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

We're lucky

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:We're lucky

[Anne Thwacks]

but what can you do

Bird flu is here to help!

Re:We're lucky

[johnsnails]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhH1chIk9_0 Apparently something like that might help.

Re:We're lucky

[couchslug]

Nature makes excess with the expectation they will die off.

Pointing out this applies to humans because we are part of nature is Politically Incorrect As Fuck, but it's also accurate.

Re:We're lucky

[multi io]

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

Why would the planet have gone to hell with an extra billion non-hungry people living in rich, educated, developed countries?

Re:We're lucky

[logical_failure]

If we had developed more than 1% of the available land, I might start to get worried. Drive outside of the city sometime. You'll see miles and miles of trees and weeds - in other words, potential farmland.

We're nowhere near the limit of what this planet can support.

Re:We're lucky

[turkeyfish]

Don't you think we should try to help them so that as they try to be like us we all don't wind up killing each other one way or the other as we collectively stomp all over the few remaining bits of planetary ecosystem that sustains us all?

Slashdotters really better get their sh#!! together or all the best gamers and problem solvers will loose, big time.

Re:We're lucky

[ShavedOrangutan]

I think we'd run out of irrigation water long before running out of farm land. But even that would be way off.

Re:We're lucky

[Smallpond]

Your head is in the sand, I think. Here's a land use chart for Iowa, tell me how its only 1% developed.

http://extension.agron.iastate.edu/soils/CLU_tables.html

Re:We're lucky

[__Paul__]

Yes, because Iowa is the perfect model to represent the entire world.

Re:We're lucky

[wierd_w]

Everytime I see this argument, I question the educational background of the person posing it.

That field of weeds and trees does have significant value exactly as it is. Contrary to many people's opinions on the matter, rampant destruction of biodiversity to develop farmland has a significant detrimental effect on the quality and viability of the total biosphere, human requirements included.

http://www.news-medical.net/news/20091204/Habitat-destruction-and-biodiversity-loss-can-increase-the-incidence-of-infectious-diseases.aspx

This means that such so called "undeveloped areas" serve a fundemental and necessary function for society exactly as they are, other than mere asthetic and entertainment values. They are NOT "worthles unless exploited".

The lack of total biodiversity is one of the reasons why the biosphere 2 project failed so miserably. The idea of a giant citywide metropolis like those from science fiction is not sustainably realistic, and human carry capacity of the planet is not merely bounded by bulk storage and nutritional requirements. The earth's biosphere is a terribly complex thing, and treating it as though it weren't and without due caution invites very serious consequences.

Re:We're lucky

[camperdave]

Uneducated, under-developed/developing countries are getting harder and harder to find. Soon we'll have to put the starving in regular countries.

Re:We're lucky

[Wyatt Earp]

How about Alaska, the bulk of Canada or eastern Russia?

Re:We're lucky

[SuricouRaven]

I'm not so sure. There are a lot of regions already suffering frequent freshwater shortages. Some US states, even. The six day war was fought in large part over contested water supply. The only way to get enough water may be desalination and distribution systems, which are very expensive.

Re:We're lucky

[wierd_w]

I don't know about you, but I can survive totally unplugged for very extended periods. (I routinely used to 'feral camp' for over a month in the summer as a kid.)

Couple that with the engineering background and diverse set of motley skills I have, as long as I didn't have to worry about idiots trying to mug me by force, I could live quite comfortably, even in otherwise total desolation.

I actually wish the wold would break down already in fact. The vast majority of the current crop of world leaders causing these problems, and a fair chunk of the people who enable them, would not be able to survive the collapse of western civilization.

(I would actually disappear from current society, if there were any sensible place to disappear TO, and would have done so years ago. A mass population reduction would defacto create such places.)

Re:We're lucky

[fiddley]

I have a strong hope desalination will get vastly cheaper when the need manifests. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that. There's already a number of small scale concepts that can do it cheaply. I don't think we're too far away from being able to utilise the oceans as potable water, but it's just the little countries that need it right now so why bother? As soon as Vegas (or similar) starts to wilt, I'd expect funding in this area to gain some traction.

Re:We're lucky

[interkin3tic]

If we had developed more than 1% of the available land, I might start to get worried

Everytime I see this argument, I question the educational background of the person posing it.

You shouldn't. Not everyone got a degree in environmental engineering. The importance of biodiversity isn't exactly one of the three R's.

Re:We're lucky

[Grishnakh]

Because there simply aren't enough resources for another billion people to live like Americans, consuming oil at the kind of rate we do. Besides oil, which is already growing more scarce thanks to the rise in demand from China and India, there's real limitations on freshwater and how much food can be grown worldwide.

Now, this doesn't mean it's impossible for there to be, for instance, 20 billion people living on the earth without widespread suffering and famine, but they're not going to be living like Westerners do today. Instead, they'll be in dense cities with no private vehicles, and they'll have to figure out how to grow more food than current methods allow given limitations on arable land and freshwater for irrigation. (Arable land is a diminishing resource in most places, especially here in the USA, thanks to the fact that places that are good for growing food also happen to be places where people like to live, so it's common for farms to be turned into subdivisions. We could stop this of course, by having the government take control and turn subdivisions back into farms, and require people to mostly live in places where food doesn't grow well and the land otherwise wouldn't be used for much, but generally, people don't like living in deserts or tundra.)

Re:We're lucky

[Grishnakh]

There's a reason Alaska, northern Canada, and much of Russia are unpopulated: the climates aren't suitable for humans. Simply put, it's too damn cold up there. People only live in places like that if they're weird, or if an authoritarian government forces them to (like in the USSR).

For farmland, those climates are absolutely useless, as again they're simply too cold. There's a reason Europe led the world in development, and it's because it was so good for agriculture.

We have tons of open space in Antarctica too, but no one ever proposes developing that for obvious reasons. The tundra and permafrost of Canada, Greenland, and Siberia aren't quite as cold as that, but they still won't let you grow anything.

Re:We're lucky

[Grishnakh]

I'm an electrical engineer, and I certainly can understand (at a more basic level of course) the importance of biodiversity and how complex the ecosystems on our planet are and how we need them to support ourselves. I probably can't articulate it nearly as well as someone with a degree in environmental engineering or even biology, as I never learned any of that stuff in college (the closest I got was freshman Chemistry, everything else was all circuits, EM fields, programming, etc.) but I guess I got enough in general education in both high school (where I did have 2 biology classes) and college that these things aren't exactly incomprehensible to me.

So if someone really can't understand this stuff, that tells me that either they're a complete idiot, or severely lacking in education, as obviously their education isn't even as good as what I got in a public high school (and an American one at that!).

To put it simply, you don't need to be an expert to understand things like this at a basic level.

Re:We're lucky

[Pseudonym]

What you can do is the only thing that reliably lowers the birth rate: Educate women and girls.

In some places places like Japan and Australia, there are more deaths than births. Japan's population is shrinking. Australia's would be too were it not for immigration.

Re:We're lucky

[morari]

Miles and miles of land squandered for the sole purpose of growing food... for livestock. It's not very efficient for society, nor is it beneficial for the environment.

Re:We're lucky

[tompaulco]

Because there simply aren't enough resources for another billion people to live like Americans, consuming oil at the kind of rate we do.
Maybe if there were another billion people here with the education and other groundwork laid out, then one of them would come up with a substitute for oil. Population growth is not a problem in a society where each person added contributes greater than or equal to what he consumes. The problem comes when another person is born into a place where there is almost no production whatsoever and they already don't have enough resources to consume. Unfortunately for us, populations are shrinking in places where production outpaces consumption, and populations are expanding in areas where consumption far outpaces production.
It is extremely irresponsible for people who have no resources, no jobs, no crops and nothing to sell to have more children. Before we feel guilty about not helping these people, we have to get them to do their part by not actively trying to make the problem worse.

Re:We're lucky

[russotto]

Uneducated, under-developed/developing countries are getting harder and harder to find. Soon we'll have to put the starving in regular countries.

Sub-Sarahan Africa, the "-stans", much of South America... plenty of traditional underdeveloped countries to go around.

Re:We're lucky

[bstender]

AND they want to feed it to CARS.

Re:We're lucky

[camperdave]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo

Re:We're lucky

[terjeber]

Now, this doesn't mean it's impossible for there to be, for instance, 20 billion people living on the earth without widespread suffering and famine

Well, don't worry, there is never going to be 20 billion people on earth. Current projections indicate we're going to max out at just a little over 10 billion, and then go down a little. This based on growth etc over the past few decades. If we can get a little more wealth and food distributed (no need to make it, we already make plenty for the population we have) to areas where it is needed, we might even see a top just below 10 billion. The UN expects starvation as a systemic problem to be mostly gone outside of Africa within a decade or so. Perhaps a tad more given the current economic down turn.

they're not going to be living like Westerners do today

With some modifications to our lifestyle, that is not correct, given the current production levels. Most of the world could live as comfortably as we do without a need for significant increase in food and goods production. Some areas are not going to be possible, oil consumption for one.

