For some strange reason my images won't show up but oh well. I can honestly say that my AP is my most beautiful piece that I've written to this day. I basically treated the AP as a continuation of the HCP, but I was far more prepared and I was a much more stronger writer than compared to when I was writing the HCP. 

The New Frontier: Space

Abstract: As the human population is projected to reach approximately ten billion people by the end of the century, efforts must be made to ensure that the already present issue of overpopulation does not become worse. I define overpopulation as a two pronged problem: the first prong being a population larger than its relative available resources, and the second prong being a limited number of available resources. I advocate that the colonization of space can provide solutions to both aspects of overpopulation. Space is full of a vast array of planets and objects that could be prime locations for colonization.

     Near the end of the 1700’s, Thomas Robert Malthus, a scholar who would later go on to influence famed theorists Charles Darwin and John Keynes, wrote in his book An Essay on the Principle of Population, that “the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce sustenance for man” (4). What Malthus was referring to was the issue of overpopulation: when a population grows too large relative to the resources it taps into, typically either food, water, energy, or land.

     The problem of overpopulation has two main factors, the first being an excessive population. Although Malthus recognized the dangers of an overly large population near the end of the 1700s, the size of world’s population being an issue did not begin to manifest until the mid-20^th century. Between the years 1950 and 2000, the population more than doubled from roughly 2.5 billion to 6 billion (Gerland, et al. 234). Although there is very little chance of the population doubling again within the century, in 2012, the United Nations released a population projection predicting with 80% probability that by the end of the end of the century, the current population of 7.2 billion will have increased to between 9.6 and 12.3 billion (see fig. 1).

     The second factor of overpopulation is the finite nature of non-sustainable resources that the population consumes. A large population would be able to sustain itself given the resources, but a large population cannot sustain itself on limited nonrenewable resources. One such resource is conventional oil, which is widely used as a source of energy for a wide range of things, and which some nation-state’s economies depend on. Various studies, however, conclude that around the year 2030, conventional oil production will reach its peak (Sorrell, et al. 5290). While conventional oil does form naturally, it takes thousands of years to be formed; it is being consumed faster than it is being replaced.

     Alone, the two factors could be easily managed; a large population could sustain itself if given a large amount of resources, and a finite amount of resources could sustain a relatively moderately sized population, but when a large population and a finite amount of resources coincide, disastrous outcomes can occur. In 1994, in what would be known as the Rwandan genocide, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed, almost 11% of Rwanda’s population (Diamond 317). Overpopulation was one of the main factors that led up to this (Diamond 327). Prior to the Rwandan genocide, Belgian economists Catherine Andre and Jean-Philippe Platteau, spent time living in Rwanda, but left shortly before the event occurred. After the genocide, they composed a report on environmental and population changes in Rwanda in the years leading up to the genocide and established a connection between them (Andre and Platteau 4). In this example, the main resource in question was land, a resource vital to those who live agricultural lifestyles, such as Rwandans. Early on, Andre and Platteau establish the fact that “when land pressure becomes too strong… no mechanism… can succeed in deflecting or suppressing the tensions arising from land scarcity” (6). By 1993, in one Rwandan village, Kanama, the population density was 2,040 people per square mile, which translated into very small farms, with farmers on average being able to use only 0.07 acres (Diamond 320). To put this into perspective, Diamond notes that “in Montana a 40-acre farm used to be considered necessary to support a family, but even that is now inadequate” (321). With such a severe shortage of arable land, it became difficult for families to feed themselves, even relative to the lower caloric intakes considered sufficient in Rwanda, and because they had such little land to work with, overworked fields would result in land degradation. Andre and Platteau emphasize that although this extreme lack of land was not the sole factor behind the Rwandan genocide, it created an enabling environment that made “desperate people… ready to seize any opportunity to change their present predicament” (34). With such a large population and such little resources, overpopulation played a large role in creating the environment necessary to allow for this tragedy to occur.

