Slashdot Mirror
World Population Expected To Hit 7 Billion In Late October
kkleiner writes "A new report documents the prodigious rate at which the world's population is growing. It was just 1999 when we reached 6 billion. And now within the next month or two we will have surpassed 7 billion. What does the continued increase in world population mean for humanity and for the the planet?"
7 BILLION PEOPLE. That's an insane amount of people putting an extreme burden on our delicate ecosystem. Earth is already at the brink of death, it's been estimated that when we hit 10 billion, there's no turning back.
We're killing our planet and all its lifeforms in multiple ways:
- Burning fossil fuels is poisoning the air
- Chemicals fertilizers are poisoning the soil.
- Chemicals in the animal food supply are filling us with antibiotics, growth hormones and other garbage.
- Nuclear power plants are flooding entire cities with high energy radiation
- Wind farms are killing birds with their razor sharp blades.
... etc. etc.
All the chemicals and radiation we're pumping into the environment along with the garbage we eat is turning us into a population of cancerous, fat, subluxated zombies. Many of us are the walking dead: zombies eating fast food and pumping Big Pharma toxins into our bodies just to keep us alive. Vaccines, the 'wonder child' of the Big Pharma industry is causing autism and other mental disorders at epidemic rates.
Want to live to be 100? It's easy:
- Maintain an organic, vegan diet.
- Swim only in non-chlorinated pools.
- Exercise in fresh country air, not in a city or near downramps (asbestos exposure).
- Have your spine assessed and adjusted regularily by a reputable Chiropractor. This will ensure proper nervous system function.
- Avoid the Big Med "Health Industry". MDs are in the pockets of Big Pharma. They don't care about you, they just want more money.
Bob
Chiropractic Saves Lives!
That way, we can cause food prices to go up even more, and starve a few hundred millions to death!
It'll be GOOD FOR THE PLANET!
I'm sure we can stick another billion people up there. If some die, well, more food and fuel for the survivors.
Child #7,000,000,000 gets the prize of officially being recognized as "Not actually a bundle of joy" and, on average, a harsh subsistence existence. Congratulations!
More quarrelling, more hunger, more poverty, etc.
...in world population mean for humanity and for the the planet?
It means we're all fucked.
"What does the continued increase in world population mean for humanity and for the the planet?"
It means war.
The system is out of equilibrium. There will be a correction.
Thanks for your insightful post. Not only did you miss first post, not make an intelligent comment, but you also misspelled two words. Very tough to top that kind of fail with only one "sentence".
Mostly, it means that we are ever the more closer to facing the facts that we can't all live consuming as much resources as the "developed" parts of the world are. Sooner or later the shit will hit the fan, one way or the other.
(Not that I claim to have a solution, or be any better myself...)
.: Max Romantschuk
And here's where they are http://www.indexmundi.com/map.aspx?v=Birth+rate%28births%2F1%2C000+population%29
It seems promising that PRC is not among the worst.
people are board and dont have a lot of money to spend, so they stay at home
I think having kids means you're planking wrong.
Psychologically, like most people, I stopped sensibly digesting the numbers when we crossed 4 billion. The best video on the subject remains Hans Rosling's http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes (BBC)
Gently reply
Shitting out children like this really isn't going to help anyone. Though I would expect certain areas to churn them out like no tomorrow, 1 billion in a little more than a decade is not an insignificant amount. Its an absolutely insane amount when you consider infant mortality and life-span rates of some areas.
What does the continued increase in world population mean for humanity and for the the planet?"
War
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Turns out to be disingenuous then...
Nullius in verba
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager
Paul Ehrlich, famous for writing the population bomb, entered a wager with Julian L. Simon that used the price of some indicator comodidy metals to gauge resource scarcity as a predicted result of overpopulation. Anyways, historically speaking, Simon came out the winner when the index prices fell between 1980 and 1990.
That being said, and my own personal admiration for the free market being laid out in the open, I do believe that there will be a decade where the proverbial Ehrlich's will come out on top. It is simple physics; the high concentration deposits of minerals will be depleted and we will all be left wondering what to do. It is certainly scary that in 13 years the population can rise by 1 billion.
Anyone that has ever seen a photo of the Earth from orbit knows resources and even space on the Earth are limited. This idea of constant growth is inherently insane. Space travel isn't the solution to the population problem since it would require moving nearly a billion people a decade just to keep up with the current growth rate. Space is about long term survival not growth. Most of the fisheries have already collapsed and much of the world is facing water shortages. Civilization existed for thousands of years without gasoline but it can't survive without water. Either we limit population or mother nature will do it for us. We can't high tech our way through the mess since we are already running short of things as basic as copper. The two biggest critical shortages are water and land suitable for growing crops. Extracting water is expensive and they aren't making more land. We change or change gets forced on us.