All of this is with our current production, current efficiency and some improvement in transportation and distribution. Slightly exaggerated, but only slightly, as an example, it is mostly easier to travel between two cities in Africa by going through London. That is inefficient and that means "stuff" doesn't get distributed internally in Africa as efficiently as possible. On a side-note, there is enough food produced in Africa to feed the entire African population (even with the drastic drop in efficiency caused by the nutcase Mugabe).

So, everything held as it is today, assuming we can find a reasonable alternative to oil (which seems likely), things do not look to bad.

Sadly, it is not so easy. We're running out of phosphates, which means most of that 10 billion crowd, half or more, will in fact starve to death. Surprisingly not many people are concerned that we are running low on phosphates. Problem with running low on phosphates, there are no alternative substance. Probably not even theoretically.

Re:We're lucky

[terjeber]

Oil we can find alternatives to. Irrigation water we can clean (with some technological advances that we'll most likely make). Land we have aplenty, though there isn't a lot more to find. Phosphates we are running low on and there are no alternatives (probably not even theoretically). Without phosphates we're not going to grow a lot of food. We'll grow some, but we'll have to grow a lot. The phosphates shortage will probably make billions starve.

Phosphates shortage is more critical than gasoline problems. It is more problematic than water purity. It is significantly more dangerous (to people and animals alike) than increases in CO2 levels.

Oddly, it seems nobody cares.

Re:We're lucky

[pnutjam]

Don't worry, if Slashdot has it's way the starving and ignorant will be taking over the developed world soon...

Raise some educated children if you want to protect western culture.

Re:We're lucky

[phlinn]

If they were living in well fed, educated, well developed areas, there wouldn't be nearly as many of them. Arguably, if the entire planet was modernized, the environment would benefit from the population reduction more than it would lose to the addtional material wealth person.

Re:We're lucky

[jellomizer]

I fail to see your point. Actually both you and the parents point.
NYC has people who live quick packed and a a city the size of Taxas is huge! Texas is the 2nt biggest state in the United states, Texas is bigger then most countries.
Secondly what does the the environmental impact of NYC need to do with the point. So we take the rest of the united states for food and energy production. So we still take up only part of north America to survive.

Re:We're lucky

[Grishnakh]

When movies where still black&white, it was estimated that there would be enough food for perhaps 3 billion people in the world. That was just a reminder how hard it is to predict the future.

Back then, they didn't use so much oil growing food. These days, we're basically converting oil into food with our agricultural methods. A giant amount of our nation's oil consumption is used by agriculture, not transportation. Oil's running out, and in the process, getting more expensive. At some point, we're going to have to find other ways of fertilizing crops. Will they be as effective?

Today we are farming lands were dirt was poisonous just 10 years ago. Simple chemistry and modern technology solved that issue. You can make food grow anywhere with modern technology.

You mean with oil, you can grow food anywhere. Guess what's going to be in much shorter supply in 50 or 100 years? At least with transportation, you can use technology to find alternatives (e.g. electric vehicles). Not so with chemicals. Another poster here mentioned phosphates as being in short supply, and that this could be an even bigger problem.

> people don't like living in deserts or tundra
Las Vegas (a desert where humans are pumping water to keep it alive).

What's your point? I said people don't like living in deserts. No one really wants to live in Las Vegas. Have you been there much? It's a fun place to visit for a few days and see all the touristy things, and that's it. It's not a place any normal person would want to live, unless you're rich like Siegfried & Roy and can afford to build your own luxurious walled-off palace with acres of irrigated lawns. It's a very seedy town, and turns very ugly as soon as you set foot off the Strip. People mainly go there so they can do things they're not allowed to do in their hometown (i.e. gambling); the only reason the city was even built was because of Nevada's legalized gambling, which at the time didn't exist in other states. If it weren't for that, there wouldn't be anything there now.

I live pretty close by there, in Phoenix, which is similar, and also largely a shithole. People think they want to live here because they're sick of snow or whatever, but after a few years of the dryness and extreme heat and lack of greenery, they get sick of it and move back east. Not coincidentally, the two hottest cities during the housing boom, and the two cities hit hardest by the housing crash, were Phoenix and Vegas. Phoenix is getting worse and worse, too; thanks to all the people and the concrete and asphalt, the "heat island" effect is making it now so there's no more "monsoon season" (summer rains), and the oppressive heat lasts for much longer and is hotter than it used to be. Finally, both these cities rely on getting freshwater out of nearby rivers. There's a limit to that; the Colorado river (used by both AZ and the LA area) is just about dried up now. You can't squeeze blood from a stone. With freshwater pumped in, desert cities will support a certain number of people, but that number is absolutely limited by how much freshwater you have access to. And unlike coastal cities like LA, inland cities don't have easy access to an ocean to use for desalinization.

Dubai is fairly similar to Vegas. It's a tourist city, pumped up by tons of investment into trying to make it look nice and make people want to go visit there and spend their money there on hotel rooms, fancy meals in underwater restaurants, etc. No one really wants to live there, except people employed by the industries living on the tourism; heck, not many Arabs even live there, as most of the population is foreigners used for labor. But at least Dubai actually has beaches, unlike Vegas and Phoenix. This kind of model works OK for tourist-driven cities, but there's a big limit to that market.

Wow...

[bradgoodman]

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...

Re:Wow...

[bradgoodman]

I just realized - those numbers actually indicate a very linear increase (though I doubt this will be true in the long-term) ;-)

Re:Wow...

[felipekk]

Oblig.

"The most important video you'll ever see"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY

Re:Wow...

[Nadaka]

No, in the long term population expansion will cease. The per capita birth rate in nearly every nation on earth is falling. In some cases (Europe, Japan and the non Hispanic parts of the US) below 2 children per woman. Human population will likely plateau around 10 billion and stay there.

Re:Wow...

[Anonymous Coward]

the only linear part is the last three billion or so (added every 12 years or so) starting in 1950, prior to that it took 100 years to reach our second bill and of course all of human history prior to get to the first bill. So yes its exponential as a trend...

Re:Wow...

[msauve]

Just remember, of all those 7 billion people, you're unique. Just like everyone else.

Re:Wow...

[Abstrackt]

I am one in a million and there are 7,000 people exactly like me.

Re:Wow...

[osu-neko]

I just realized - those numbers actually indicate a very linear increase (though I doubt this will be true in the long-term) ;-)

Right. It used to be exponential, now it's more linear, and if current second-order trends continue, it will eventually halt and start to backslide. Already has in many developed nations.

Re:Wow...

[JonySuede]

find them and start a being Abstrackt (609015) club !

Re:Wow...

[Anonymous Coward]

Doubt it... any group of people that has a genetic or cultural based tendency to have a lot of kids will eventually take over the current population, weeding out the infrequent breeders.

Re:Wow...

[peragrin]

you forgot the 1 child per family china, and the majority of those families are having males. More Males mean less kids.

In 40-50 years china's population will start to contract massively.

compare with the Western world which is having less kids later in their lives. means that the separation between generations is increasing.

Re:Wow...

[turkeyfish]

With world population set to rise to 10 billion, the addition of oil and gas expected to be recovered and burned from tar sands and fracking, at the current rate of carbon burn per individual accounting for the differential rate of carbon burning and assuming that the balance of present growth trends will not widely deviate from their present geographical distribution, the planet will be to warm to support life in as little as 350 years, except for the most thermophilic bacteria.

Re:Wow...

[turkeyfish]

All changes to cumulative distributions appear to be linear if looked at over a small enough time scale or over several different segments of the curve, but population growth that best characterizes the idea that you are trying to convey is the logistic distribution, which is a smooth, infinitely differentiable function.

Re:Wow...

[PJ6]

Doubt it... any group of people that has a genetic or cultural based tendency to have a lot of kids will eventually take over the current population, weeding out the infrequent breeders.

But on what timescale? Something very big and game-changing will probably happen before first-world birth rate picks up again.

Re:Wow...

[SuricouRaven]

In the future, the most common surname in the US will be Duggar.

Re:Wow...

[__aagmrb7289]

you forgot the 1 child per family china, and the majority of those families are having males. More Males mean less kids.

In 40-50 years china's population will start to contract massively.

compare with the Western world which is having less kids later in their lives. means that the separation between generations is increasing.

