Sunday, December 4, 2016

Reductio ad Absurdum

Reductio ad Absurdum  is a form of argument which attempts to disprove a statement by showing it inevitably leads to a ridiculous, absurd, or impractical conclusion.  That's what I tried to do in the previous post, showing that the idea that people now living settled lives should give nomadism a try leads to the ridiculous situation where everyone is on the move and nobody is maintaining all the systems that make it possible for 7.4 billion to stay alive.
Let's look at some maps.  I like to have graphics in my posts.
I like the color scheme on this map.  The writing on this map is too small to make out, but I think what this map is trying to show is population density on a per country basis.  The darker the color, the more people total live in that country.  Not surprisingly, Mongolia, that lightest of blue country sandwiched between black hued Russia and China has the very low population density that makes it possible to carry on a nomadic lifestyle.
Here's another map, probably a better one than the one above, even though I don't like the colors as much.  This one seems to show population density more by region than by nation state.  In this case, it's the gray areas where nomadism is historically prevalent.  So if you intend to go nomadic then maybe you should look at some of the gray areas of the world to do it providing of course that they let you in.  If an area is red, forget it.  Every square inch of the red regions already has a bunch of people on it and they don't need you.
Getting back to the reductio ad absurdum notion, we have concluded that nomadism is not for everyone, mostly because of practical constraints.  

No comments:

Post a Comment