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Earth Officially Home To 7 Billion Humans
New submitter arcite writes "It's official: planet Earth is now home to over seven billion ugly-bags-of-mostly-water (otherwise known as humans). We're adding ten thousand new humans every hour, or one billion every nine years. Head over to 7 Billion Actions (put together by the UN with the help of SAP) and check out the population map data. Short of adopting a strict diet of Soylent Green, what viable solutions will enable us to survive on this increasingly crowded pale blue dot? What will the role of technology be in supporting this many people?"
We're lucky as hell that the extra billion people live in starving, uneducated, under-developed or developing countries. Because if they didn't, the planet would have gone to hell yesterday.
Not so lucky for them, but what can you do.
Overpopulation you say? I doubt we could colonize other plantes now, I guess a large scale war would be in order?
It feels like just yesterday we crossed the 6-Billion mark. I remember when I was younger (about 30 years ago) there being 4-billion. The number isn't just increasing, but the rate of acceleration itself is picking up in a scary way. You think of these things as being long-term, but when you can see it happening over the course of your own lifetime...
I'm sure you meant "seven billion ugly meat bags" meat bag.
FP meat bag.
This is only one solution to population control that is 100% successful -- affluence. Only poor people can afford to have kids. Rich people don't need them.
I, for one, welcome our new crystalline overlords. Quick, dim the lights!
It's self-regulating.
Or as the great 80's thrash band Nuclear Assault put it, "apathy creates despair"
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
Maybe I'm a bad, horrible, terrible person, but I keep hoping that Bird Flu, or some other similar pandemic, rears its head soon-ish. There's too many damn humans already and the rate of growth continues to explode. That's right, I'd like to keep what few resources we have to myself.
It's getting crowded in here! Time for world war 3 ...
to prevent over-population. It's hard to get a girl down to the basement; willingly.
well maybe they can keep using IPv4 with NAT
Educate and electrically empower them. The growth rate will become negative, just as it has in the Western World. The problem is actually how to stop us from dying out.
Obviously the solution is to transition away from the current paradigm, where every person has their own physical hardware. We must move to a new architecture, where a single body can concurrently run numerous minds, greatly increasing overall efficiency and reducing waste.
I would come up with a clever acronym, but schizophrenia has way too many letters.
I believe that nations and unions are going to have a larger demand for military technology in the future. To protect resources they already have, to acquire more resources from their neighbours and to protect their borders from the influx of refugees from war zones and various lands that can't sustain them (for one reason or another).
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
Time to drag Bruce Willis back into the fray, so he can get shot at the Philly Airport, and David Morse can release the plague that will force us all to live underground...
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
It's just a matter of time before genocide comes back into vogue.
With the help of people like Norman Borlaug.
--fatboy
It is a well known fact that the more wealthy a population becomes, the less children are born and thus population growth stagnates.
Right now, the resources of third world countries are being willfully plundered by the 147 strong oligarchy corporations making the world as a whole less rich by concentrating wealth.
This is the only reason population is growing.
stop the concentration of wealth, stop population growth, its really that simple.
Is there some reason for saying that "today" humanity passed the 7B mark? Are the counts really that accurate?
There are really only two options.
1) Reduce the populations in India, Central America, China, Muslim countries, and Africa. (The rest of the world is doing a fine enough job depopulating itself, as it is.)
1a) Wait for China to decrease these populations through war. With the male:female ratio in China, there is a huge glut of unlaid males in China. Conquering wars is the most likely outcome of this happening, historically.
2) Reduce consumption. The only way to make this happen is to actually decrease production. This isn't going to happen without #1 happening, not willingly. Even if you decrease production artificially, you won't have the desired effect: it'll actually increase consumption some years later with the next, burgeoning impoverished generation.
So basically, you're looking at war. Worst case scenario, MAD. Best case, there's a "winner". Voila, decreased consumption!
The world population booms we're seeing now are precisely because the West, and the US specifically, has been a stabilizing force in world affairs for the past century. Wars haven't been allowed to culminate "naturally", and all the while advances have come in leaps and bounds making affluent life easier for everyone.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Progressive people: It will balance itself!
Conservative people: It will balance itself.
Human population is projected to peak at 10 billion.
Is it possible to equate the Human population with that of mono-culture farming. I'm sure there is a lot wrong with the analogy, but that is a lot of ecosystem for something to chomp through.
Don't mono cultures almost inevitably fail in dramatic fashion? (Surely I'll be called stupid for even thinking this way, but it is a real question).
With antibiotics failing us in piecemeal fashion, this is actually quite frightening.
This planet has enough resources to sustain billions more but not with the world sliced up and walled up by political self interests and governments that do squat for it's people. One world order? Hell if I know the answer but I do know what we have now isn't it. Suggestions?
The UN estimates of world population now indicate an increase until around 2075 (9.2 billion), and then a decrease after that.
Birth rates in all developed nations are falling fast, many are under replacement rate already. The US population would be lower than the replacement rate right now if it weren't for immigration.
The problem with Malthus is not the math, it's the model. Anyone can pick assumptions and make a model, and from there make predictions. Mathus erred in assuming that things would not change. An exponential curve is indistinguishable from a bell curve at the long tail beginning, so the evidence seemed to support his prediction.
What's changing is the demographics. Once raised out of poverty, people naturally start having fewer children. There are a variety of proposed reasons for this, and the evidence is very strong.
The prediction now is that once everyone is reasonably above the poverty line (mostly Africa, with some contribution from SE Asia) population growth will reverse.
Interestingly enough, in 75 years time there may be the reverse problem - population *shrinkage*.
This is not a problem. We can all relax about this particular issue, and focus on solving the other issues, on some of which population is dependent.