Not to mention the fact that resource wars and wars caused by having too many unattached men on the planet are likely to take care of some of the population...

Re:Wow...

[ShakaUVM]

>>but the rate of acceleration itself is picking up in a scary way.

The UN population estimates show the earth peaking in about 40-50 years and then declining after that.

Of course, standard disclaimers about trying to predict the future always apply.

Re:Wow...

[interkin3tic]

The rate of reproduction in the first world would not be falling if "family size" were dictated that much by genetics. You'd expect it to continue to increase. Unless you separate the frequent and infrequent breeders out for a few generations, the genetic push would be a wash if it were. Social trends impact that much more. Careers for women are pushing back when families start having children. Not genetics.

Re:Wow...

[randy of the redwood]

So what you are really saying is the population will be much lower since it will be too warm to support life?

That's great! Now we don't have to worry about that pesky global warming problem. Mother nature already has a plan all worked out. Once our population reduces, we won't have the ability to push as much carbon into the atmosphere, thereby cooling the planet. :-)

Sorry to be pessimistic, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

If you ever coded Conway's game of life, you know there are only two possible outcomes - infinite (the earth will cool to the point of absolute zero at some point or heat to the point of turning to a vapor and dispersing) or it will reach a governed stasis (the earth has some naturally occurring phenomenon that moderates our temperature). Historically, it looks like the latter, since we have had both ice and warm ages which it has recovered from. Therefore, while I wholeheartedly agree we are experiencing a climate change, we are mere children when it comes to understanding the real causes and ultimate effects. We may do our best (worst?) to try to overheat the planet only to find it cools as a result because the cloud cover ultimately shades out the sun (or some other completely unexpected outcome).

Re:Wow...

[BlueParrot]

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.

Since then availability of effective contraceptives have increased dramatically. If you want to fight the trend of extreme population growth the most effective way to do so will be to promote access to contraceptives and their social acceptance, in particular in third world countries.

Re:Wow...

[CrimsonAvenger]

but the rate of acceleration itself is picking up in a scary way

Actually, the growth rate has been slowing for the last 50 years or so.

Right now, we're looking at only 1.5% growth rate per year, as opposed to the 2% gorwth rate we were seeing in the 60's....

Re:Wow...

[Grishnakh]

There's a big obstacle to that: the Roman Catholic Church.

Re:Wow...

[daver00]

But life expectancy is increasing, and that is the killer. The dramatic increase in population today, and in years to come has far more to do with people staying alive longer than it has to do with more people being born.

Re:Wow...

[Time_Ngler]

How could the genetic push be a wash if the breeders are breeding and the non-breeders are not? There will always be more breeders produced in each coming generation then non-breeders. Since there isn't anything culling them out, like in the old days where everyone would starve to death if it got too crowded, there really isn't anything stopping them.

Re:Wow...

[perryizgr8]

you forgot the 1 child per family china, and the majority of those families are having males. More Males mean less kids.

In 40-50 years china's population will start to contract massively.

compare with the Western world which is having less kids later in their lives. means that the separation between generations is increasing.

now how is that even possible??

Re:Wow...

[Mr.No]

Just remember, of all those 7 billion people, you're unique. Just like everyone else.

So what?

Re:Wow...

[Maxo-Texas]

Exactly.

View a big screen TV as a new wonder drug for the human virus.

And some part of the culture will resist the drug and come to dominate the population.

It will end badly--- hoping for 50 years instead of 30 years.

Re:Wow...

[peragrin]

um prenatal screening and abortions.

It is a really sick practice, but Chinese society places more emphasis on males, with one child per family they get pregnant, check the sex, and abort if it is female unless they want a girl.

The government is trying to stop it,but they aren't very successful.

Re:Wow...

[tehcyder]

Just remember, of all those 7 billion people, you're unique. Just like everyone else.

Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't NEED to follow ME, You don't NEED to follow ANYBODY! You've got to think for your selves! You're ALL individuals!
The Crowd: Yes! We're all individuals!
Brian: You're all different!
The Crowd: Yes, we ARE all different!
Man in crowd: I'm not...

Re:Wow...

[tehcyder]

There's a big obstacle to that: the Roman Catholic Church.

I don't know about anyone else, but I'd be prepared to sacrifice the various churches to save the planet. I'm sure Jesus would approve.

Re:Wow...

[terjeber]

Actually, no, it isn't. The "rate of acceleration" is dropping dramatically. According to projections it is dropping so fast that we'll reach the max population of less than 10 billion or so some time later this century (around 2075). Then we'll drop a little, and possibly flatten. Assuming that is, that we can find a good way to grow food without phosphates. If we can not, we'll drop significantly in a relatively short time frame after peaking.

Re:Wow...

[terjeber]

Doubt it

Remember, a little bit of education on any topic where you have doubts will remove those doubts. Go read about this somewhere and your doubts will go away. You may of course be one of those people who trusts your gut feeling more than science, then I'd recommend you read up on "truthiness".

Re:Wow...

[terjeber]

Nonsense.

Re:Wow...

[terjeber]

No, it is not. The most efficient contraceptives are education and food/other resources.

Re:Wow...

[terjeber]

No, it isn't. There is no trend showing Catholic countries having more of a population growth than others. Quite the contrary in fact, the countries in Europe with the slowest population growth at the moment tend to be Catholic (Italy. Spain etc). Some of the highest birth rates are in Protestant Norway, but that is a special case.

Re:Wow...

[hesaigo999ca]

We have a crisis that the governments are not doing anything about, and China and India are the main conspirators

Re:Wow...

[Nadaka]

I have to call bs on that. I am no AGW denier, but you are talking about a 20 or 30 degree increase in global temperature.

Re:Wow...

[tbannist]

The evidence runs contrary to your belief. Birth rates are falling when according to your theory indicates they should be rising.

The critical part you may have missed is that it is prosperity in our modern society that decreases birth rates. Take maternity leave for example, the more money that a mother makes the less likely she is to use the full maternity leave because maternity leave often pays the same rate as unemployment insurance unless her employer supplements it (most do not). Daycare is also expensive so it puts an economic limit on the number of children you can have without some form of corporate or government subsidy. Also pregnancy and maternity leave a permanent mark on a woman's career, after having one or more children she now earns less than her contemporaries because of her absence.

The economics are simple, the poorer you are, the lower the opportunity costs involved in having children. The only way for birth rates to start growing again is to trap a significant number of people in eternal poverty. There is, as far as I know, no genetic link to birth rates, and cultural influences are currently understood to be less influential than the economic factors.

Re:Wow...

[Nadaka]

"Blame"? They are the only demographic in the US that is expanding, that is a fact, and the anglo demographic is shrinking. I am not "blaming" them for anything. If you count every other demographic, the US has negative population growth. If you include Hispanics, the growth is positive.

Re:Wow...

[Time_Ngler]

But reproduction rate is the point of genetics! It doesn't matter what the disincentives to having a child are, if the parent is driven by an uncontrollable instinctual drive to reproduce.

Birth rates falling right now, but that does not mean that it will always be so. The problem is that human beings change over time, just as any species does. Normally genetic change would take tens of thousands of years. However, I think that the current population has a set of people who already have an uncontrollable urge to reproduce, regardless of the consequences. As generations go by, the faster the growth rate of people with this characteristic will rise, until they become the dominant force of humanity.

Re:Wow...

[9re9]

That is only if you use the low estimate, which the UN is no longer advocating. They now advocate using a middle estimate which provides:

The medium-variant projection for 2050 is more certain than for 2100 because people who will be 40 years and older in 2050 are already born. According to the medium variant, it will take 13 years to add the eighth billion, 18 years to add the ninth billion and 40 years to reach the tenth billion. According to the high variant, an additional billion would be added every 10 or 11 years for the rest of this century.

Original source here: http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Other-Information/Press_Release_WPP2010.pdf More data here: http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/P-WPP/htm/PWPP_Total-Population.htm

Re:Wow...

[tbannist]

But reproduction rate is the point of genetics! It doesn't matter what the disincentives to having a child are, if the parent is driven by an uncontrollable instinctual drive to reproduce.

That's a big if. I am not aware of any evidence to indicate that such a group actually exists. Those groups that have surplus children tend to be adequately explained by economic factors. There exist some individuals that are not explained by the usual economic factors, but their "uncontrollable urges" are likely explained by unique psychological or economic factors which do not appear to be hereditary.

Re:Wow...

[Time_Ngler]

That's a big if. I am not aware of any evidence to indicate that such a group actually exists. Those groups that have surplus children tend to be adequately explained by economic factors.