Business as usual then.
This enormous wave of young people -- kids born in the 80s, 90s, 00s -- are going to topple established trends in ways we cannot imagine. This population increase of one billion people in ten years means that one in every seven people on this planet is under the age of majority. In ten years you'll start seeing change on the scale of the Arab Spring like you wouldn't believe.
This is why all those sob-story TV ads imploring me to donate to help children in poor countries piss me off. Not because I'm a cold-hearted bastard who doesn't want to help, but knowing that such help will make the overall situation worse.
Add in religious-mandated foreign policies from the former Bush administration and the current Harper-led Canadian government, which in part required that any funding to humanitarian NGOs must not promote or even mention any birth control other than abstinence (never mind abortion), and you have a classic snowball effect where there will be even more impoverished children being born, with the same or fewer people back home able to donate their own money, and less tax dollars to fund the foreign aid.
3rd world population is increasing exponentially while developed countries' populations are steady or even declining except for immigration--this isn't rocket or climate science, it's simple, indisputable math.
Around 40% of the corn produced in the US goes to ethanol.
It's obviously not a question of whether we can support 7 billion people, since we basically are, but whether we can support the increasing growth rate. If you look at this graph, you can see the population is projected to level off around 10billion or so. And if you look even closer, you can see it's really a question for India (and to a lesser degree, Africa): can India handle its massive population growth? If so, then the world can handle it, too. If not, then they are going to suffer a lot.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Unfortunately the areas that are experiencing the highest population growth are not first world countries. They are the countries which are unable to sustain their population, and depend on government (usually not available), or international hand-outs to survive.
If we want to solve this problem, we must cut aid to areas which cannot sustain itself. I realize that's harsh, but creating a life does not entitle it to live. There's a reason we fight to survive, and getting hand-outs (for the long term, not just some short-term disaster) due to unsustainable population areas means we're just making it worse.
Cut off the aid, and let the population re-balance itself on what can be sustained by these 3rd world areas. This will lower demand on resources as well, and allow the world to grow at a more moderate pace.
What does the continued increase in world population mean for humanity and for the the planet?
It means we're all fucked. That's what. When more and more people compete for the same resources, somebody or somebodies starts dying. Or we all make do with less. You figure out which one.
Another Anon Coward comments:
He's right, you know. Even in the Youtube comments section you would get pulled up for being so inane. Your UID suggests that you are a new user. Kindly put more thought into your comments. I bet you don't even know about Natalie Portman's love of hot grits!
Another brilliant retort. I am overwhelmed by your genius.
> I did not know I was being graded
Now you do. Everybody who reads your post evaluates it, and in this case that evaluation doesn't take long.
> fuck off and die
If he does that, you'll still have to deal with his offspring.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb
Back in 1968, this book was published talking about how there was going to mass starvation across the globe and everyone would die because the globe couldn't handle the population of the 1970s. Obviously, there is always hunger around the globe and that shouldn't be discounted, but the UN report notes that the percentage of the world's population who qualify as "undernourished" has fallen by more than half, from 33 percent to about 16 percent, since Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. That was when the population was around 3.5 billion, or half of what we're about to hit.
So I'm skeptical of alarmism.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
More people means more capacity to produce. Love them or hate them Japan, russia and china are showing the world how to manage (or how to not manage) demographic shifts. Places with money are taking steps to reduce massive overpopulation, places without it are still growing.
For decades we all assumed chinas vast population was their great weakness, not enough resources for everyone etc etc etc. As it turns out the most valuable resource is people, with energy (not electrical energy, more personal ability to work energy) and education, because everything else can be created from those two things. Not enough coal, uranium, oil etc? No problem, we'll invent something else. Too many people? No problem, we'll figure out how to make birth control.
Yes, it means more people, especially in africa, will probably starve to death. That's another problem we can solve if we bother to.
The biggest problem we face isn't 7 billion people, it's politicians who are unwilling or unable to make tough choices about how to deal with whatever specific challenges that creates in the long ru. I don't think anyone is really fond of chinas 1 child policy (or moreover its implementation), but the alternative is the mess that is india, where children are legally obliged to support parents, and there's no incentive, to have less children. Education and food production can catch up, or keep up, with the people we have, if we create reasonable incentives to limit family sizes and solve problems. And if governments aren't willing or able to make choices like that the people in those states are beyond anyones ability to meaningfully help in the long run anyway, so we'll try, and fail.