Once we eat all the animals, we will eat all the plants, then we eat each other.
Bring back saber tooth tigers.
Or we could go the high tech route. In every 7th grade on the planet put a pole that has a metal ring at the six foot level that has a million volts at 100 amps.
Do not put a fence or railing around it but put signs in every common language for the area on the pole saying, "Warning one million volts at 100 amps if you touch it you will die."
That or invent the Rubic's Condom and put them on every male at the age of 14.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Eventually we're going to end up a lot like Japan. Japan is a small place with a lot of people. Over time, we'll have small places in which to live, with fewer, more general purpose devices in the home that consume small amounts of energy. We'll eat smaller meals. In general, we'll make do with less because there's a finite supply of resources and a lot more people gobbling them all up.
We have quite a bit of time before that happens in the USA or Russia or China - those places have a LOT of vacant land - but we'll get there eventually.
We'll likely have to rely on growing "super foods" that are very dense with calories and nutrients. Lots of renewable energy sources. I'm betting Solar and Bio will be the big ones, with Biofuels being one of several solutions to the massive amount of human waste (poop). It is possible that more and more countries will start to enact incentives regarding breeding - either something very strict (you can have 1 or 2 kids, then you're sterilized) to something more flexible (you can have 2 kids, but any more and you lose certain benefits).
While food and energy are a concern, so are economies. With technology allowing people to do so much with so few people, what kind of work will people be able to find? Society needs only so many farmers, factory workers, etc., and with technology replacing hundreds and thousands of people... Where will we find work? What to do when a population is so incredibly productive that, say, only 30% of the population is needed to produce and service everyone?
Or, of course, with resources being strained with so many people, eventually People A are going to look at People B and say, "Hm, you know what, we need that fresh water supply more than they do..."
Perhaps we'll solve our population problems on our own and we won't have to worry about extreme population support.
Love sees no species.
Consider that it took until 1804 for the world's population to reach 1 billion. Then, it took another 123 years to reach 2 billion in 1927. It then it took 33 years to reach 3 billion in 1960, and 14 years to reach 4 billion in 1974. Most recently, it only took 11 years to add a billion from 1999 to 2011. Something has got to give.
what viable solutions will enable us to survive on this increasingly crowded pale blue dot?
The vast majority of people won't move away from the volcano even when it's rumbling and smoking. Voluntary measures are not viable on anything beyond the individual level.
There are plenty of viable solutions. Unfortunately, most of them are just not compatible with anything remotely resembling a free and just society, nor are they without their own set of consequences (EG China's One Child policy)
Biologically speaking, overpopulation is a self-correcting problem. The population will crash and rebound. Lots of people will die in an unpleasant manner, either through starvation or violence. It would be nice to think humanity as a whole could avoid a catastrophic correction. Individually, we're smart enough to see the writing on the wall, but collectively we're too dumb to address the problem in a pragmatic manner until it's too late.
Individually, all you can do is make sure you and your family are among the survivors: invest in the resources and knowledge to be able to produce your own food, and have the ability to defend it against looters.
In time we will probably have too few people: http://news.yahoo.com/next-challenge-not-too-many-people-too-few-112046879.html/
No matter where you go, there you are. So Enjoy it.
7B humans = 7B religions.
Remember, folks: Just because the function, locally, looks linear doesn't mean it's globally linear. Many, many functions (all the one's in your standard calculus text) can be locally approximated by linear functions, but globally act radically different.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
As I suggest here, the solar system does not have enough people: :-)
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-August/004174.html
As Julian Simon suggests, the more people, the more creative ideas:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
How else would we get the idea to grind up rock to fertilize soil?
http://www.remineralize.org/
Or to make solar power cheaper than coal?
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/29/ge-solar-power-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-in-5-years/
Or to invent the computer mouse?
http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/vision-highlights.html
Or to create terrific participatory democracies?
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2010
Or to move beyond war by thinking better?
http://www.beyondintractability.org/audio/morton_deutsch/?nid=2430
http://www.anwot.org/
Or maybe even to have cold fusion?
http://pesn.com/2011/09/14/9501913_Rossis_One_Megawatt_Reactor_Gets_A_New_E-Cat_Model/
The human imagination (empowered by education and health and access to basic resources) is indeed the ultimate resource.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Soylent Green was full of good ideas. The right to end your own life in a controlled and pain free way would free up resources and give people dignity in death. While I don't approve of directly eating the dead, it is more resource efficient than burial or cremation to process remains into some form of organic material that can be used safely in agriculture or for industrial lubricants.
With every major population growth story, you can guarantee there's going to be a lot of misanthropism, blaming the developing countries, so forth. Malthus is will be quoted. Then people will respond to that in anger, maintaining the false choice between insane growth and brutal population control.
In terms of consumption, the average Canadian needs a third less of resources, the average Italian 55% less - they don't lead a lifestyle substantially less comfortable than the US citizen. The average East Indian consumes an eleventh - yet in some parts of India where wealth is distributed sensibly, they have almost the same life expectancy and literacy rate.
There are, better yet, lifestyles that are eco-positive. It is possible for this world to be richer for all species as a result of the human presence, if done correctly. Some very startling theories about the pre-Columbian Amazon forest suggest that it was largely anthropogenic - that cultivation of the forest itself through biochar and seeding of food-bearing species yielded a win-win scenario for people and the environment.
It would be a grave mistake to ask what technology can do for this situation, instead of what's appropriate to do about it. *Appropriate* technology is important. For an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sohI6vnWZmk
to kill themselves to save the planet.
Stop turning food into fuel!
All those people having sex and I can't get laid.