Correlation does not imply causation. How can you prove that their surplus children (and the surplus children of their ancestors) are caused by their financial conditions rather than vice versa? It actually makes more sense that their financial conditions are due to their ancestors having too many children, limiting the families financial success. Since before modern farming techniques and the social safety net kept people alive, this group could have been effectively culled due to starvation or disease. This is no longer true.

All other species of life reproduce until unable to do so anymore due to the limits of the environment. Take a look at any foreign invader in a local environment. If they are able, they soon take over until they can no longer do so. I don't see why it's a forgone conclusion that some groups of humans will not also behave this way. If poor economic status is caused having too many children, then it no longer becomes a method of explaining away surplus children, but actually an indicator that such a group exists.

Looking at average population increase ignores the fact that people have varied strategies for continuing their bloodline. Some people will think about their quality of life, and realize that having kids won't improve it. These people will be weeded out in the genetic pool of future generations. But others won't, and now there is nothing stopping the offspring from a couple having eight kids all surviving until they are old enough to do the same.

A slight dip in the reproduction of the human species is not a trend I would rely on. Based on where we have come from, ie. the natural world, where whoever reproduces the most wins, and the fact that the game is now changed so that the more kids you have, the better chances of the survival of your genes, I can't believe that without some type of intervention, the number of human beings won't increase until there is absolutely no way the earth can support any more.

Re:Wow...

[neoform]

This will have a very interesting effect on global economies, since much of our economies are based on growth caused by populations increasing...

Re:Wow...

[tbannist]

Correlation does not imply causation. How can you prove that their surplus children (and the surplus children of their ancestors) are caused by their financial conditions rather than vice versa? It actually makes more sense that their financial conditions are due to their ancestors having too many children, limiting the families financial success. Since before modern farming techniques and the social safety net kept people alive, this group could have been effectively culled due to starvation or disease. This is no longer true.

As I understand it, in the poorest nations children are literally wealth. The families with more children face temporary privation until the children are able to start earning an income, then the additional income increases the family's wealth. So the more children they have the better off the family becomes. Given that relationship, it would seem that their poverty would have to be from the lack of children of their ancestors. However, as previously noted as the wealth of the country rises, the investment required to raise a productive child increases thus reducing the economic incentive to have children.

Looking at average population increase ignores the fact that people have varied strategies for continuing their bloodline. Some people will think about their quality of life, and realize that having kids won't improve it. These people will be weeded out in the genetic pool of future generations. But others won't, and now there is nothing stopping the offspring from a couple having eight kids all surviving until they are old enough to do the same.

Yet, the average number is what is important. If the average rate is declining then the overall rate is also declining. You are arguing that there is a demographic shift going on, but have yet to offer any evidence to support that.

A slight dip in the reproduction of the human species is not a trend I would rely on. Based on where we have come from, ie. the natural world, where whoever reproduces the most wins, and the fact that the game is now changed so that the more kids you have, the better chances of the survival of your genes, I can't believe that without some type of intervention, the number of human beings won't increase until there is absolutely no way the earth can support any more.

Never the less, analysis shows that as a country's affluence increases, it's fertility rate decreases. The trend has been steady for about 150 years. I'd say that after a 150 years it's more than a "slight dip".

Re:Wow...

[interkin3tic]

But reproduction rate is the point of genetics! It doesn't matter what the disincentives to having a child are, if the parent is driven by an uncontrollable instinctual drive to reproduce.

The problem is that human beings change over time, just as any species does.

No. According to the widely held theory of punctuated equilibrium, most species change very little after a comparatively short period of transition. A new species of fish might spend 1,000 years changing, then will be set for the next 100,000 years. There are few conditions under which a species will evolve. Most evolution occurs with speciation events: one small group of fish is separated from the parent group for several generations, that small group evolves to slightly different conditions, and eventually is it's own species.

With humans, there is little gradual evolution. If you have a baby that is smarter than average, odds are good he or she is going to breed with someone of average intelligence, and produce average intelligence babies. If not that generation, the next generation, and so on. It will all mix out.

Applying this to frequent vs infrequent breeders, it could be the case that frequent breeders will pair up, that's a theory, but in practice you see that those trends don't hold. People coming from big families often hated it and vow to have smaller families, whereas people from smaller families often want bigger families. And, as GP pointed out, the evidence shows that economics play a much bigger role in family size than you assume.

At the very least, realize it will be generations before evolution will affect the breeding rate much. While change happens rapidly in terms of the "lifespan" of a species, it's still very long on a human timescale. People who are genetically driven to breed like rabbits will not suddenly overwhelm the normal population and change the projected population growth in your lifetime, so stop worrying about it.

Re:Wow...

[Time_Ngler]

According to the widely held theory of punctuated equilibrium, most species change very little after a comparatively short period of transition. A new species of fish might spend 1,000 years changing, then will be set for the next 100,000 years. There are few conditions under which a species will evolve. Most evolution occurs with speciation events: one small group of fish is separated from the parent group for several generations, that small group evolves to slightly different conditions, and eventually is it's own species.

The problem here is that the environment the fish live in is also pretty much constant for that 100,000 year period, so I don't think it applies to us because our environment is rapidly changing. Our diversity is becoming greater, very quickly. If you don't believe that, ask yourself how many severely near sighted people successfully found a mate and 300 years ago compared to today. How about those with diabetes?

These genetic configurations that were sub-optimal in the past and basically lied dormant due to being recessive are now much more prevalent, because they no longer matter to the survival of offspring. I believe that a tendency to reproduce at a young age and frequently is one of them. In today's society that would be a net gain in the survivability of a bloodline, so if it exists, it would rear its head rather quickly.

Look at all the fat people in America, seemingly unable to resist their urge to consume mass quantities of cheap junk food. You could explain it all away as due to culture, or just a natural human response. I know this is hardly proof, but it does lead to the possibility that this group is like this because they do lack a certain amount of self control, same as their parents and grandparents. That reckless abandon in thought is the new diabetes, the new extremely near sightedness. And this will soon grow out of control, not in 1000 years, but more like 50.

Re:Wow...

[interkin3tic]

Our environment may be changing, but that's not driving genetic changes in the human population.

Myopia may be increasing, but it's not correlated with nearsightedness no longer being selected against. It's been thousands of years since people with poor eyesight were allowed to die, whereas myopia is increasing in the last few decades. Were it some genetic de-evolution, you'd expect it to happen when we stopped letting nearsighted people starve. Obesity too clearly correlates with dietary changes, not food suddenly being available. Countries like Japan where McDonalds and other junk food are making inroads, they're experiencing weight gains as well. Diabetes too follows dietary changes.

As I said, genetic change doesn't just suddenly happen in large populations, because it gets diluted out. Getting back to the original topic, this fast breeders business would be dilluted out as well. Even in Mormon populations, it's clearly a social thing. If you've ever met an ex-mormon, you'd know that having a large family is not genetic, it's social.

That reckless abandon in thought is the new diabetes, the new extremely near sightedness. And this will soon grow out of control, not in 1000 years, but more like 50.

Now that is pretty clearly one of those 90% of statistics that were made up on the spot. What, if anything, do you base that on? Gut feeling?

Of all the possible things to point to and say the sky is falling, I think you've chosen one of the more ridiculous. Worry about the economy and climate change before you worry about people with an uncontrollable urge to have ten babies overtaking the earth since, again, the economy and climate change have the potential to affect you during your natural life. Population growth is slowing in developed countries.

Re:Wow...

[Time_Ngler]

Myopia may be increasing, but it's not correlated with nearsightedness no longer being selected against. It's been thousands of years since people with poor eyesight were allowed to die, whereas myopia is increasing in the last few decades. [nih.gov]

That study you linked to did not compare myopia rates anytime before 1972! So, you're saying that thousands of years ago, people with extreme near sightedness not only survived, but were able to raise a family? Please.

Obesity too clearly correlates with dietary changes, not food suddenly being available.

I don't understand your point here. I'm saying that obesity could be partially explained by a genetic component. It's an example of recessive genomes that is quickly growing in it's expression in the population.

I know this is hardly proof, but it does lead to the possibility that this group is like this because they do lack a certain amount of self control, same as their parents and grandparents. That reckless abandon in thought is the new diabetes, the new extremely near sightedness. And this will soon grow out of control, not in 1000 years, but more like 50.

Now that is pretty clearly one of those 90% of statistics that were made up on the spot. What, if anything, do you base that on? Gut feeling?

It was a hypothesis.

As I said, genetic change doesn't just suddenly happen in large populations, because it gets diluted out. Getting back to the original topic, this fast breeders business would be dilluted out as well.

And as I said, the evidence of that only applies when the environment isn't rapidly changing. Diabetes, myopia, they aren't advantageous. Fast breeding is. And as I also said, these aren't novel genetic changes, but recessive characteristics that are increasingly being expressed in the population. How is dilution going to apply here?