When you're too lazy to punctuate, you fail at life.
What does the continued increase in world population mean for humanity and for the the planet?
For humanity it means that there are more humans, for the planet? FUCK THE PLANET !
Bloody Catholics having bloody children they can't bloody afford to bloody feed...
In first world countries, reproduction drops durring economic downturns. This increase in population is almost entirely because or third world countries.
I wonder if the rule that a new aircraft is ready to fly when the weight of its documentation equals the weight of the aircraft applies to the weight of all humans compared to the weight of the earth?
The one that keep having children forcing them into a life of suffering, poverty, slavery, or famine?, or the ones having the means, but doing nothing to prevent that (i wonder for how many centuries would be eradicated famine from the planet with the banks bailout money), or the ones that or the ones that even know how much will suffer the childs born in certain conditions, still ban abortion, or the ones with the best intentions that ends making things worse for most, or...
Well, only the toughest, most self-sufficient babies survive without anybody taking care of them, so we probably won't have too...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
I know you were kidding, but I got tired of people talking about 'unused land' back when the world population hit six billion, and I did the math to show how stupid an idea it is.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones
Hope they're not right, not much else to say.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." - Albert Bartlett
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9znsuCphHUU
Can somebody mod this crap down so that it doesn't appear any more?
Slashdot is tolerant, but if you are plain stupid there are many many sites out there who can cater for your needs. Stop messing things up for the rest of us with your inarticulate drivel.
Some of us are still waiting :-)
Our industrialized society makes large families less important -- in fact kids are a monetary drain. But to non-mechanized farmers as are common in the third world, kids mean more hands working in the field, more likelihood of survival.
Then there's death. A family here with one kid will actually see an improvement in finances if that kid were to die. That farmer family's kid dying means they might not be able to tend the crops and produce enough to eat.
Then by old age if you and your kids haven't each produced lots of kids, there's nobody to take care of you.
Learn your own freaking language. Get someone to help you if you cannot figure it out for yourself.
Soylent Green
though made mention of in the article; i think it would be generally instructive to visualize where on the planet are the populations rising significantly. it's overly optimistic, i'm sure, but it might help to drive some international efforts to promote basic birth control measures.
Humans are complex social creatures. When we over populate some people will not notice or care while others will suffer. Going even further, we will create methods by which more people can feel at ease and even some of the suffering people can create an incorrect context to feel better about it. We can lower statistical thresholds on just how bad poverty is... among other things.
We still have an influential amount of people who refuse to admit and another who refuse to adapt to the climate crisis we are in-- which is CAUSED by over population... sure, blame technology for it-- if there were fewer people wasting and polluting the climate could handle it better.
If you think a quality of life on par with the EU is a good goal, then you've already picked something impossible because the planet can only sustain about 2 billion people at those living standards; and possibly over the longer term the climate may not handle that either (but likely it would be slow enough we could adapt?)
JOBS: the big deal is jobs. there may be enough food to go around even today and we can ignore the fact it'll not keep up with population growth; because we don't have economically viable means to distribute the food / resources to WORKING peoples of the world who deserve equal right of access. We don't have enough gainful employment for the world; we have far far less meaningful jobs because we must create consumerism in order to prop up pointless jobs; this increases the resource consumption at a higher rate than population growth in order to maintain continual economic growth (which isn't sustainable either.) After we remove the cheap exploited labor and replace it with robotics there will be even more people unable to find work and we will have to invent even more meaningless jobs... something which seems unsustainable as well.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Interestingly, the article sticks with generalities and doesn't go into the specifics of where population growth is occurring and what impact it is having. What we don't want is for a less developed nation to be in a zero sum game for resources and have an expanding population. It's also not good if this growth occurs in poor nations, but is supported by highly developed nations, either directly through international aid or indirectly through immigration (e.g. the US's population growth).
Obviously every life is important, but is the increase in productive members of society or in impoverished people needing support? I.e. are they net producers or net consumers of the world's resources? If it's the former then it's cause to celebrate, but if it's the latter then conditions are going to deteriorate for most people, especially said poor.