Controlled breeding is needed. A maximum of two children per couple per lifetime. If one child dies before couple end of life, another may be made if said couple is still capable of breeding.
We should all eat vegetarian diets. It doesn't make sense to grow subsidized corn and then use it to sustain an animal that -- given a year or two -- will become food for us. Of course, we'd simply end up with a glut of food in the first world, along with some very angry dairy farmers because getting the food to those who need it is another issue entirely.
I don't know about you, but I don't hear the news reporting in about food shortages (with the exception of Africa, but that's a different matter). We indeed already have the technology to put more people in smaller places and keep up food production to match. When China starts to complain about food, then I'll be worried. The world isn't all that crowded. I see vast open space on my commute to work and every time I travel. That's just in the US too, there is open space even in China, so I wouldn't say the earth is anywhere near full.
There's so many opposites,
So many opposites
So many, there's so many, there's so many (x2)
(sung)
Let's have a war
So you can go and die!
Let's have a war!
We could all use the money!
Let's have a war!
We need the space!
Let's have a war!
Clean out this place!
It already started in the city!
Suburbia will be just as easy!
CHORUS
Let's have a war!
Jack up the Dow Jones!
Let's have a war!
It can start in New Jersey!
Let's have a war!
Blame it on the middle-class!
Let's have a war!
We're like rats in a cage!
It already started in the city!
Suburbia will be just as easy!
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
copy movies 1-2 child's max per family / women.
Been done in many movies or is part of the back round of the stories.
We do have the technical capabilities to provide automatic, vertical farming in almost any environment. The fact is, feeding the world and taking care of people is not profitable, in a world that revolves around money not human needs. Money is debt, for that is how new cash comes into existence. 97% of the entire world money supply exists as a number in a computer only. Due to mathmatically insane and ecoligically suicidal banking methods in use today such as fractional reserve banking, where banks literally create money out of nothing adding to their own coffers.
We can apply science in all areas of life, and should for the benefit of all Earths people. There are organisations the main stream do not tell you about.
To find out more about the money creation process, search Zeitgeist Addendum free on youtube.
Find out more about freeing the world, using technology to create an abundance of food, housing, clean water, and human needs. With no wars and no politics for all the worlds people. See The Venus Project .org and research a resource based economy.
Can't afford to feed your 13 starving children? There's a message there. The western world is largely at fault by sustaining these populations that are otherwise unsustainable. Sure, nobody likes the image of a starving child, and it's certainly not their fault, but if they survive they will only bring more starving children into the world, many of which will die. Which is the greater evil? Letting one starve today, or let them bring many more to starve a few years down the road.
Starvation is not something to be 'worked' through in those regions with chronic shortages of food. Having a horrible crop year due to natural disaster? That's one thing. Baby factories breeding more baby factories in a land without a single tree to be seen on the horizon? Famine is natures way of taking care of this. The more these people are supported, the worse the situation gets and the outcome will not be pretty.
Eugenics. Quality over quantity.
In the future we'll be able to watch 3D HD news reports of people starving while we sit with a plate of food that's only going to make us fatter.
In the earth's long biological history, my take is that whenever an organism stumbled upon a giant resource, the organism either exploited the resource or was soon replaced by one that could. Humans have done with oil what any other species on the planet would do if they managed to stick their long snout into an underground ocean of glucose.
Unlike most any other species, we've invested perhaps 10% of this windfall wisely: primarily in the form of information technology and reading the genetic code. The energy intensity of those technologies is constantly falling (the intensity of progressing those technologies is another story).
Also unprecedented in biological history: we're discussing the consequences of our giant slurp well before the consequence arrives in dire form (excepting the extirpation of megafauna biodiversity, which started long before we found oil, and has subsequently accelerated).
In fact, I'm pretty sure we're the first species on the planet to conduct a census to determine if our numbers were getting out of hand.
If god lobs another rock at the planet--like a late-popping popcorn kernel--I'm sure we'll give Deep Impact the old college try, notwithstanding that this would be our biggest intrusion on the cosmic plan ever and not lose too much sleep over the philosophical implications. Yet here we are doing what every successful species does (expand into the available niche) and wringing our hands as if our current circumstance is some grand exception to the history of life on earth.
Since the way of things seems to be cycles of boom and bust, if we succeed in pulling off the soft landing following our trillion barrel feast, we will all deserve a nice pat on the back for turning a trick not yet achieved by life on this planet. Many people seem to think the task at hand is to address a deviant transgression; I think the deviancy lies in our future efforts to mitigate the consequence of behaving exactly as mother nature made us. The biological tiller of fate has been swinging wildly for many billions of years. Only now do we propose grabbing onto it and taking the helm.
Correct, there is no "world" overpopulation issue. For more info, see the Wikipedia page on world population growth. A few areas of the world have a massive growth rate (mainly central Africa, plus a few countries in southwest Asia), and many of those are almost certainly overpopulated (since they cannot really support themselves).
But most of the world is around the replacement rate or lower. In many areas, the current population will go extinct if current rates continue. Even in the U.S., the total fertility rate in the United States estimated for 2009 is 2.01 children per woman, which is below the replacement fertility rate of approximately 2.1 (it's more than 2 due to premature death, etc.). In other words, the current US local replacement rate isn't enough to sustain the current US population. Immigration keeps the US population numbers going up; it's not due to internal replacement. The rates for many other industrialized nations are even lower. So for most countries, there is no explosive growth; instead, they are shrinking. Even if you think world overpopulation is an issue, the birth rate is slowing overall.
Most announcements about the "world population" figures don't make it clear that population growth isn't the same everywhere, and that rapid growth is actually really localized. It'd be just as accurate to say "the US local population is declining" since it is.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Ahh! Look at all the lonely people! Where do they all come from?!
