"Robert A. Heinlein - Time Enough for Love" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

had occurred at the twenty-first-century potential, our numbers would now be
of the order of 7 x 10^9 x 2^68 -- a number so large as to defy emotional
grasp; it is suited only to computers:

7 x 10^9 x 2^68 = 2,066,035,336,255,469,780,992,000,000,000.

-- or more than two thousand million billion trillion people
 -- or a mass of protein twenty-five million times as great as the entire mass
of our race's native planet Sol III, Old Home.
Preposterous.
Let us say that it would be preposterous had not the Great Diaspora
taken place, for our race, having reached the potential to double three times
each century, had also reached a crisis under which it could not double even
once-that knee of the curve in the yeast-growth law in which a population can
maintain a precarious stability of zero growth only by killing off its own
members fast enough, lest it drown in its own poisons, commit suicide by total
war, or stumble into some other form of the Malthusian Final Solution.
But the Human Race has not (we think) increased to that monstrous figure
because the base figure for the Diaspora must not be thought of as seven
billion but rather as a few million at the opening of the Era, plus the
unnumbered, small-but-still-growing hundreds of millions since, who have
migrated from Earth and from its colony planets to still more distant places
over the last two millennia.
But we are no longer able to make a reasoned guess at the numbers of the
Human Race, nor do we have even an approximate count of the colonized planets.
The most we can say is that there must be in excess of two thousand colonized
planets, in excess of five hundred billion people. The colonized planets may
be twice that number, the Human Race could be four times that numerous. Or
more.
So even the demographic aspects of historiography have become
impossible; data are out of date when we receive them and always incomplete-
yet so numerous and so varied in reliability that several hundred
humans/computers on my staff keep busy trying to analyze, collate, interpolate
and extrapolate, and to weigh them against other data before incorporating
them into the records. We attempt to maintain standards of 95 percent in
probability of corrected data, 85 percent in pessimistic reliability; our
achievement is closer to 89 per cent and 81 percent-and getting worse.
Pioneers care little about sending records to the home office; they are
busy staying alive, making babies, and killing off anything in their way. A
colony is usually into its fourth generation before any data reach this
office.
(Nor can it be otherwise. A colonist too interested in statistics
becomes a statistic himself-as a corpse. I intend to migrate; once I have done
so, I won't care whether this office keeps track of me or not. I have stuck to
this essentially useless work for almost a century partly through inducements
and partly through genetic disposition-I am a direct-and-reinforced descendant
of Andrew Jackson Slipstick Libby himself. But I am descended also from the
Senior and have-I think-some of his restless nature. I want to follow the wild
geese and see what is happening out there-get married again; leave a dozen
descendants on a fresh uncrowded planet, then-possibly-move on. Once I have