With all the rules, interdictions, health care and all, we are directly tampering with "natural selection", so more people, who would otherwise die, continue to live after diseases or accidents that should have left them dead. Of course, we improve our life expectancy with the more and more sophitiscated health care that we provide, but we artificially increase our life expectancy, and our birthrate with the survival of more and more premature born babies. I am not saying this is bad, but this is certainly one of the reasons that makes the population grow faster and faster.
That Dominion 'igions and other religious shibboleths are alive, well and still spreading their dogmas.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
perhaps when God told us to go forth and populate the Earth.... he had made the (mistaken) assumption we'd know when to stop.
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
I love these kinds of articles on slashdot. It always inspires so much conjecture by commenters who know the only accurate growth model for the future.
I'll do the intro for the rest of the wikipedia quotations erhm I mean comments.
And in the optimistic corner with over 50 gen modified crops on his record and boasting over 12 green patents we have the Cornucopian.
Hailing all the way from 1789, inventor of the term "water war" in the pessimistic trunks, the Neo-malthusian.
Now gentleman I want a clean fight. That means no pie-in-the-sky technologies for you cornucopian and no fudging available food supply number by you neo-malthusian. I want to see links to graphs on at least extrapolated growth numbers, corn and water usage. If you manage to find out the address of your opponent, by all means, biting, scratching and off course head-butting is allowed.
This fight is brought to you by crystal ball inc. "We know you were gonna by 'em that's why we made 'em"
Let's get this thread underway!
Current Population:
http://tinyurl.com/currentpopulation
6.9 billion people
World fertility rate for population replacement:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility
2.33 children per woman
From:
http://tinyurl.com/futurepopulation
According to the United Nations, the global population could be as high as 11 billion in 2050 or as low as 8 billion, if the right programs are put in place now.
Population growth stretches natural resources to their limits. Deforestation, food and water shortages, and climate change are all intensified by the addition of nearly 80 million people a year to the world's population.
With nearly 7 billion people already we are facing issues such as climate change, species extinction, deforestation, famine, etc. All of these are the result of overpopulation. I contend that we can't support 10 billion, much less 7 billion. We are removing natural resources at a rate faster than the rate they can be replenished and polluting the world to the extent that glaciers will be melted in less than 100 years resulting in sea rise that will leave a lot less land for people to live on. Although these changes are accelerating they are still happening slowly when compared with the human lifespan. Most people don't even realize the damage we've already done. Our leaders are incapable of understanding or simply deny the problem. I see it as self correcting though. We will continue to damage our planet until the point where there is not enough food for everyone to eat or enough land with hospitable climate. At that point, hundreds of millions or maybe even billions of people will die off due to lack of food or war or disease. Those that remain may stand a fighting chance but will live in a much different world than we now live, and it may not be different in a good way. Just look at what happened on Easter Island, their entire society collapsed due to overpopulation and the depletion of their resources plunging the population into war and famine. That's our future on a global scale.
Does the 7 billionth baby gets a free car?
We all know what the solution to the overpopulation problem is!
The newest product is Soylent Green, a small green wafer which is advertised as being produced from "high-energy plankton." It is much more nutritious and palatable than the red and yellow varieties.
In most industrialized countries, the native growth rate has slowed substantially in recent years, and in some has even started to decline. Right now, for instance, the only thing that is keeping North America's population from actually dropping is immigration from other countries.
Ultimately, the finite resources available on this globe will catch up to the population growth rate and it will start to level off.
As there is no appreciable growth in industrialized nations already anyways, I do not think that most of them have much to worry about with regards to massive numbers of people starving to death or dying of some other cause related to overcrowding.
National Geographic has been running a series of articles that try and answer the summary's question:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/7-billion
I thought in another article we already discussed how we might be reaching the peak population soon which will start to decline?
It took just 13 years to go from 6 to 7 Billion. I am assuming it also took 26 years to go from 5 to 6 Billion. However, I think it took far less than that.
I remember being a kid and reading that the world population was only 3 Billion in the early 70's. So, in the space of 4 decades, the world's population more than doubled.
Given our scale of population growth; it's fairly to easy to guess the following:
8 Billion in 6 more years == 2018 (assuming a start @ 2012)
9 Billion just 3 years later == 2021
10 Billion just 1 year later == 2022
War/population crash/food shortages/global catastrophes/plague somewhere by or before 2023. I'll be 58 by then, so I will probably live to see the great purging of mankind from this planet.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
So peak humanity occurs when the children of 2005 begin to die off, so let's say about 2070 or so. At that point, there will be fewer live humans than the year before.