War, pestilence, famine. The classics never get old.
The people who say we should "consume less" seem to discount people's pesky habit of eating and how we're gleaning the land and oceans bare.
Intelligent population control? He, he. That's a good one.
Do you really think that bird flu is going to stop at the border and tell the difference between you and Ruppert Murdoch? Some of the most recent cases have occurred in the upper Midwest and Northeast.
Mwhahahahahaha!
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Short of adopting a strict diet of Soylent Green, what viable solutions will enable us to survive on this increasingly crowded pale blue dot? What will the role of technology be in supporting this many people?"
- interesting attitude problem that is permeating all throughout this story's 'scoop', including this gem:
seven billion ugly-bags-of-mostly-water (otherwise known as humans).
.
Well, these ugly bags of mostly water have invented a way to continue their continuous propagation in this system, it's called capitalism, and it's a pill that is better taken in a free market (free of government of any kind), because any government's point is to grow its power to sell it, which breeds corruption and monopolies and destroys innovation, competition and wealth, promotes inequality and poverty.
The technology is free market capitalism, we know it works. It is the same technology that was used to bring a mostly subsistence farmer population into the innovative industrial and lazy post-industrial age, with only 5% of the population feeding the 100%.
Of-course with all the government subsidies, being a farmer has been so ridiculously difficult in the last 40 years, that the average age of a farmer is over 58 y.o. in USA, and farmers have among the highest suicide rates out of most other professions (and this statistic is not limited to US, it's a very common occurrence in the developing world.)
The farmers were and still are depressed, very few people go to study farming (or mining or managing such activities), but the world supplies of food are very limited today, I think farming (and mining) will once again become a worthwhile investment over the next decade.
We don't know what technology will be invented to help us with all our problems, but if we do not use the best technology that we know we have (free market capitalism), we'll see all sorts of problems: food shortages and riots, higher and higher unemployment, lower and lower standard of living.
We need to accept the fact that the governments do not know better, that they are not there to help anybody but themselves, that people need to be responsible and that 7,000,000,000 ideas (good or bad) are better than few ideas generated by all of the combined brain trusts of governments (who are truly just extensions of the banking system, that took over the world with the monopoly power to print money).
The most dangerous technology that we know is the technology of currency printing and thus inflation - this is the worst technology, because it gives some ability to buy productivity without actually participating in creating and increasing this productivity.
But therein lie the seeds of that system's own destruction, as the future civilization will cleans itself from this monopolistic corruption of governments, lucratively merging with corporate power. The true potential and ingenuity of human spirit will be unlocked by the reduction of monopoly power over our lives, and if we do not achieve this, we will see a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions, ending in a war and famine and there are plenty of those 'ugly water bags' that will just wither and die without nourishment.
We have the technology, do we have the strength of conviction to apply it?
You can't handle the truth.
When we realize that we will be forced to make the politically incorrect the topic of central discussion, what will it do to our own perceptions of ourselves?
When seeing millions die elsewhere as we expend little effort to prevent it, knowing that is almost certainly to result in a threat to our safety of our own families, what will this motivate us to do?
It makes a person question our own effectiveness of our own humanity, for what it is worth.
One can only be left wondering, is my and humanities number up given by my relative unwillingness to help work with others to solve the larger problem?
1.5 children per person, maximum. Thank you. The doctor will see you now.
Great that people raised out of poverty will have less children, but at the same time all those formerly poor people will want to raise their standard of living to something on par with the average American. If possible a bit better, after all we are a competitive species and "enough" is usually defined as "a bit more than my neighbor".
Care to think about what happens when 9 billion people start to use earths resources at the same rate as the current average American ?
That simply can not be sustained. Earth can not even sustain the current usage rate.
Some say technology will progress so far that we can supply everyone with a decent living.
I do not believe that. First, that is a big assumption. Second, it depends on your definition of decent.
My definition includes being able to go somewhere and not having to hear/see other people for a while.
I've A Modest Proposal, if you've an ear to listen...
It has happened in the past over thousands of years, and it will happen again and again.
Lesser Countries will never agree to stop doing anything to restrict population growth, as they want to be "bigger countries".
Hence, we run out of something and ...
Why do Americans generally tend to think that the problems in other parts of the world won't somehow find their way here, especially disease and famine. If global warming produces enough erratic weather it is not all inconceivable that one could get one or two consecutive growing too dry or too wet or possibly both Springs that essentially eliminate the growing seasons of most food crops, particularly now that vast infestations of numerous insect, fungal, and bacterial species from the tropics have largely eliminate most of the natural and human bred bee populations?
Think folks. It's your lives too that you are talking about.
A well funded civilian space colonization program, we have a lot of empty rocks in the solar system that we're not doing anything with and with a little work a lot of them could be habitable. Also, dispose of those pesky national borders that curtail the moving and trading of vital resources. It's about time we had one nation for one species and one planet.
Data's painting is making me dizzy...
We can enjoy renewal at the carousel.
Of course, it may not be needed since we are all killing ourselves with fast food, soda, and alcohol.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
Earth could easily support 40 Billion people and still have a stable and working eco-system. Earth wouldn't even be very crowded. It was here on slashdot where someone proved that todays entire population would easyly fit into Texas, and even then Texas wouldn't be particularly crowded.
Waste, bad education and crappy management are what put the world in the sorry state it is in now. Bad distribution of food, bizarely huge amounts of resources wasted in aggriculture, huge damages done with pesticides and clearing of rainforrests just because some ignorant doucebags want cheap meat every day, etc. pp. Seriously, just a little common sense applied to worldwide resource management and large amounts of our problems today would simply disappear. That's the problem. Not overpopulation per se.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
that you presume that you will be on the top of the food chain. That guy Ghadaffi thought the same thing, along with a history book full of others.