Of all the possible things to point to and say the sky is falling, I think you've chosen one of the more ridiculous. Worry about the economy and climate change before you worry about people with an uncontrollable urge to have ten babies overtaking the earth since, again, the economy and climate change have the potential to affect you during your natural life.

I don't think the sky is falling. The world is changing. Overpopulation isn't a doomsday scenario... I just think it's likely and thought it was interesting.

Population growth is slowing in developed countries.

Yea, you mentioned that. Yes, population growth is slowing right now, not stopped, not reversed, for the past 40 years. Here is a graph of population growth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Population_curve.svg What is your point?

Obligatory FP comment. Wit optional as ever.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure you meant "seven billion ugly meat bags" meat bag.

FP meat bag.

Re:Obligatory FP comment. Wit optional as ever.

[Samantha Wright]

This is a notice to inform you that your geek card has been revoked. Here is your missing reference. Please study this carefully before you reapply for your card.

Guaranteed solution

[Citizen of Earth]

what viable solutions will enable us to survive on this increasingly crowded pale blue dot?

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.

Re:Guaranteed solution

[CAIMLAS]

Affluence means increased consumption. Increased consumption - ie, what the land can actually maintain - is the only 'real' problem, here (long term).

You need poor people for the affluent to consume. (How do you think the West has maintained its charade? By outsourcing their poverty to the 3rd world.)

When you figure out that the moon is a valuable mineral-rich oil grape, you can disregard my post. :)

Re:Guaranteed solution

[Kjella]

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 think you got it backwards, in many countries poor people can't afford to not have many kids because if they don't they're screwed as elderly. That old people can live off their retirement benefits and have a modest 1-3 children rather than 4-10 that they used to is what has slowed growth in the west the last 100 years. And if you think western and that children are a huge expense, not so much in poor countries where they're put to work early, no luxuries, inherit clothes and the biggest expense is food to feed them. Of course you do raise another and even larger generation of poorly educated people, but I can understand those who feel they must have many kids to have a decent life.

Re:Guaranteed solution

[msauve]

"I think you got it backwards, in many countries poor people can't afford to not have many kids because if they don't they're screwed as elderly."

Maybe if the GP had used a few more double-negatives it would have been clearer to you. "If they don't not have many kids, they're screwed..." Huh?

Re:Guaranteed solution

[PopeRatzo]

You need poor people for the affluent to consume.

Plus, without poor people, how are the rich going to know they're rich?

I guarantee, if everyone but the top 1% by wealth suddenly disappeared, the first thing that would happen is that the wealth of 99% of the people who are left would very quickly start to decline.

It's not enough to be wealthy. There have to be sufficient numbers of poor people around to remind you how well-off you are.

I believe something happened to the human race in the past half-century. There has been a persistent trend to create a breakaway society - maybe a breakaway species. As income disparities increase to the point where certain types of life-extension and other technologies are only available to a small number of people you're going to see that breakaway group forming up. Eventually, they'll have the ability to leave the Earth behind. And if that happens, there will be increasing incentive to make sure those folks left behind never get to catch up.

There used to be the joke, "The rich are different from the rest of us - they've got more money" which was a uniquely American perspective that the only difference between rich and poor is money. I think that has significantly changed as more institutions are put in place to guarantee less economic mobility. Here in the US for example, economic mobility has been steadily decreasing for 30 years. We are now much less economically mobile than the socialist countries of Northern Europe for example (despite the oft-repeated and obsolete right-wing mythology that "anyone can make it in America, if they work hard enough, blah blah" there is increasing evidence that if you're born poor in America, you're going to stay poor, by design.)

We are now seeing an acceleration of the efforts to "manage" the increasingly economically challenged as they replace the efforts to raise everyone's standard of living. Ubiquitous surveillance, for example and law enforcement's transition away from crime prevention toward the maintenance of order. I walk my dog past Chicago's police academy every day, and many days I see big trailers from Xe Services (formerly Blackwater) drilling the recruits in what looks like crowd "control" and stopping riots. And that's been going on since before Blackwater changed their name and there was any hint of an "Occupy Wall Street" movement". That's part of the process, I think. Crime rises in poor and middle class neighborhoods (at least property crimes) but more law enforcement focus is on protecting the enclaves where the most wealthy live, work and play.

Re:Guaranteed solution

[osu-neko]

I love how you say he got it backwards, then state a double-negative that, once parsed, has precisely the same meaning. XD

Re:Guaranteed solution

[ShavedOrangutan]

Only poor people can afford to have kids. Rich people don't need them.

After devoting your 20's and 30's to education and a career, it's much more difficult to get pregnant.

Re:Guaranteed solution

[turkeyfish]

Rich folks don't need so many because each has a much higher probability of successful reproduction that will the children of virtually all poor. Of course, being the same species their is intermixing of these two evolutionary strategies for survival. One really does have to wonder, however about these guys whose sperm donations have created hundreds of children all effectively without fathers, merely their sperm. Perhaps the probability of success for such children is not high, as growing up without a father is known to lead to a shorter life span on average.

Re:Guaranteed solution

[turkeyfish]

The probability of there being oil on the moon is vanishingly small. Most computers probably don't have enough bits to quantify it accurately.

It would seem this one particular oil-rich grape is the only one we have.

The problem we face is how to create a global economy of 7-10 billion people that can be sustained in the near future without burning any oil lest we quickly make our planet uninhabitable to all but a few species of thermophillic bacteria in just a few centuries.

Re:Guaranteed solution

[siride]

It's like you've never read a history book. We're obviously going backwards right now in terms of social mobility, but it's still a lot better than it was for most of civilized human history. Breakaway societies were the norm, not the exception.

Re:Guaranteed solution

[PopeRatzo]

We're obviously going backwards right now in terms of social mobility, but it's still a lot better than it was for most of civilized human history.

You miss my point. Yes it's better than the 13th century, but the US now has less economic mobility than any of the EU countries, for example, or Japan, or any current developed country.

Economic mobility is part of the myth of American Exceptionalism. Except it's a lie. The economic mobility in the US is bad and getting worse.

Re:Guaranteed solution

[siride]

Then explain this paragraph: "I believe something happened to the human race in the past half-century. There has been a persistent trend to create a breakaway society - maybe a breakaway species. As income disparities increase to the point where certain types of life-extension and other technologies are only available to a small number of people you're going to see that breakaway group forming up. Eventually, they'll have the ability to leave the Earth behind. And if that happens, there will be increasing incentive to make sure those folks left behind never get to catch up."

That's what I took issue with. My referencing "breakaway societies" should have tipped you off to that.

Re:Guaranteed solution

[turkeyfish]

But what if 100% total successful means having the world's single largest collection of rhinoceros horns, automobiles, ... in order to outclass the republican next door or Keeping up with the Joneses?

Re:Guaranteed solution

[PopeRatzo]

>>Here in the US for example, economic mobility has been steadily decreasing for 30 years.

Lies. (Or Socialist talking point, same thing.)

Here you go ShakaUVM - Some data to support my assertion from that well-known Socialist organization, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston . I know that may not be as authoritative as the Wikipedia entry that you provided so triumphantly, ShakaUVM, but it's probably a little more reliable since it's less likely to have been edit-bombed by a bunch of interns at the American Enterprise Institute trying to work off that grant from the Koch Foundation.

For those of you who don't want to clickthrough and download a PDF file from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston's website, the paper is called Trends in U.S. Family Income Mobility, 1967 - 2004. I'll give you a little taste from the abstract:

By most measures, we find that mobility is lower in more recent periods (the 1990s into the early 2000s) than in earlier periods (the 1970s). Most notably, mobility of families starting near the bottom has worsened over time. However, in recent years, the down-trend in mobility is more or less pronounced (or even non-existent) depending on the measure, although a decrease in the frequency with which panel data on family incomes are gathered makes it difficult to draw firm conclusions. Measured relative to the overall distribution or in absolute terms, black families exhibit substantially less mobility than whites in all periods; their mobility decreased between the 1970s and the 1990s, but no more than that of white families, although they lost ground in terms of relative income. Taken together, this evidence suggests that over the 1967-to-2004 time span, a low-income family's probability of moving up decreased, families' later year incomes increasingly depended on their starting place, and the distribution of families' lifetime incomes became less equal.

I added emphasis to the most important part because ShakaUVM tends to be a little thick. He likes to rely on Wikipedia when some really good primary sources are very easy to find.

Re:Guaranteed solution

[PopeRatzo]

That's what I took issue with. My referencing "breakaway societies" should have tipped you off to that.