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/07/peak-child-and-the-graying-population-of-the-developing-world.ars
The world is getting better, slowly, incrementally, always two steps forward and one step back, but guys like Ehrlich are just shills. Malthus was wrong. The real correlation is inverse: as economic growth increases, rate of child births decreases. It's only when people are poor, life is brutish, nasty, and short when we get an explosion in the rate of child births.
The next challenge of the human species will be to make sure that as many people as possible can enjoy the bounty of economic growth, which will then ensure the long-term sustainable reproductive future. And to do this means economic growth which is also sustainable, so it's a solid argument in favor of high-density energy supplies, economic efficiency and an explosion in human creativity. Expensive energy, anything economically inefficient will have to be replaced.
But this is all an engineering challenge, not a philosophical or moral or existential challenge. It can be done, and it will be done. Slowly, incrementally, always two steps forward and one step back.
tl;dr
Article is a troll.
Dan Quinn has some very insteresting ideas you might want to check out:
http://www.ishmael.org/
Basically, it's all about food production. Once we freeze the yearly food production output at the current amount, population growth will stop. No extra famines or revolts (we're having those already, remember?).
His Book "The Story of B" contains a great analogy about the reproduction among mice.
Ever wondered whats wrong with the world? http://www.ishmael.org/
Yes, Erlich jumped the gun, but that doesn't mean his thesis was wrong. He just didn't anticipate the mitigating factors that arose after he wrote his book. The bottom line is, our "standard" assumption of perpetual growth is simply incompatible with the constraints of a finite planet. And we can't keep relying on the "magic" of technology to continue pulling our collective ass out of the frying pan forever.
Spend an hour of your time on this video presentation by Dr. Bartlett. No doubt the early parts will seem "old hat" to a /.er, but stick with it and it may surprise you.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Lots of people here talk about "overpopulation" and how people are selfish and breed too much. Since they're saying this on the internet, in English, most of them are American or European. This means firstly they will be the last to feel the effects of any food or space shortage (and nope, being stuck in traffic during the rush hour is not due to overpopulation) long after entire regions in the third world have succumbed to mass famine. It secondly means that their lifestyle uses an amount of resources that could provide for an order of magnitude more of those selfishly breeding poor people.
It is not bad, really !
When in 2100,
and with the global fertility rate at the usual population replacement rate (around 2.5),
the number stabilise to the projected 10 billions,
we would be JUST 50% more people.
Since ALREADY we have the technology AND THE RESOURCES (yes, we have them) to sustain this population,
we just need to better organise social-economical-political.
Given what we have today in terms of food and water that's no problem - unless people start to copy cities like Las Vegas and demand even more golf courses in deserts ... hopefully both will start to rot in their own decadence in the next decades.
We aren't going to run out of space either. There is room for at least another billion people in North America alone. Look at a map, compare it with China (pop. 1.3bn) and "South Asia" (India + Pakistan + Bangladesh; pop. 1.5bn) and you'll get the idea that the USA is just barely inhabited.
Resources won't pose much of a problem. We can live a long time on recycling what we have already dug out of the earth and stuff like iron or aluminum is practically unlimited on this planet. The only problem is energy resources like oil, gas and coal that are overused by industrialized countries - the USA in particular - and rising prices on world markets will lead to quite a lot of pain in those countries that are most dependent upon them. And yes, again the USA prefers not to endure any pain at all, so long as it can painlessly deal out a whole lot of pain to avoid it (be it through military, political or economic interference).
Developing countries, on the other hand will not care all that much. They lack the necessary infrastructure and investments to even use a lot of oil, gas or coal - which are their primary concern. The price of those resources is a secondary consideration - but the demand will still be high, because a whole lot of people using small amounts will still use a lot all told.
So the stagnating (aka developed) countries will face the problem of using less resources with their established infrastructure and resources, while developing countries can build it from the start to accommodate scarcer resources in some areas and will become much more affluent than some people tend to believe.
we should reduce the population by killing all the muslims. hitler had the right idea, he just chose the wrong race to exterminate.
"What does the continued increase in world population mean for humanity and for the the planet?"
Unlimited potential created by expanding human capital....
1350 - The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30–60 percent of Europe's population.
1918 - The global mortality rate from the 1918/1919 pandemic is not known, but an estimated 10% to 20% of those who were infected died. With about a third of the world population infected, this case-fatality ratio means 3% to 6% of the entire global population died.
Due to modern global movement patterns, it's only a matter of time before the population gets cut in half (or more) again. The next "big one" will spread through the community much faster. No worries.
