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?"

Comments

There are only a few choices...

[CAIMLAS]

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.