I'm not sure what we're arguing about here. It appears that we agree that economic mobility is better than the 13th century, but worse than the 1970s.

Do I have it wrong?

Re:Guaranteed solution

[Kjella]

I love how you say he got it backwards, then state a double-negative that, once parsed, has precisely the same meaning. XD

No.

Only poor people can afford to have kids.

This implies the poor may or may not have kids, while the rich can't.

Only poor people can't afford to not have kids

This implies the poor must have kids, while the rich may or may not have kids.

When you use exclusivity then a double negative does not parse as the same at all.

Re:Guaranteed solution

[joeboomer628]

My observations of the way things work on this "little blue dot" is that mother nature has her own ways of limiting overpopulation of the various species. Famine, disease, natural disasters, and wars are just a few of her obvious tools. Of course there is always the possibility that we could become one gigantic nuclear mass suicide.

Re:Guaranteed solution

[Xaositecte]

He's arguing that all of the trends you observed are not unique to the past half-century, but is more likely following a cycle that we can observe having happened many times in the past.

Implicitly, this means while it might even be getting worse right now, counter-cultural trends will push towards increased economic mobility.

I would argue that this is a result of a large number of people who would have been capable of economic mobility in a "good" part of the cycle who are being denied the opportunity due to unfair societal conditions. As a result, those capable persons will do whatever it takes to attempt to create a better society for themselves, changing society so other people like them can have a similar shot.

Re:Guaranteed solution

[ShakaUVM]

>>Some data to support my assertion from that well-known Socialist organization, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston .

From the paper: "The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, or the Federal Reserve System"

The paper also focuses a great deal on income inequality, which is a nonsense measure. Worse, it actually uses GINI measures as input into some of its mobility calculations.

It's fundamentally flawed, in other words.

>>it's less likely to have been edit-bombed by a bunch of interns at the American Enterprise Institute trying to work off that grant from the Koch Foundation.

Ah yes, that well-known Conservative organization, Wikipedia, which draws its references from the well-known Conservative group The Center for American Progress. /sarcasm

Re:Guaranteed solution

[Krneki]

Not poor, you need bored people. TV has probably had the biggest impact on newborn numbers.

Re:Guaranteed solution

[PopeRatzo]

As a result, those capable persons will do whatever it takes to attempt to create a better society for themselves, changing society so other people like them can have a similar shot.

Ah, thanks for explaining.

I was too busy maintaining my defensive crouch to think laterally about what he was saying. Of course that's right.

Re:Guaranteed solution

[PopeRatzo]

The paper also focuses a great deal on income inequality, which is a nonsense measure. Worse, it actually uses GINI measures as input into some of its mobility calculations.

And what did you Wikipedia link use as input into its calculations?

Oh wait, they didn't make any calculations.

And regarding Wikipedia being conservative, there are plenty of credible stories, with citations, that show right wing groups spending lots of money to alter Wikipedia entries to support their agenda.

Now, let me remind you that in the past I've banned you from addressing me. I forbade you from talking to me in the future until you get a clue and stop using bad faith arguments. A Slashdot restraining order, if you will. I'll ask that you abide by that henceforth.

Re:Guaranteed solution

[tehcyder]

what viable solutions will enable us to survive on this increasingly crowded pale blue dot?

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.

But peple don't have children purely for economic reasons, hard as that may be for you to believe.

Re:Guaranteed solution

[tehcyder]

Only poor people can afford to have kids. Rich people don't need them.

After devoting your 20's and 30's to education and a career, it's much more difficult to get pregnant.

Speak for yourself, most people devote their 20s and 30s to shopping and fucking, education and career are just shit you have to do to fund your fun.

Re:Guaranteed solution

[tbannist]

It would have been clearer if he had just said "Only rich people can afford to not have kids".

Re:Guaranteed solution

[ShakaUVM]

And what did you Wikipedia link use as input into its calculations?

Oh wait, they didn't make any calculations.

Perhaps you haven't used Wikipedia before? The references are at the bottom of the page if you want to look them up, and they include references to the Pew Charitable trust and the Center for American Progress.

And regarding Wikipedia being conservative, there are plenty of credible stories, with citations, that show right wing groups spending lots of money to alter Wikipedia entries to support their agenda.

There's plenty of just-as-credible stories about chemtrails and bigfoot sightings, too.

Invasion?

[ericloewe]

I, for one, welcome our new crystalline overlords. Quick, dim the lights!

Re:Invasion?

[WillgasM]

So I'm not the only one that read that in the silicon life form's voice?

Oh i wouldn't worry

[gTsiros]

It's self-regulating.

Or as the great 80's thrash band Nuclear Assault put it, "apathy creates despair"

Re:Oh i wouldn't worry

[turkeyfish]

anything as long as they don't vote for Obama.

Re:So...

[Rockoon]

At 10,000 per hour and growing there is only 1 kind of war that will have any meaningful effect. We dont have enough bullets.

virtualization

[demonbug]

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.

Re:virtualization

[turkeyfish]

I know some poor republicans with minds they don't use. I'm sure you could borrow theirs. They wouldn't miss it.

Re:virtualization

[Ihmhi]

I would come up with a clever acronym, but schizophrenia has way too many letters.

Society Can Help Inhibit Zoophiles Only Partially. Help Remove Excessive Ninnies In America.

...I tried.

Re:virtualization

[martas]

To the cloud!!!

The obvious

[Misagon]

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).

Re:The obvious

[Coren22]

The USA on the linked map shows a positive population growth. Do you know why? Immigration. We'll take your huddled masses.

12 Monkeys !!

[tekrat]

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...

Re:12 Monkeys !!

[EdIII]

release the plague that will force us all to live underground...

I thought that was already released.

It was a combination of Moms, HotPockets, WoW, and Basements.

Re:Bird Flu

[amorsen]

Maybe I'm a bad, horrible, terrible person, but I hope that you'll get it first.

We will survive the same way we have been....

[fatboy]

With the help of people like Norman Borlaug.

Re:We will survive the same way we have been....

[vlm]

With the help of people like Norman Borlaug.

Bad news for you is he died approx 25 months ago. Probably the most important person no one has ever heard of.

Re:We will survive the same way we have been....

[electron sponge]

One can only hope there will be others who stand on the shoulders of that particular giant. Feeding hungry people is good. Helping hungry people feed themselves is great, and Borlaug was great. It's a shame most Americans don't know that one of our countrymen was responsible for saving a possible billion lives.[citation]

The malthusians amongst us may argue whether or not this is a good thing. Not being one of them, I heartily think it is. People not starving is good.

Re:Bird Flu

[grimmjeeper]

With so many people living in squalor, it's only a matter of time before some new killer disease goes on a rampage and kills untold millions of people. Although, there are untold millions sitting around with nothing to lose. All it's going to take is a kook with delusions of grandeur to whip them in a frenzy, getting all of those people to run amok trying to take over the worlds resources. That kind of potential for global war will certainly cut down the population as much or more than a big outbreak of a nasty disease.

Or maybe we'll get both.

Silly

[seven of five]

Is there some reason for saying that "today" humanity passed the 7B mark? Are the counts really that accurate?

Re:Silly

[osu-neko]

Is there some reason for saying that "today" humanity passed the 7B mark? Are the counts really that accurate?

Well, we're growing at ten thousand per hour. That's a quarter of a million per day. To be wrong about the day, we'd have to be off by more than that. And, unlike the cattle farmer who doesn't bother to name each of a few thousand head of cattle, we humans are pretty particular about each and every individual human being. The counts probably are at least that accurate. We don't misplace a quarter million people easily...

Re:Silly

[turkeyfish]

We don't misplace a quarter million people easily

Perhaps not, but we don't seem to mind missing that many traffic fatalities or heart attacks or people through starvation or malaria, etc. Just all income to the mortuary business, save those eaten by sharks, lost in the woods, etc.

Re:So...

[NevarMore]

Thats 167 rounds per minute, which isn't really that fast of a cyclic rate for a modern automatic weapon.

The trick is getting them to stand still while you reload.

Balancing out

[Anonymous Coward]

Progressive people: It will balance itself!
Conservative people: It will balance itself.

Re:Balancing out

[amliebsch]

This is the most insightful comment I've read in a month.

Re:Balancing out

[BlueParrot]

Progressive people: It will balance itself!
Conservative people: It will balance itself.

The question that separates the two is essentially who will be "balanced" and who will get to live.

Alternatively we could make an active effort to promote effective contraceptives, comprehensive sex ed, and tackle poverty.

Re:Balancing out

[Internetuser1248]

Seconded. Most first world nations have negative population growth. Most of the fastest growing nations are impoverished. A study of the statistics makes the correlation between poverty and population growth undeniable. So all we need to do is stop raping third world nations with the big black dildo known as the international financial market, and instead help them out a bit, and voila - stable population.

