Arthur C. Clarke puts the proper size of the human population at one six thousandth of the present size. Here is why:
The astronomer Fred Hoyle once remarked to me that it was pointless for the world to hold more people than one could get to know in a single lifetime. Even if one were president of United Earth, that would set the figure somewhere between ten thousand and one hundred thousand; with a very generous allowance for duplication, wastage, special talents, and so forth, there really seems no requirement for what has been called the global village of the future to hold more than a million people scattered over the face of the planet. (Quoted from Arthur C. Clarke’s Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!: Collected Essays, 1934-1998.)
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For a brief biography of Fred Hoyle, click here.
For a brief biography of Arthur C. Clarke, click here.
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