     Efforts are being made however, to reduce population growth in a number of nation-states, although this is merely slowing the growth of the population, not decreasing its size. The most notable would be China’s recently modified “one-child policy,” which is now a “two-child policy.” In reality however, China has never truly implemented a “one-child” policy; the policy was only strictly carried out within urban areas whereas in rural areas, a majority of families would be allowed to have two children (Peng 582). Also, while China now has a lower population growth rate than, for example, the United States (Central Intelligence Agency), its population is also almost 4 times the size of the United States’. So although China’s population growth rate has been lowered, its population is still growing at a much faster than that of the United States’.

     While China’s one-child policy has been successful in slowing its growth, it has also raised demographic and moral issues. With a highly patriarchal society and the availability of pre-birth sex identification, the one-child policy has led to “sex-specific abortion” (Peng 583), in which female fetuses will be aborted in an attempt for the family’s one child to be male. While a moral issue in itself, this has also led to a problem in China’s demographics. The male to female ratio in China is 1.2:1 (Peng 583), which might not seem like much, but when applied to China’s population of almost 1.4 billion, it creates a staggering gap between the number of Chinese men to Chinese women. The one-child, now two-child, policy has also raised the issue of the morality of dictating the number of children a family can have, and has been criticized as a violation of human rights because of this. Although it has been successful in slowing China’s population growth, it has only slowed it, and not reduced its size. As its population continues to grow, it will eventually place even greater impacts on its already burdened resources and environmental pollution problems (Peng 568).

     Like with the population factor of overpopulation, there are also efforts being made towards resources, although there are also issues with these as well. Continuing with my example of oil, its gradual depletion is fueling the drive for more sustainable technology, resources and policies in regards to transportation. Hybrid vehicles, which use a combination of electricity and oil as a source of energy, have become much more common within the past decade as their prices reached affordable levels. They require less gasoline, which is refined from conventional oil, than vehicles with conventional combustion engines, and they emit much less emissions (Demirdoven and Deutch 974). There are also government incentives such as a federal tax credit of $1500 for purchasing a hybrid vehicle, although this was discontinued in 2006 (Demirdoven and Deutch 976). Although full alternatives to conventional gasoline vehicles have been developed, such as fully electric or hydrogen-powered vehicles (see fig. 2), it will still take more time and resources to make them affordable to the general public (Kintisch 903). Hybrid vehicles are becoming more commonplace as they become more affordable, but being hybrids, they still require gasoline to function, and the costs of full alternatives to conventional gasoline based vehicles keeps them from becoming widespread. Alongside investing in alternatives to conventional gasoline based vehicles, private companies are also continuously searching for more oil fields in an attempt to increase the supply of oil, however these efforts will not be enough to preserve the world’s oil supply. The rate at which oil fields are being discovered peaked between 1960 and 1970 and their number and sizes have been decreasing since then (Aleklett, et al. 1406). Similarly, like China’s population growth, oil depletion is only being slowed, not resolved.

     In economics, a fundamental component of the theory of supply and demand states that as the demand of a resource increases, its cost will increase; this is to increase profit and to preserve the amount of resources, but what happens when the resources run out? Unless there is a complete shift towards renewable resources, the only option to remedy this aspect of overpopulation would be to continuously gather new resources. With only a few exceptions such as wind and solar energy, the resources of earth, namely food, water, energy, and land, are finite, and the ever-growing population will only continue to increase the demand on these resources.

     Decreasing population burdens and increasing resources; these are the solutions to overpopulation, and it is with these goals in mind that I shift towards the periods of colonization of the past for a solution. Throughout the 1700s, European empires extended their reach across the Americas and created colonies that would help to make their mother nations prosperous while at the same time relocating portions of their populations to these new colonies. This would happen again during the latter half of the 1800s when these same empires partitioned and colonized Africa. In both these periods, raw resources such as sugar, cotton, and rubber would be extracted from the colonies, and then sent back to the mother nation. In North America and South Africa, large migrations of settlers would result in colonies becoming their own nations. During these periods of colonization, the mother nations saw portions of their populations migrate to new lands, while also increasing their supply of resources. However, there remain no lands left on earth to be explored and exploited, but it is with that thought that I shift the context from that of earth, to that of space.