Nothing, because the human population will peak around 2050, and decline back to around current levels (or slightly below) after that, according to demographic trends.
The only way to keep the population growing is to keep it poor. The liberals of the world are doing a great job there, but the depression is likely to eat their political careers before they can have much effect.
Prices are high because production is limited.
Natalie Portman can't eat hot grits; she has been turned into a statue.
Statue-based entities generally do not seek sustenance through food.
Japan and Europe haven't figured out some great secret of population control. It's simply that the more wealthy a nation becomes the less it's citizens reproduce. China is one of the few nations in the world that actually enforced population control. It helped keep population in check, but then so did starvation, war and inept government policies over the last century. The interesting thing in China is that increased affluence is also leading to a decline in childbirth. And coupled with the irrational value they place in boys over girls has lead to a situation where China has far more men than women. But beyond that, the Chinese government has already become concerned with the prospect of population decline, that future generations would be able to sustain the nation, it's social programs and public works projects.
And the real problem there has always been that everyone has been crammed into cities while the rest of the country is considerable more sparse. Even with the population they have there numerous apartment developments that sit vacant and cities built around factories that have become ghost towns when those factories closed.
Japan has already been suffering from the consequences of population decline for a long time and it's going to get worse. It's such a big concern that they're offering money to couples who have children. Every developed nation in Asia ranks near the bottom for birthrates. Most of Europe isn't far behind. If non-immigrant birthrates were counted in the US I'm quite certain they'd be pretty low too. Of course Europe, but especially the US still has a strong immigrant population that reproduces more readily. In the long run, that may prove to be a very good thing.
It's also been shown that the developed world produces more than enough food to feed the world's entire population. The problem isn't a lack of food, it's corruption in third world nations. It's no secret that much of what we donate to Africa never makes it into the hands of the people who need it.
As for other resources, well, fossil fuels are a concern. But there are numerous methods for generating electricity that are not dependent on fossil fuels and use largely renewable resources. And electricity is probably the most important resource we have.
I recently read Ringworld and found it quaint that the big concern was unchecked population growth. I think it's been sufficiently proven that population will never grow incessantly. There are far too many forces in play here influencing growth. I'm convinced that we're at a point where a blanket implementation birth control is unnecessary. What is important are things like the economy and the careful management of resources.
"I knew it. I'm surrounded by assholes" - D. Helmet
Ever watched a bacterial colony grow in a petri-dish? At a certain size, it starts do die in the center. When it hits the walls, it starts to die off completely. That is where this is going.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The arab nations, even those with high financial wealth never stopped breeding. Some of them managed to finance a relatively high standard of living purely based on oil sales. Iraq? Taxes? Unheard off. Same with Libya, the regime wasn't nearly as brutal as the west currently wants you to believe. Oh, people were tortured and killed but these were on the whole not people the west would like in the first place. See how one of the new libyan leaders was sent over there by the west for questioning.
But there is only so much you can do even with virtually unlimited wealth, the Arab nations exploded because they got to many idle hands. Not exactly poor, they are not starving to death like further down but living an entire life on hand outs creates unrests. And when maintaining the benefits becomes more expensive because of food prices... well... we saw what happened.
That is why China did not explode, China has a high population density and social repression and unfair distribution of wealth BUT people are working. They got a way out, not an easy one and not one that everyone will make BUT there is hope.
China has strict population control and NOT just birth control. You can't just get into China. The west has population control through its culture but is letting in a lot of immigrants. That was fine when there was a lot of work westerners did not want to do and we thought we could afford a large percentage of natives being unemployed (It is a nice capitalist idea that everyone should work for a living but you want to be the boss of someone who only works because he has absolutely no choice?) consuming tax money.
But the economy took a nose dive and suddenly having high un-employment and importing workers seems a bit contradictory.
About the only alternative is to create more work but how? And how are you going to get generations raised on not working, working on boring jobs? It always sound so good, create jobs but even if your scheme has some nice jobs, those will be taken by those with skills. How do you get the average london rioter or paris suburb kid working for a minimum wage in a back breaking job?
See how many of the arab spring protestors are university students complaining they can't find a job? Same in Greece and Italy. What did they study? Islam... liberal arts!... what kinda job creation can you do that demands these skills? There is currently a shortage of all kinds of IT staff especially developers/coders in Holland. Haven't had a job in my entire career as a web developer were we didn't have more then one position open often to anyone in the world... switch a dutch company over to English for one immigrant? No problem. Have seen it multiple times BUT never African (I have worked with a few blacks but their recent roots lie in former dutch colonies and they speak excellent dutch invariably). East European is the main source of IT talent.
