How 2 Scientists You’ve Never Heard Of Redesigned Our Planet
In the year 2050, there will be 10 billion people on Earth. Or at least that's the scientific estimate. Sounds like a giant human milestone, right? Well IT TOTALLY IS...assuming we harvest 50% more food than we are now, to feed those people. Oh and 4.5 billion people will be short on fresh drinking water by 2025, 1.2 billion people are short on electricity right now, and global temperatures are about to rise a degree Fahrenheit or two (or 8.1, turning most of the world into a desert). So...where do we go from here, Earth?
Well on this week's episode of The Cracked Podcast, Alex Schmidt sits down with science/history/everything writer Charles C. Mann. They'll explore the lives of Norman Borlaug & William Vogt, the title "characters" of Mr. Mann's new book The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World. We'll also uncover photosynthesis's stupidity, nail down climate change's branding, and look back on hundreds of years of human self-improvement that suggest we might just make it to 10 billion if we pull it together.
Footnotes:
Drought-Stricken Cape Town Braces For Water To Run Out In April (NPR)
Norman Borlaug (Nobel Peace Prize bio page)
Lynn Margulis, 1938-2011 (obituary in Nature)
Fritz Haber's Experiments in Life and Death (Smithsonian Magazine)
The Book That Incited a Worldwide Fear of Overpopulation (Smithsonian Magazine)
The Great Oxygenation Event: Earth's first mass extinction. (Slate/Bad Astronomy)
The Path from C3 to C4 Photosynthesis (American Society of Plant Biologists)
"Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry" by J.K. Rowling (Pottermore)