     Like the colonization of the past, the colonization of space could provide an outlet for the world’s population while at the same time providing a new supply of resources. The exploration, colonization, and most importantly, the exploitation of space and its myriad of resources could mitigate and possibly even overcome the issue of overpopulation.

     Arguably the last frontier, space is a host to a range of planets and other astronomical objects, such as asteroids and meteoroids, which themselves are hosts to a range of resources. The earth’s very own orbiter, the moon, is one such host. Discussions of using the moon as a source of resources began when the first lunar samples were recovered in 1969 (Heim 830). Native to the moon is an array of resources including water, helium-3, and the mineral ilmenite (Seife 1603). The necessity of water is indisputable; not only is it vital to life, but it can also be split into oxygen and hydrogen for breathing and fueling purposes, and helium-3, when fused with hydrogen-2 or itself, creates a large amount of energy, more so than energy created from electrical power plants (Seife 1603). Ilmenite is an iron-titanium mineral that is common (see fig. 3) on the moon (Seife 1603), and it can be broken into iron and more importantly, titanium, a lightweight yet very strong metal. Various discussions of a lunar base on the moon include the use of ilmenite in its construction, and even NASA has discussed in a report the benefits of the use of lunar rocks, soils, and ores as building materials in space (Billingham and Gilbreath 275). In that same report, it was noted that collecting ilmenite ores would be “possible with existing technology” (Billingham and Gilbreath 287), but that report was written in 1979, almost four decades ago. Technology has advanced very far since then, and if it was possible using technology available then, it would be even simpler today with modern technology.

     In addition to the moon are near-earth asteroids, or NEAs, which although asteroid mining has not yet been fully developed, if invested in, could prove beneficial to both the safety of earth and to its supply of resources. Development of technologies to harvest resources from asteroids could also be used to prevent asteroids and meteoroids from hitting the earth (Sonter 1). NEAs are more abundant in resources than the moon, and materials that could be extracted from them include materials used for “propulsion, construction life support, agriculture, metallurgy, semiconductors, and precious and strategic metals” (Ross 4). One material in particular is platinum, and platinum-group metals. An asteroid of modest size and enrichment could contain “twice the tonnage of PGMs [platinum-group metals] already harvested on Earth combined with economically viable PGM resources still in the ground” (Ross 6). In addition to the quantity, the quality of PGMs recovered from asteroids is also high; compared to platinum recovered from mines in South Africa and elsewhere whose grades range from 5 to 10 ppm, platinum recovered from asteroids have grades of up to 100 ppm (Sonter 1). In addition to precious metals, resources from asteroids can also support life (Mautner 59). Extracts from meteorites have been “found to support the growth of complex algal and microbial populations” (Mautner 59). This is significant in that resources from asteroids can potentially be used to create habitats suitable for agriculture in space, which could provide for colonies in space or the population on earth; if such technology was widespread and available prior to the Rwandan genocide, a different Rwandan history might be known today. It is important to note however, that these estimates and extractions are derived from recovered meteorites (Sonter 2), fragments of meteoroids and asteroids that impact the surface of the earth.

     Alongside being able to provide a new source for resources, space also provides an outlet to reduce the burden of an excessively large population through the creation of colonies, whether they be on planets or standalone settlements. Gerard K. O’Neill, a physics professor and avid space activist wrote multiple papers advocating for space colonization, but what stood out about his arguments were that he supported them with scientific and mathematical calculations. After inquiring more into meteoroid damage, agricultural productivity, material sources, economics and other topics, one of O’Neill’s conclusions was that the carrying capacity for the human population in space would be at least 20,000 times its current value on earth (“Colonization of Space” 1). Colonies in space would be more than just a method to deal with a large population; it would create new communities for those living there, but first, they must be created.