As the realities of Darwinian evolution close in on humanity, one has to wonder what species are we related to and does their fate tell us something about our own? Remember we are not really talking about other species but very much components of ourselves, especially when those who starve are human.
There is plenty of food *right now*. People are starving not because there are too many people, but because the economic principles that drive production and distribution necessarily include extreme imbalance.
More directly, as good capitalists, we just can't conscience the thought of giving food to starving people for free (even though we have so much of it that we pay farmers to not grow it, to make sure the price doesn't fall too low).
There are really only two options.
1) Reduce the populations in India, Central America, China, Muslim countries, and Africa. (The rest of the world is doing a fine enough job depopulating itself, as it is.)
1a) Wait for China to decrease these populations through war. With the male:female ratio in China, there is a huge glut of unlaid males in China. Conquering wars is the most likely outcome of this happening, historically.
2) Reduce consumption. The only way to make this happen is to actually decrease production. This isn't going to happen without #1 happening, not willingly. Even if you decrease production artificially, you won't have the desired effect: it'll actually increase consumption some years later with the next, burgeoning impoverished generation.
So basically, you're looking at war. Worst case scenario, MAD. Best case, there's a "winner". Voila, decreased consumption!
The world population booms we're seeing now are precisely because the West, and the US specifically, has been a stabilizing force in world affairs for the past century. Wars haven't been allowed to culminate "naturally", and all the while advances have come in leaps and bounds making affluent life easier for everyone.
Or all of those western countries that are now fighting epidemics of obesity could simply share the excess food they have with the starving third world populations. There is plenty of food on this planet, it is just not distributed equitably.
The virus won't. Medical care will. If the drugs to treat it cost even $200... even the most poverty-stricken in the US can probably get that together in such desperate circumstances, but that's a lot of money for a third-world peasant.
So the moon is looking is looking pretty good this time of year. Do we have any volunteers for leaving this planet?
Failing that, Japan's gotta shrink ray gun somewhere, right?
I'm not American, I'm Canadian. I live in the 3rd world. And I am a physician. Here's a tip for you: there ARE diseases that affect the poor more than the rich, those who live in dense communities rather than sparse, etc. Countries with better infrastructure have a huge advantage over those that don't. When is the last time you've heard of a cholera epidemic in the US? How about Typhus? TB? Plague? Oh there are isolated cases once in a while, but these are diseases that can decimate populations in the right conditions - they had no trouble doing so in the past. The difference is not because the people are different - it's the living conditions that are different thus making it harder for the disease to spread.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You can look up age distributions in Wolfram Alpha
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=China+age+distribution or estimated future distributions
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Saudi+Arabia+age+pyramid+2030
Japan is going to need robots
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=japan+age+pyramid+2030
The US, not so bad
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+age+pyramid+2030
If society uses life extending drugs and machines to keep humans around longer we're going to have a blow out of population. These new technologies that are in the pipeline will have to be controlled. That's going to open a whole can of worms as to who can or can't or shouldn't be allowed to auto-extend their body's use by date.
Stop seed patents. Instead of shipping guns and troops, ship teachers, engineers, and foodstuffs. Enriching life will lead to less fighting anyway. Stop consuming more food than we need, this will lead to less waste as well. Stop producing high priced junk, or at least put tariffs on un-nutritious foods.
Good healthcare and birth control. Families that are pretty sure their kids will be healthy enough that backups are not needed will readily make use of contraceptives to limit their family size to far fewer kids. Such a trend has been shown to work over and over in many countries.
Carl Sagan said, "The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it. But the way those atoms are put together." In the same way (albeit macroscopic), humans will improve and deepen their existing relationships between each other in order to live in this new global world.
The hallmark of any system is aggregation and connection. Technology is playing a huge role in furthering these concepts. You are all witness to an amazing period in history, have a nice day.
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
It's time for quality control in humans. We have an unending supply of idiots, criminals, and other defectives. It's bad enough that they are a burden for their community, but when they are allowed to have children....actually ENCOURAGED to have children...we go into the realm of a race to the bottom. Yes, I know, not all defectives have defective children, and normal or exceptional parents can have defective children. But, we live in an age where testing for genetic diseases is accurate an inexpensive. Sterilization is also inexpensive, compared with the costs of the damage of highly defective children. But, any of these measures to reduce the slide into idiocracy are only effective when a community takes care of itself.
A community which reproduces defectives without bounds is not just a threat to itself, but those around it, and eventually the whole world. We take action to attack the worldwide problem of global warming, which seems to point to one-world-government as the ultimate answer, but yet we ignore the fundamental cause of global warming: too many humans. But it is not simply the number of humans, but the balance of resource consumption and production, which is correlated to the level of technological development and long-term planning. If we view history, we can see that many times in the past a limit to human population seems to have been reached: but it is only a limit within a given level of technology. Humans would never have achieved this seven billion population of not for the ability of technology to change our world: such inventions as the Haber process and antibiotics have made this number possible. Yet the breakthroughs of the few are not enough if the populace does not have the means and desire to adopt these technologies. We have delivered cars to people that can't or don't want to learn how to drive properly, we have delivered a low infant mortality rate to people who don't want to practice birth control. We can have either an intelligent population of great numbers, or a stupid population of small numbers.