This is a huge problem, now the revolutions have happened, things got to change but how? Were are all those people in Libya that got an automatic weapon going to find work? Oil industry? Not with an Islamic education you are not. There is a reason most oil companies are western. That Libya had a HUGE immigrant population itself. Work is hard and a lot of it ain't fun. So when you can avoid it, you will.
Note that this post may sound racist but places like Liverpool and Manchester are much the same, colonies of unemployed white people sustained by a magic income from the rest of the country for so long the culture has changed from factory workers to gangland. And while entire regions have it as the norm not to work, those in power says the country desperately needs immigrants from all over the world to do the work...that is not sustainable. Something has to give... see the riots. And the recent ones in London were not the first and other countries have had them too.
We are living in a world in a which a US coca cola plant is so efficient that a crew of less then a dozen can do in a shift more then a million can's per perso
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
What would you call the London riots? Norway? Paris riots?
War isn't always going to be army against army. War can happen right in your home town. It is called civil war. I don't know why, it doesn't seem very civil to me.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
what it really means is that there is now more women than ever before with whom you cannot have sex.
Bartlett ignores that solutions can grow exponentially, not just problems. See, for example:
http://unbridledspeculation.com/2011/03/17/the-exponential-gains-in-solar-power-per-dollar/
http://unbridledspeculation.com/2011/06/09/solar-cheaper-than-coal-in-3-5-years-ge-and-first-solar-think-so/
The Club of Rome made the same mistake in the 1970s.
See also:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
It's so sad how much despairing and conflict-promoting minisinformation is in this discussion.
Beyond that, there is room for quadrillions of humans in space habitats, and we've been able to build them (in theory) since the 1970s. You'd expect "nerds" might be more optimistic. Who is profiting from this despair?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Not if everyone wants to live in the style to which Americans have become accustomed. As I note in the link, for that to happen (given current tech), "We're going to need three or four New Earths."
To change that, you need to either (greatly) improve the tech, or (drastically) change the living standard and policies. Or a combination of both.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
> What does the continued increase in world population mean for humanity and for the the planet?
Isn't it obvious?
....we have our gonad-driven destiny.
We will replicate ourselves until we exhaust the ability of our niche to sustain us (in which case we die off down to a sustainable level), or some sort of predation takes place (disease, vampires, zombies, aliens) to do the same thing.
Or, until Disney cameramen chase us off a cliff into the sea.
I'm not sure why we are so certain that we're "different" from every other animal. As far as I can tell, despite a very thin veneer of non-instinctual behavior that we call "civilization" we respond in large scales predictably like most other social animals. (shrug)
-Styopa
I think at some point, people will realize China's birth control is a great contribution to the world.
China's population went from 400 million to 1 billion in 30 years before they adopted birth control in 1978. If they had not done that, we'd probably have 9 billion already.
I'm surprised no one's brought it up: solution (it's not a simple one) is colonization of space. Yeah, yeah it'd be cheaper to have a planet wide war, and many would die in the process. A lot of resources would be used up initially. It moves the population off of Earth though, doesn't it.
The globalists will increase their "not enough resources" propaganda while they fly around in private jets and live in 20,000 sq ft homes, even though the entire worlds population could fit in the space of NJ. There will be increased promotion of abortions, "vaccines" aka sterilization (see Bill Gates' videos if you don't believe ment), slower responses to catastrophes, and any other way they can think of to increase the death rate. It's really quite satanic, whether you believe in satan or not. They certainly do, and worship him.
Commander Taco is being replaced by Chicken Little in slashdot.
Expect numerous announcements on how we "just" grew by a billion in twelve years, while the previous billion took ten years and the billion before took even less, starting from smaller bases. For a more balanced explanation of the situation see:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/multimedia/2010/11/world_population
Yes they were while I was in college. You make deposits, you get paid. Hell it paid for books. I did not think anyone would actually use them to make kids! There are a lot more fun ways then making withdrawal. Fresh stuff is better, right? You get the added bonus of burning some calories and it is a lot cheaper!
Again, sorry. I really did not think that people would use it to make children. At last count I am the father of 102 children. And I never even went on a date with their mothers. I just hope no one calls for child support. 102 kids, dam. That is gonna hurt.