     Although believed to belong in the realm of science fiction, space colonies are in fact feasible. In what would later be known as the O’Neill cylinder, or colony, physicist Gerard K. O’Neill designed a self-sufficient space settlement (see fig. 4). Its shape would be that of a cylinder, four miles in diameter and roughly sixteen miles in length, with its circumference divided into alternating stripes of land, or “valleys,” and window areas, or “solars,” which would allow sunlight to enter (“Colonization of Space” 2). To create a sense of gravity, the cylinder would rotate, creating rotational acceleration which would be akin to the acceleration caused by gravity (“Colonization of Space” 1). The colony’s energy requirements would be met by solar power; direct sunlight would fuel agriculture, the solars would concentrate the power into heat for industry, or it would be converted into electricity (“Colonies and Energy” 1). The location of these standalone colonies would be Lagrange liberation points 4 and 5, which, under the combined gravities of the earth, moon and sun, have stable orbits (“Colonies and Energy” 1). The construction of the colonies themselves would likely see lots of titanium and aluminum, both of which are in abundance on the moon (“Colonization of Space” 2). When constructed, these colonies could develop into agricultural or industrial colonies to produce goods, or they could urbanize into a metropolitan type area. They could also become the staging point for asteroid mining or harvesting resources from other planets. Some downsides to these however, are the time and costs required for such large scale creations. This also raises the question of how resources would be brought to space, but a few years after O’Neill wrote his reports on space colonization, he constructed a prototype mass driver, or an electromagnetic catapult, which uses electromagnets to launch objects. O’Neill proposed that the concept of mass drivers would become essential in transporting resources between planets and colonies (“Colonization of Space” 8). The concept of using electromagnets to propel objects can be seen in use today; one of the US Navy’s newest ship classes, the Zumwalt, is being considered to be equipped with a railgun, a weaponized version of the mass driver. While ideally the colonies would eventually become self-sufficient, they require a large initial investment of resources (see fig. 5); they are not however, out of reach with today’s technology.

     The largest issue with space endeavors and the thought of creations such as O’Neill colonies are that they are costly and would take a large amount of time and resources to produce, but cheaper alternatives are being sought after and developed even as I type. Figure 6 is a picture of the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or the BEAM, which was recently inflated just a few days ago. The BEAM is a privately built “prototype space habitat for future space stations, moon colonies and moon bases” (Cofield). Fully inflated, it measures 4 meters long and 3.2 meters wide, but when deflated, it measures nearly one-fifth of its inflated size (Cofield). Although not extremely spacious, it is a step towards creating larger expandable habitats that hopefully will eventually be able to house the eventual colonizer population. Being inflatable, the expandable habitat both weighs less and costs less than its metal counterparts (Cofield), making it more favorable to send into space, and instead of taking possibly decades to assemble like O’Neill’s colony might take, it only required seven hours (Cofield), although this slow pace was merely a safety precaution. The BEAM makes establishing a habitat in space almost as easy as pitching a tent and shows how space endeavors are becoming more feasible and affordable by the day.

     The idea of space colonization being the resolver of the world’s overpopulation crisis at first seems outrageous, but upon closer examination of the causes of overpopulation and the boons of space colonization, connections between the two can be made. There are both known resources and an even greater unknown amount of resources yet to be discovered, and as technology continues to progress, the idea of creating livable largescale habitats in space becomes more and more attainable.

Works Cited

Aleklett, Kjell, et al. “The Peak of the Oil Age - Analyzing the world oil production Reference Scenario in World Energy Outlook 2008.” Energy Policy 38 (2010): 1398-1414. Web. 17 May 2016.

Andre, Catherine, and Jean-Philippe Platteau. “Land Tenure Under Unendurable Stress: Rwanda Caught in the Malthusian Trap.” The Notebooks of the Faculty of the Economic and Social Sciences, No. 164. The University of Notre Dame de la Paix, 1996, Namur.
Covering the Rwandan genocide, I use this source as my main example of a "Malthusian catastrophe." Although not the sole factor responsible, overpopulation played a very large part in creating the environment for the tragedy in Rwanda to occur. The credibility of the authors comes from the fact that they lived in Rwanda prior to the genocide occuring, so they have firsthand knowledge of the conditions there.