I come from a race which has tested only middle in the heritable IQ studies. I think I am somewhat more intelligent than the average person in my race, but I realize there are many more intelligent people around me, and that a percentage of this is genetic, heritable intelligence. The future for whatever children I may have would be far better off if I have fewer children than the people who have higher heritable intelligence than me, and I have more children than those whose heritable intelligence is less than mine. It has long been the case that the natural order of the world caps a given population at its means, more or less, by starvation, plague, war, emigration, and societal collapse. But the so-called 'humane' society which feeds the starving populations in countries which can not support their population is encouraging disaster. We made similar policy mistakes when fighting forest fires: forest fires were bad, so we put them out. We did not take into account the much greater problems that interfering with the natural cycle of burns would create. Now we have firebreaks, and controlled burns. Can we have controlled plagues, and population-breaks? Please?!
Big problem there.
Semi-correlated (not causation, I know etc) the physically hardy set doesn't capture the Frail But Smart crowd. It's an Intellectual world now.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
It becomes a matter of efficiency and smart planning. We have room for all these people, but in some countries we have huge sprawling cities of very low density.
Lots of large tower apartment blocks with good amenities nearby as well as well-planned farms world-wide to cover food usage. We've got a place like Seoul which has 10 million people in it but it has half the foot print of a city like LA which has under 4 million people in it. And there are entire areas of Seoul where the density isn't that high.
The cities need to be designed well, they need excellent public transportation and road networks, but there is no reason we couldn't make tons of smart cities to hold that density without it looking like some kind of prison.
Make the practice of medicine illegal.
Because America - at least the northern half, some parts of the southern continant are infamous for their slums - has running water and sanitation. That provides a lot of resistance to disease. They also have the best medical researchers in the world. The food supply has a significent excess of calories. I think the biggest problem in the event of famine would be political - in the event that production somehow got cut to the point that there was actual starvation, the obvious approach would be to introduce rationing, but this goes against the free-market princibles currently popular.
Please... stop... fucking... each... other!
WWIII
It is only an intellectual world, due to the existence of the support systems in place by modern society to enable that trend. (Green revolution and mechanized farming, etc...)
Pull that rug out from underneath, and the ones unable to survive will simply die.
Ironically, this will be the vast majority of the population, as most people in the western world have no conception of how to survive even a plane crash, let alone the crash of civilization as they know it.
In 30 years, civilization would be unrecognizable, but still existent.
What we need is a lab-made human-killing disease. That would surely solve this overpopulation problem. It would help if the disease transmitted itself through reproduction. Bonus points if you can design one that prevents one person being able to save another through... I dunno, say... blood transfusions.
Ohwait... we have one of these already, and we're fighting for a cure and preaching prevention. Silly humans.
Thanks for the SF references, submitter. Soylent Green and a Star Trek TNG reference mean extra geek cred!
Why is all the good stuff already modded 5, when I have mod points?
Have gnu, will travel.
Can't anyone here do simple math?
Suppose each and every one of those 7 billion people were given 1/4 acre of ground, such that a family of four has a full acre. Studies have shown that a larger family can easily provide very well for themselves on an acre of ground, if needed.
Now let's suppose we put all those people in one place. How much land would it require? I'll let you figure it out, but realize that every single human could then fit inside the country of Brazil, with plenty of the country left over.
Let me know when this planet really does get overcrowded. Until then, let's worry about real problems.
And yet I am still so alone....
Get off this rock.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
You never, ever, ever see anyone when talking about population say "Hey, maybe we can achieve the same lifestyle we have now without being so stupidly wasteful and then we can support a whole bunch more billions.
All the population control nutters base their ideas of what the "world" can hold on either some sort of agrarian fiction, or on us being as stupidly wasteful as we are now. The world can support way more people than we currently have, we just need to stop being stupid, we have the technology to build more densely, to build vertical farms inside our cities, and to generally do everything we do in the western world at a rate of efficiency which is several orders of magnitude better than we currently do. That's not even talking about what we'll be able to do in a hundred years or two hundred. Humanity is stupid and wasteful, but we don't have to be, the debate shouldn't be about "How do we stop population growth for one because that's already happening, and for another because it's not the right problem. We can't afford to keep being wastefully inefficient and we can't go back to some sort of back 40 grow your own food agrarianism either because the 6 billion people more than we had when we had that kind of lifestyle aren't going to quietly die in a corner.
Care to elaborate? One presumes that you're speaking from a position of authority here. Which plane crash(es) have you survived? What advice do you have to others that might find themselves in the same predicament? Oh, and do you have a newsletter?
Regards,
dj
We have plenty of food for everyone.
We just have "problems" with distribution.
I even saw a live news story of a farmer dumping tankfuls of milk into manure, just out of spite, in protest of some sort. I don't remember what ticked him off but for some reason he was prepared to get nothing in the ultimatum game rather than deal with whatever he didn't like about selling it for profit.
Btw, ultimatum game is game theory stuff where the first player proposes a split, and the second player has the right to veto it and have both of them get nothing.
On a strictly theoretical basis, it's better to take something than nothing.
In practice, the leverage of being able to deprive the first player of everything can motivate him to be fair.
The best thing we could do, for population control and in general, is to educate and empower women. That makes them less mere baby factories, for men and for their own self-defeating purposes. And it gives the (small margin) majority of people more to give back to more than just themselves and the few people immediately around them.
Ultimately our problem is not so much the number of us as the ratio of our numbers to our ability to communicate amidst that complexity. But women are globally so uneducated and so weakened that just improving their education and power would dramatically increase the overall power to communicate. Combined with the consequential slowing or perhaps even reversing the population growth, we'd have the whole problem pinched.
--
make install -not war
All we have to do is keep doing what we're doing. Our Greenhouse pollution is installing limits to our population even faster than our population is growing. When some more Greenhouse disasters force hundreds of millions of refugees, our species will no longer be able to support so many.