Re:Balancing out

[Rob Aley]

"Alternatively we could make an active effort to promote effective contraceptives, comprehensive sex ed, and tackle poverty."

Its even easier than that. We promote general education.

Education really is the magic silver bullet to most if not all of the worlds problems. When people are educated, you don't need to promote contraception and tackle poverty, they will work on it for themselves.

The growth is slowing

[Hentes]

Human population is projected to peak at 10 billion.

Re:The growth is slowing

[Atroxodisse]

http://overpopulationisamyth.com/

Or thereabouts. By 2100 we'll be back down to 7 billion and it won't be because of a pandemic or zombies. Population growth is naturally slowing down. It may seem like 1 billion was a lot but relative to recent growth it's actually slowing down. The math is done in one of them fancy overpopulationisamyth videos.

Corn is too high...

[hovelander]

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.

Re:Corn is too high...

[vlm]

See our periodic infestations of the black plague, influenza pandemics, etc.

Antibiotics are useless against virii, all they do is pacify frustrated mothers.

There is a "well known" racial difference of malaria susceptibility vs sickle cell anemia. Also some disease like HIV/AIDS seem to have nearly wiped out countries of certain races much worse than countries of other races, although its all very politically incorrect to even think about it, much less discuss it. Finally funny you should mention corn, as the more corn consumed, the more deaths due to obesity, once corrected for violence and economic effects. It would seem the most effective sort-voluntary depopulation mechanism might be to pepper the earth with 7-11s full of doritos.

Re:Corn is too high...

[Wyatt Earp]

What country has been "nearly wiped out" because of AIDS/HIV?

I will wait for the answer.

Re:Corn is too high...

[hovelander]

Hopefully vim is actually trying to underscore how poverty affects the emergence of disease instead of implying something akin to racism. The point of my comment was trying to highlight some kind of critter that takes advantage of the overall similarity of the 7 billion mobile bags of food. Not racial differences to disease.

Doritos and poofs must not have too toxic an effect, or no one would post to /.

Re:Corn is too high...

[turkeyfish]

"There is a "well known" racial difference of malaria susceptibility vs sickle cell anemia"

There is a relationship between malaria and susceptibility to sickle cell anemia because having the sickle cell trait is beneficial in the presence of high concentrations of malarial mosquitoes. It is the condition, which is a heterozygous trait, is benefitcial to those in areas of high incidence of malaria. It results from by a single base pair difference leading to a single base amino acid substitution in a haemoglobin subunit and is associated with partial collapse of the erythrocyte wall giving the phenomenon its name. Unfortunately, for homozygotes the condition can be fatal.

However, the relationship is not racial, except in the sense that the frequency of the haplotype varies among people of different races that live in different areas where there is a high presence of malaria.

Re:Corn is too high...

[hovelander]

Mod you up if I could.

Problem is politics not population

[hilldog]

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?

Re:Problem is politics not population

[ProzacPatient]

I agree. People who say that there isn't enough room on the planet for a significantly larger population need to take a coast-to-coast road-trip. It's that we don't have enough space for people to live it's just that we don't have enough space for arbitrary borders telling people where they can live.

Re:Problem is politics not population

[TapeCutter]

Try actually working on a farm rather than just driving past them every now and then, it takes much more than a box with central heating to support a human. All large carnivores need a large territory to feed themselves, the only thing different about humans is that we've stopped our prey from running away when it comes time to eat them.

Re:Problem is politics not population

[turkeyfish]

I suggest that you continue to spend lots of time in southeastern Utah, where you will find that there are so few people because there is so little water that things just don't grow so well there, except for a few hardly indians and mormons. If you think Utah is to wet, try the Atacama Desert. Not a lot of people there either for obvious reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with politics. You don't have to believe me. You can move there and see for yourself. Heck, I won't even complain if you take your conspiracy theories with you.

Re:Problem is politics not population

[Grishnakh]

People have been trying to figure out how to make an effective, fair, just government ever since "government" was invented, and we haven't succeeded yet. No one's figured out how to keep greedy, selfish people from rising to power and then using that power for their own ends instead of helping their people. It might not be a solvable problem, unless perhaps someone "outsources" government to computers or benevolent aliens or something.

Re:Problem is politics not population

[ProzacPatient]

It's not that we don't have enough space for people to live but rather it's just that we don't have enough space for arbitrary borders telling people where they can live.

Fixed that typo I just caught.

Overpopulation is not a problem

[Okian Warrior]

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.

Re:Overpopulation is not a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I understand Japan is already worried about population shrinkage.

Re:Overpopulation is not a problem

[broken_chaos]

Until we get under 3-4 billion, I wouldn't worry about population shrinkage, mind you. Unless it all happens at once, then you should worry, as it probably means a zombie horde.

Re:Overpopulation is not a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Be nice if it were true. Unfortunately there isn't enough wealth on the planet to raise its current population out of poverty. If the wealth were shared out equally we'd all be living in the equivalent of a calcutta slum.

Re:Overpopulation is not a problem

[sexconker]

Interestingly enough, in 75 years time there may be the reverse problem - population *shrinkage*.

We were in the pool!

Re:Overpopulation is not a problem

[Paul Fernhout]

"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."

I read that Malthus recanted his position in a later edition, but no one pays attention to that.
    http://conservapedia.com/Robert_Malthus
"There were other contemporaries who accepted the Malthusian theory but regarded the policy recommendations as both harsh and ineffective. In a later edition of his Essay, Malthus admitted the probability that "having found the bow bent too much one way, I was induced to bend it too much the other, in order to make it straight." "

See for the quote:
http://books.google.com/books?id=KRQAAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA427&lpg=PA427

And also:
http://factoidz.com/criticism-of-malthusian-theory-of-population/
"(v) Malthusian theory of population gave no proof of his assertion that population increased exactly in geometric progression and food production increased exactly in arithmetic progression. It has been rightly pointed out that population and food supply does not change in accordance with these mathematical series. Growth of population and food supply cannot be expected to show the precision or accuracy of such series. However, Malthus in the later edition of his book did not insist on these mathematical terms and only held that there was inherent tendency in population to outrun the means of subsistence. We have seen above that even this is far from being true."

More: http://www.google.com/#q=malthus+"Later+edition"

A general issue is that while problems can grow exponentially, so can solutions. Example:
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/29/ge-solar-power-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-in-5-years/

Re:Overpopulation is not a problem

[Nadaka]

"Wealth" is not static. Wealth is natural resources transformed into a useful state by action of labor and energy. As population rises, labor available rises and the rate of transformation of resources into wealth increases. Does it increase as rapidly as population? Maybe, maybe not.

I would also point out that it would only take a few percent of the worlds deserts covered in solar plants to provide enough energy equal US consumption for the entire human population.

Re:Overpopulation is not a problem

[sonicmerlin]

Will Africa ever improve? The way America keeps dumping free food on markets, driving out farmers and making the people complacent and reliant on foreign aid, I don't see it happening soon. Maybe China will finally do it with their investments into African infrastructure.

Re:Overpopulation is not a problem

[kangsterizer]

yeah, lets blind ourselves and just decide current statistics says its going to resolve itself.
Oh and also there's currently no one dying from hunger and here is enough for everyone alive right now. And we have so much land that we don't have to pay all our lives to get a few square meters to sleep and eat in, even in "developed nations".
And we're absolutely not overproducing a ton of crap that last one year and goes to dust again (or most likely, piles up somewhere)

Oh snap. There seems to be a problem after all. Good thing predictions says everyone is going to be above the poverty line soon. And that population will decrease. And also we'll all get a pink pony a birth.

What's scary is that people actually believe this. Frightening kind of scary.

Of course this is not all due to overpopulation, and in fact, overpopulation itself did not come on its own either. But still, wow. Stuff I can read sometimes.

Re:Overpopulation is not a problem

[Pharmboy]

Interestingly enough, in 75 years time there may be the reverse problem - population *shrinkage*.

That can be cured with a generous dose of poverty. I am not sure how the economics work out in the long run. Obviously, we can create a world where everyone has enough to eat (we already produce enough food, just not in the right places) but we can't exactly create a world where everyone is rich, at least I don't know you can. So there will always be one or more groups who are less well off, if because of war, civil strife, environment, or just being the least developed in a world of heavy developed. Or put another way, there will always be countries that are producing more offspring than are dying off, and other countries that are dying off faster than they are producing offsprings. Right now, there are just few of the latter.

Re:Overpopulation is not a problem

[CrimsonAvenger]

Until we get under 3-4 billion, I wouldn't worry about population shrinkage,

You should.

