else. A team led by Labouriau in Denmark found the same. Work done by a man named Calhoun showed that a mouse population permitted to grow without limit on space, food and so forth, will have its fertility fall to zero.
As I said, there are four more proofs.
There is a video taken from the work of Hans Robling that shows that worldwide populations are falling below replacement and the superficially seeming to stabilize but age at marriage immediately starts to rise and does so inexorably moving toward menopause.
And a “Grand Summary” file puts much the same material into what may be a more agreeable form.
Yes, you’ll have to do a lot of abstract reasoning, and I am hoping you are good at it. And yes it will take a few hours, but given your skills and resources you will then be in a position to stabilize the world population – if there is still time.
Let me know if I can help in any way.
Sincerely,
M. Linton Herbert MD