On 21-Oct-98, Justin Baugh wrote:

There simply wouldn't be enough resources to deal with 1.4875 billion 
people emerging at once (this of course assumes everyone gets
pregnant at the same time)....the logistics alone would cause chaos.  and
once that occurs, you get war, reducing the male population even
further...see my point?

   Of course, the war and conflicts would be fought mainly by woman since
it is too expensive to future population curves to have males fight.  So
war itself may be a prohibitively expensive endevour for most societies
at that point.
   But the main point remains that most social endevours would be funneled
into child care and educaton, at the expense of most everything else.
And even at the end of the day, a Red Plauge would herald the effective end
of most cultures within a generation!  (Meaning in 50 years + 1991 you 
might have 250 Million people on Earth, with the West, Asian, and 
Islamic mainstream culture surviving, but pretty much as monocultures.
There wouldn't be much else).
   There is even the possiblity of a single human culture developing
in the end from the surviving threads of mankind (still mostly 
womankind).  The balence of power might also shift to a female run
society within a century.
   In the long term, human society may decide to maintain a high 
female to male balence (75-25 or higher) instead of 50-50 to 
ensure the safety of a matriarchal world culture.
   This is not even taking into account technological development
in biotech and fertility changing the equation somehow (such as
an artificial sperm being developed to allow two egg cells to 
be combined to form a single fetus-and yes, you still need sperm,
since in effect you are fusing two embyros).(1)
   For a moment, suppose a scenario where in 7+ years after the
Red Plague, techniques start to be developed to allow the fusion
of fertilized eggs to create females.  Affluent socieities in the
west and Japan (which would have more resources per person available
to them, and pay higher salaries per capita post plague) may 
decide to go this route to the extent they can afford to do so.
Add in the ability to sex select children and the political 
and social pressure may shift the percentage of female births 
upward as a permanent trend.
   Prognosis: humankind will suffer a massive die-off to 
about 200- 250 million total population, but may be 
able to survive.  The length of the crisis period would 
be 33-55 years.  Technological development could make the
population higher (toward 350 to 500 million equilibrium),
but would spark greater social instability down the road.
Furthermore, the resulting society would be fundimentally
different from the one we live in today, and may be 
permanently matriarchal in nature.

-jdb

*************************************************
Justin D. Baugh, CompSci@Rensselaer
www.rpi.edu/~baughj         email:baughj@rpi.edu
Author of NGE: New Age - http://www.rpi.edu/~baughj/evana
"Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, is still there." -
Philip K. Dick

Steven P. Cornett
cornetts@gemair.com