Re: Population smopulation
"If we ship off 200,000 people, yes that number will simply be born tomorrow... but those 200,000 we just lost would likely have had children, who may in turn have children, who also might have... and so on."
Well yes, but that is the population growth, not the birth rate.
To keep the population constant, you have to ship out 200,000 people every day for the rest of time. If you only ship out 200,000 then you have postponed the collapse of civilization by exactly 24 hours. Of course if you manage to ship out, say, 400,000 people every day, then the population will actually start to shrink and you will eventually be able to stop for a while.
Removing any fixed number from an exponential growth only delays the increase by a fixed period. It never solves the problem. If you decimated the population back to Adam and Eve, with a 1.14% per annum population growth they would eventually get back to 6.5 billion. In this case, if you could ship out 200,000 people, then you would delay the growth by one day. 400,000 would give you two days, and so forth. In order to make a dent in that 200,000 per day rate of increase, you would have to remove 600,000,000. Then the rate of increase would drop to 180,000 per day.