Nature bats last.
--
make install -not war
I'll go one farther.
Most people in the Western World (tm) would simply curl up and die if their electricity went out for any meaningful amount of time. That's not even getting into the prospect of actually having to secure food and fend off looters.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
as Captain America.
The good thing is that as long as people don't mind the cold, the heat, or the gravitation or the immense difficult in growing their own food, they should have no problem moving to other worlds. Based on the prices of current airlines tickets, no doubt a trip to the uninhabited moons of Jupiter will be well within everyone's budget.
After you.
that there aren't nearly enough of them to constrain the greed and gluttony of the average anti-environmental conservative.
The population is out of hand! Get rid of the 3 billion darkest ones!
No, not a plane crash survivor. What I am is a survivor of dire poverty, which is actually worse.
There is a reason why I know about edible plants, how to tie snares, and about sustainable foraging and hunting practices; my family depended upon them to survive.
No, I do not have a newsletter, but if you really want one, I would suggest the foxfire series. They started out as a postal order newsletter. The older publications are chock full of goodness. Everything from how to make wicker fishtraps, to wigwams. Good stuff.
Now, do you feel good about yourself for being snide and pretentious? I know I don't.
there goes the neighbourhood!
-
If we keep burning everything we can get our hands on, these vast northern lands will become viable, both for living and farming.
Install Flash so I can see a map.
Hans Rosling got some really interesting statistics on population growth ( http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth.html ) and a number of other issues related to this on TED ( http://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling.html ). His basic message is that the world has turned a lot better and that the average child/woman already is decreased to sustainable levels in most countries that previously were poor and suffered from overpopulation. In fact, the division "developed" versus "developing" countries and the accompanying fear of overpopulation is a heritage from how it looked in the 70:s. Personally, I just marvel at the possibillities. Never before have as many people been able to realize their potential as today. If we assume that the birth of a great genious (an Einstein, Mozart...) is of a certain low probability, and that on top of that that this genious would be born under such circumstances that it would survive and have the means to realize its potential, we can assume that we actually have more of those in our current society than ever before. As a side note.... this is also why I find the whole religious "stuff that are old must be true" a very strange point of view - by virtue of better education and more accumulated experience (exteligence), I think that we are more qualified to design a moral system today than some bronze-age herders somewhere in the middle east.
Care to elaborate? One presumes that you're speaking from a position of authority here. Which plane crash(es) have you survived?
I shouldn't be telling you this, because it's a secret... but wierd_w, a mild-mannered (though somewhat arrogant) Slashdot commenter by day, is actually Superman in disguise. He lost his job at the Daily Planet because of poor spelling.
No, not a plane crash survivor. What I am is a survivor of dire poverty, which is actually worse.
Look, I can't say I've experienced either, but I'm sure being in a plane crash is no picnic!
Pull that rug out from underneath, and the ones unable to survive will simply die.
I think that applies to all things.
as most people in the western world have no conception of how to survive even a plane crash
Fortunately plane crashes don't happen too often considering the number of plane flights that occur on a daily basis. Still a plane crash is a great leveller between first and third world travellers very few actually survive.
let alone the crash of civilization as they know it
Actually people in third world countries have a better chance of surviving a civilization crash since they (the third world) don't have so far to fall.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
What will the role of technology be in supporting this many people?
Not really support per se, but it will have a role in killing a goodly percentage of these billions off in a controlled manner over several generations - bioweapons (name your poison/nightmare - a Black Death Mk II, if as good at its job as the original, would take out about a fifth of the population, and I suppose our bioartificers can improve on that), plain old wars (though, it'd have to be a series of 'biggies' to make an appreciable dent in billions)..
Sorry, but as I'm getting older, I'm getter more jaded and cynical about the eventual fate of humanity as a whole.
"Heat?" "Heat is produced as a waste product of civilization." "I fail to understand," said Speaker-To-Animals. Louis, who as a flatlander understood perfectly, forebore to comment. (Earth was far more crowded than Kzin.) "An example. You would wish a light source at night, would you not, Speaker? Without a light source you must sleep, whether or not you have better things to do." "This is elementary." "Assume that your light source is perfect, that is, it gives off radiation only in the spectra visible to kzinti. Nonetheless, all light which does not escape through the window will be absorbed by walls and furniture. It will become randomized heat. "Another example. Earth produces too little natural fresh water for its eighteen billions. Salt water must be distilled through fusion. This produces heat. But our world, so much more crowded, would die in a day without the distilling plants. "A third example. Transportation involving changes in velocity always produces heat. Spacecraft filled with grain from the agricultural worlds produce heat on reentry and distribute it through our atmosphere. They produce more heat on takeoff." "But cooling systems --" "Most kinds of cooling systems only pump heat around, and produce more heat for power." "U-u-urr. I begin to understand. The more puppeteers, the more heat is produced." "Do you understand, then, that the heat of our civilization was making our world uninhabitable?" -- From Larry Niven, ringworld, 1970
3 billion gone, easy.
And if you do it with "clean" bombs, you'll be able to take over the real estate in a couple years.
http://www.worldometers.info/ still says we have 6 days to go, if it's accurate.
There are nut jobs out there who are still using the argument "We can't allow gay marriage because the human race won't produce!" Its pretty clear that the human race is reproducing far too much.
Read the book "The Limits To Growth--The 30 Year Update"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
Many people dismiss this book; but, from the wikipedia article:
It's been a couple of years since I read the 30-year update edition, but I recall being unnerved by how accurate their predictions have been up to that point; and I see no reason to think things will change. It is not going to be pretty.