Often people wonder whether we will be able to support a population of 7 or 10 or whatever billion people. I don't find that interesting, I'm sure we can have many billions more on just this planet alone. The real question is what will be left of nature with 10 billion western style living people? Will we as a species be able to preserve any significant amount of wildlife, ecosystems and natural beauty for our children?
Repeat after me: We are all individuals
So, what happens if you give each of those 7 billion people 0.25 acre of land. So that a family of 4 would have 1 full acre. How much of the earth's surface would you require? That appears to be 1.75 billion acres, or 2,734,375 square miles. That's a LOT!
Wait. Just checked the wikipedia article on Brazil. It covers 3,287,597 square miles. Hmm. That's 83% of Brazil. And that still leaves the whole rest of the planet unpopulated. So, how severe is this overpopulation thing really?
1) We need more people so we'll have the necessary mental resources to solve the big questions like how to get off this singular rock and out into space before the meteor or comet with our name comes.
2) People need to consume less so that we can have more people to solve the big questions. People are living too high on the resources. And no, going vegan is not a solution, that's just a fantasy escape from reality.
More sales for my medical devices company. Yeah, baby!
an ill wind that blows no good
Beyond that, there is room for quadrillions of humans in space habitats
We don't actually know this. We've never got anywhere close to scientifically testing that proposition.
and we've been able to build them (in theory) since the 1970s
No, we really haven't.
We've had space advocacy groups in the 1970s claiming that space habitats will solve all our problems, but so far the only attempt we've made at actually building closed ecological life support systems has failed miserably and there's apparently been little interest in replicating the experiment since 1995.
In theory we might be able to mine a bunch of barren rock from the Moon, form it into cylinders, and toss it into orbit. Will that come anywhere near close to providing a viable habitat for humans? Not unless we possess the means for instantaneously converting desert sand into a self-sustaining ecologically balanced garden, and if we had that we'd already be using it in Somalia.
In my opinion, we should be committing Apollo-level resources to doing Biospheres 3, 4, 5 and so on. The knowledge of sustainable ecology gained from this would be immense and practically valuable, and could be applied to save lives almost immediately. And once we've got the sealed-greenhouse thing working on earth, after a hundred years or so, then we could look at the huge extra challenges of attempting it in space, where gravity is wonky and there's radiation and vacuum and shipping resources like fresh water up the well is hugely expensive.
But to claim we could do this in the 1970s? No. We were able to dream it in the 1970s. But those dreams weren't necessarily realistic.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Managed Resources will properly be strong buzz word in the decades to come. Along with corruption and struggling job markets.
Capitalist style nations always trying do something with development, such as housing and so forth? We live in a time of high and higher automation. We or our children will facing job shortages due to the efficency of companies and nature of hyper-capalistic economies. Look what happening in Europe, the social demorcacy's employed way too many people to keep them working. Now there too many people, not enough money, so there riots, crime, and social unrest.
Sadly, unless break through in technology, such as development of colonization of other non-Earth bodies space isn't found, only way our species and our planet can survive is there being LESS of us. A terrible time is coming, one current leadership isn't able to withstand since they worry about their electablity and what special interests will want vs what may need to be done.
I hope someone can figure out good way relieving the stress.
Arrogant twat!
7 is special in the bible. Maybe the birth of the baby that caps off the 7 billion will start the rapture, which has been delayed from earlier estimates due to the unforeseen development of birth control (psychics and prognosticators can't nail EVERY detail).
Back then I'm sure the prediction would have been that China would have continued to decline to the point where you have something like a famine in Somalia only with Billions suffering.
We have already significantly degraded the renewable food and potable water supplies of the planet getting to where we are. Not only is there "peak oil" but also peak phosphorus (agricultural fertiliser) and water. We are using these resources faster than at any time in history after having already reduced fish stocks by 70%, arable land by 30% and potable water by 20%.
Good luck with the theory that "technology and better resource distribution will solve our problems". History says it ain't so.
More quarrelling, more hunger, more poverty, etc.
Soylent green!!!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Any other problem (energy, wars, peace, economy,... ) is unsolvable if we don't solve the NP one.
Yet, if we have to stop making population grew, then, we better stop now (that still have some green fields and some nice places on earth to stay) that wait until everything becomes Mexico DC.
The problem is usually corrupt and oppressive governments.
People on their own don't generally live where there's no ability to make food -- they move.
The increasing population means nothing good to human and the earth but only causing more and more problems and it increase the pollution and enviromental problems. Ice are melting on the polar, animals are dying out...etc. http://www.visitourchina.com/
too bad the links (3 clicks deep) to the actual content are to a for-pay site...