Anteater Express. “Hydrogen Fuel Cell.” Photograph. Anteater Express. UC Regents, n.d. Web. 30 May 2016.

Billingham, John, and William Gilbreath. Space Resources and Space Settlements. Washington, DC: NASA Scientific and Technical Information Branch, 1979. Web. 9 May 2016.
The book is split into various sections with information regarding materials and technology used for space exploration or materials gained from space exploration. It also includes sections on agriculture and using asteroids as a source of materials, both of which relate to my issue of overpopulation. The time it was published also plays a role; in it, the authors note that the technology of their time, the 1980s, was capable of extracting resources from the moon. I note that almost four decades have passed and technology has also improved, making what was feasible during their time child's play during ours.

Central Intelligence Agency. The World Factbook 2016-2017. Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 2016. Web. 30 May 2016.

Cofield, Calla. “1^st Inflatable Habitat for Astronauts All Pumped Up on Space Station.” Space: NASA, Space Exploration and Astronomy News. Space, 28 May 2016. Web. 29 May 2016.
A very recent occurrence; an inflatable habitat was inflated on the International Space Station. Compared to creating costly colonies, this provides a much cheaper and quicker alternative, and illustrates how easily colonization could occur. The fact that it was built by a private company but federally funded also illustrates how the private and public sectors are working together to further space endeavors. 

Demirdoven, Nurettin, and John Deutch. “Hybrid Cars Now, Fuel Cell Cars Later.” Science 305.5686 (2004): 974-976. Web. 30 May 2016.

Diamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Penguin Group, 2005. Web. 23 May 2016.

Gerland, Patrick, et al. “World population stabilization unlikely this century.” Science 346.6206 (2014): 234-237. Web. 30 April 2016.

Heim, Barbara Ellen. “Exploring the Last Frontiers for Mineral Resources: A Comparison of International Law Regarding the Deep Seabed, Outer Space, and Antarctica.” Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law 23.4 (1990-1991): 819-850. Web. 9 May 2016.

Kintisch, Eli. “Report: Think Simple of Cars.” Science 321.5891 (2008): 903. Web. 30 May 2016.

Malthus, Thomas. An Essay on the Principle of Population. 1788. Electronic Scholarly Publishing Project, 1998. Web. 12 April 2016.

Mautner, Michael. “Planetary Resources and Astroecology. Planetary Microcosm Models of Asteroid and Meteorite Interiors: Electrolyte Solutions and Microbial Growth— Implications for Space Populations and Panspermia.” Astrobiology 2.1 (2002): 1-19. Web. 10 May 2016.

O’Neill, Gerard. “Space Colonies and Energy Supply to the Earth.” Science 190.4218 (1975): 943-947. Web. 18 May 2016.

---. “The Colonization of Space.” Physics Today 27.9 (1974): 32-40. Web. 9 May 2016.
In his paper, O'Neill discusses the fundamental issues regarding the colonization of space, such as the environmental effects and pollution. He also includes diagrams of possible model colonies and estimates the resources necessary for their construction. His credibility comes from his background as a physicist at Princeton University, a renowned Ivy League university. While an activist of space, he takes a very objective stance to the feasibility of creating colonies in space.

Peng, Xizhe. “China’s Demographic History and Future Challenges.” Science 333.6042 (2011): 581-587. Web. 3 May 2016.

Ross, Shane. “Near-Earth Asteroid Mining.” Space 2001. Web. 3 May 2016.

Seife, Charles. “Moon’s ‘Abundant Resources’ Largely an Unknown Quantity.” Science 303.5664 (2004): 1603. Web. 9 May 2016.

Sonter, Mike. “Asteroid Mining: Key to the Space Economy.” adAstra. National Space Society, 9 February 2006. Web. 3 May 2016.

Sorrell, Steve, et al. “Global oil depletion: A review of the evidence.” Energy Policy 38.9 (2010): 5290-5295. Web. 16 May 2016.