emigration
b brought home a classmate to work on a physics lab project. something about building a car powered by a mouse trap. kinda clever actually. this kid asserted the solution to overpopulation is emigration. so where are we going to emigrate to? the moon, mars, etc. huh. well. at least he didn't answer planets around other stars. he claimed we will have a colony on the moon by 2050. to facilitate mining of asteroids. hrm. maybe. but unlikely. anywho. let's look at shipping people to the moon cause it's so overpopulated here on earth we can't feed everyone. it costs $10k to put a single kilogram in low earth orbit. leo is a quarter of the way to the moon. in a gravitational potential energy sense. most definitely not in a dollars sense. but let's suppose in 2050 it will cost $10k to put a kg of living human flesh on the moon. so $1m to put a man on the moon. compare that to food stamps. which expect to feed a person for $5/day. so $2k/year. so that $1m to put a person on the moon would feed them for 500 years. so food would have to get a lot more expensive before one could even consider exporting excess population to the moon. where, as everyone knows, food is so plentiful it's free.