"Don't blame the log for the fire." --Andrew Ratshin
The output of the process is greater than just one individual resource that is needed. By that I mean we get a vastly different set of nutrients from eating beef than corn so it doesn't make sense to simply skip the animal for efficiency of production.
I would say the percentage of people who believe you had to feed your family on foraging plants is close to zero. That makes you one of the 1%. Congratulations my new overlord!
Need to just have less sodding kids, is it really that hard? Nobody should be having more than two kids now. Nobody.
I can't understand all these other people suggesting ways we can manage as the population surges. What about our quality of life? What about the animals and plants who share this planet who's habitats we're destroying to make way for this? As for going to space? We can't manage this planet without wrecking the environment and wiping out species left right and centre, why in the hell would you wish us on any other planet?
We need to stop using the third world to prop up our dwindling populations and embrace it, and work towards an economy that deals with a population decline, and deal with the hardships therein. We're at fault in the West for continuing this trend and not facing up to the fact that endless growth is (very logically) not an option.
what viable solutions will enable us to survive?
Nukes. The west nukes the east, China nukes Russia, India nukes Pakistan. Nothing beats global nuclear warfare when it comes to regulating overpopulation. /sarcasm.
Afterwards, we're back to "out of Africa" scenarios (and out of south-america too, admittedly) -- it'll be a deja-vu!
Now that we know of one solution, can we, please, all be mature and come up with something better than this? Preferably far better?
Being able to survive a plane crash isn't as important as being able to survive a car crash. Planes don't crash verry often.
It's also harder to prepare for. A SAS survival handbook, some guns, some wires and fire stuff will get you a long way when civilisation crashes, but a plane/car crash is a brute force event. Preventing to be crushed is not easy.
Unless you're talking about surviving long enough to be rescued after a plane crash. That's much the same as surviving a civilisation crash, although one can assume a civilisation crash would give oppertunity to gain some resources (raid a shop or a warehouse). If you have that opportunity after a plane crash you're pretty much saved already.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
what viable solutions will enable us to survive on this increasingly crowded pale blue dot?
Thunderdome?
Decimation?
J.
Schizophrenia =/= "split personality"
You're thinking of Multiple Personality Disorder.
There's a great example of engineered multiple personalities in Peter Watts' awesome novel Blindsight.
Biosphere 2 failures: biodiversity not a cause
The lack of total biodiversity is one of the reasons why the biosphere 2 project failed so miserably.
It was actually because of the uncured concrete sequestering all the CO2 as Calcium Carbonate, resulting in dropping Oxygen. During the second mission, they sealed the concrete, as they should have done initially, but members of the first mission intentionally vandalized the second.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
Also... when they pulled Jane Poynter out for the hand surgery, they snuck supplies back in with her:
http://doney.net/aroundaz/biosphere2.htm
-- Terry
Three times per second, somewhere on the planet a woman is giving birth to another human being. I think we should find that woman and STOP HER.
If i recall correctely, UN Low / UN medium shows a stabilisation , but UN High does not. There are many scenario. However how probable is UN high comapred to UN MED and UN LOW I cannot say.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1554535956
then crunch some numbers --- 5.25 acres per person (36794240000/7000000000) --- note that this doesn't take into account whether or no the land is arable, and for many countries the number is _much_ smaller.
Optimistically one population projection shows the population peaking at 7.5 billion in 2020 or so --- here's to hoping that's correct.
We need to get every woman in the world to visit this web site:
http://www.billings-centre.ab.ca/
or read this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Billings-Method-Controlling-Fertility-Without/dp/039452120X
"Developed" countries at the same time:
1. Are terrified of global population boom.
2. Try to motivate their ageing societies to have MORE children while immigrants are kept out.
Way to go.
I would just like to say for the record, I had no part in this, so don't blame me!
Maybe in Europe, But Americans are a hardy bunch, I am not saying that a lot of people won't die in the United States just not most of them.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
so hard to get laid?
Actually, I was a child at the time.
Yes, my childhood sucked.
You don't have to believe it to be true. Truth is axiomatically what remains after you stop believing in it. I don't have to believe I know how to survive, I know I can, as I have done it before. The skills to do it are not necessarily hard, just not the skills most people today have.
In 30 years, civilization would be unrecognizable, but still existent.
While I agree with the remainder of your comments, I think you're off a few years on this estimate. Global population won't even double in that period of time, and there are plenty of places for humans to spread out still.
Just another day in Paradise
Only if by hardy, you actually mean fat. I suppose that excess fat will keep American alive a few weeks longer. They'll all die off within a few months though, at best. Assuming they don't starve because the grocery stores are closed, or freeze to death because their electric heaters won't come on, then they'll be killed by one of the more intelligent looters that see than as a potential threat and/or competition for survival.
You don't learn how to survive by mowing your lawn twice a week, or making sure that your brand new car is waxed and waxed and waxed!
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Actually it's the opposite. It's BECAUSE of the undeveloped countries that the population explodes. It's because the rich and powerful 1%'ers keep the undeveloped world undeveloped that we have these exorbitant population increases. It's FACT that fertility rates (number of children born to an average couple) in undeveloped countries are high and low in developed countries like western countries. If the Big banks like the IMF would stop preventing developed countries from creating industry and wealth for their populations, the fertility rate in those countries would go down. People who have jobs and are happy spend less time fucking than those who have nothing.
- A Frog in a pond utters an azure cry. -
Not going to happen.
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/stranded-resources/
I am not part of the problem, proud to be 3,553,227,618!
Where's the fence? I mean shouldn't we have erected some sort of fence?
http://sharkdivers.blogspot.com/2011/10/i-am-not-part-of-problem-proud-to-be.html