Social Security (and the European equivalents) are based on the assumption that we have a lot of young workers for every elderly person so supported.

Population decline due to lower birthrates (which is what we expect to be seeing later this century) rather turns that on its head, as the number of new workers to support the elderly drops faster than the elderly do.

Re:Overpopulation is not a problem

[turkeyfish]

The problem with over population is that everyone wants to live like Americans and when you have 10,000,000,000 that means that the probability of human extinction rises to 1.

Re:Overpopulation is not a problem

[turkeyfish]

Perhaps, but at least then we could all have our self-respect.

Re:Overpopulation is not a problem

[turkeyfish]

"A general issue is that while problems can grow exponentially, so can solutions."

The Modern Pangloss returns to Slashdot.

The only problem of course is that given only a finite amount of time to solve the problem of over-population and over-consumption and rising carbon dioxide levels, far too few of the exponentially growing problems will actually be solved in sufficient time to raise crop production enough to keep even a few people alive given the dramatic drops in yields that can be expected as global temperatures rise above 120 degrees F on a sustained basis. With a planet of ten billion, all clamoring to live like Americans, you can give the human race perhaps 100-200 years. After that they will be intently studying designs for space craft that can tolerate extreme heat. Humans will probably have to move into permanent caves and pipe in specially cooled sunlight and then in time evolve into naked mole rat cultures.

Re:Overpopulation is not a problem

[NeMon'ess]

An article in The Atlantic suggests the infrastructure being built is only for the extraction of natural resources, and for some roads leading to the homes of the rulers. Sometimes the infrastructure overlaps with where it will help the local population, but far from always. The Chinese are bringing in their own workers and not training Africans. So unless the African countries push back for better deals and training and employing their own citizens, no China won't do it.

Re:Overpopulation is not a problem

[KarlIsNotMyName]

So in 75 years I guess all the ice has melted.

Re:Overpopulation is not a problem

[Mr.No]

You should.

Social Security (and the European equivalents) are based on the assumption that we have a lot of young workers for every elderly person so supported.

Population decline due to lower birthrates (which is what we expect to be seeing later this century) rather turns that on its head, as the number of new workers to support the elderly drops faster than the elderly do.

Isn't that called a Madoff effect i.e. you borrow more money to pay pack a loan. We're already too many on this planet, stop this stupidity about having more young workers to support old people when countries like Spain have 30% of youngsters below 30 without work.

Re:Overpopulation is not a problem

[CrimsonAvenger]

stop this stupidity about having more young workers to support old people when countries like Spain have 30% of youngsters below 30 without work.

When SSA was put into place, the USA had ~11 workers per retiree drawing benefits.

Now, the number is closer to five.

This will continue, as life expectancy continues to increase and the number of children continues to decline.

Re:Bird Flu

[bsharp8256]

You're assuming you'll be one of the lucky few to survive your pandemic.

More Predators.

[LWATCDR]

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.

Re:More Predators.

[RivenAleem]

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."

You also kill off all the people who question authority. Government people, are you reading this?

Re:More Predators.

[LWATCDR]

The stupid people that question authority. The smart people that question authority would sit back and wait for a dumb one to test it for them or build a device to test it safety.

If a person isn't that bright it is for the best for all concerned that they follow the rules.

Food, Water, Energy, Housing

[KermodeBear]

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.

Dizzying speed

[Lucas123]

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.

Re:So...

[Dunbal]

Disease and famine can kill far more efficiently than that. Instead of having to be active to cause people to die by going out, lining them up and shooting them, at some point people will die due to inactivity - not enough farming, not enough transportation, not enough construction of basic sanitation, etc. This is why developed nations must hold on to their infrastructure for dear life. Population in poor countries will boom and bust with disease cycles, but most of those diseases (cholera, for instance) really can't gain a toe-hold in a country with modern water treatment/waste processing.

Alternate view.

[wierdling]

In time we will probably have too few people: http://news.yahoo.com/next-challenge-not-too-many-people-too-few-112046879.html/

a math comment

[ThorGod]

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.

Peak Population crisis?

[Paul Fernhout]

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.

Re:Peak Population crisis?

[NeMon'ess]

If the population was 3.5 billion, would innovation and invention happen more than twice as slowly? I see no reason why it would. After a certain point, there are more than enough people to fill all the roles and industries and have economies of scale. Further population brings much fewer benefits.

Soylent Teriyaki

[Sponge Bath]

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.

Re:Soylent Teriyaki

[EdIII]

Yeah.... okay.

Eating the dead is fine I guess.... if you want to start picking up diseases. Prions are the greatest concern. Google "kuru". Staying away from human brains will not help you either. There are a large number of parasites and diseases that are transmissible by eating the corpse. Even monkeys and apes are dangerous because how close they are to us genetically unless you believe in the Jeebus, in which case we are not even close to monkeys and apes... at all.

All the animals we consume now are killed while healthy. The only way your Soylent Teriyaki program will work is if you kill perfectly healthy humans that pass a physical before hand.

It gives a new meaning to organic-no-hormones-no-antibiotics-gmo labels on food though.

Re:Soylent Teriyaki

[tehcyder]

Soylent Green was full of good ideas.

You must be a hoot at dinner parties.

The problem is lifestyles, not people

[Dasher42]

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

Re:The problem is lifestyles, not people

[Arlet]

That's not a solution. Consume half of before, wait a few generations, and population will double again. Then you'll have the same problem, but worse.

Re:The problem is lifestyles, not people

[w_dragon]

Except, given the current rate of change of population growth, the UN expects us to never make it to 10 billion people. Unless something major changes in the next 100 years, the population will never be double the current level.

Re:The problem is lifestyles, not people

[Arlet]

If the population won't double, it's because of war, pestilence and famine, not because it's going to stop magically at 10 billion with plenty of food around.

Stop!!

[bitbucketeer]

Stop turning food into fuel!

Sad

[Anonymous Coward]

All those people having sex and I can't get laid.

Re:Sad

[electron sponge]

-1 Redundant. You're on /.

Re:There are only a few choices...

[polymeris]

1) Reduce the populations in India, Central America, China, Muslim countries, and Africa.

[citation needed]
Population density is really diverse in Central America. There are local foci of very high density (Mexico City, parts of Guatemala), but overall it is less populated than, say, Europe. Same goes for Muslim countries. The only clear case of overpopulation in an Arab country I can think of is Bangladesh, and even that case I am not sure it is worse than e.g. the Netherlands.

2) Reduce consumption. The only way to make this happen is to actually decrease production.

I disagree with the later statement. The 5% of the population that the US represents, consumes 25% of world resources, approximately. If that extra 20% isn't enough to solve this problem, I am sure it would contribute.

Re:There are only a few choices...

[CAIMLAS]

Nope. Let's see:

* WWI (WWII may not have even been fought, as Germany would've been surpreme after prolongued fighting). Japan would own China and they'd have started industrialization much sooner than they did.
* WWII (there'd be many fewer Russians and Europeans than today, after many years more fighting). Russia would rule Europe.
* Korean War (they'd probably still be fighting, if one side hadn't decimated the other)
* Tens+ of thousands of Kurds and Sunnis are alive today who would've been genocided by Saddam. This would be going on today.
*

If it wasn't for the efforts of the US in the past 100 years, there would be more, larger arm races, or a single empire in the world. (Imagine what would've happened if, instead of the US and European housing markets collapsing, it was the housing markets throughout the whole world due to broader government control of a region.)

You seem to have a different definition of 'stabilizing' than I do. Generally, oppositional weights are required for stabilizing something. If it's one sided in weight, it's not going to balance.

Easy. Or is it?

[Dzimas]

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.

Re:Easy. Or is it?

[thesandtiger]

It takes more effort to be a vegetarian than it does to be an omnivore, both to specifically seek out foods that are vegetarian and also to prepare the meals.

If you can show me a way to be vegetarian while also getting proper nutrition, not requiring more time for shopping, prep and cooking, I'd give it a go. But as it is right now, it seems like a lot more work on something that isn't super important to me (past being reasonably healthy) since for me food is mostly just fuel rather than something I want to spend a large part of my life thinking about.

Re:Easy. Or is it?

[jez9999]

How about a way of being vegetarian whilst eating tasty meat?

Re:Easy. Or is it?

[rsborg]

If you can show me a way to be vegetarian while also getting proper nutrition...

There are more vegetarians in India than omnivores (or even people) in the USA (Wikipedia estimates 1.2B ppl * 40% lacto-ovo vegetarian = 480M lacto-ovo vegetarians). This has been the case for centuries. The culture and traditions there support it heavily, and thus it's possible/easy.

Re:Easy. Or is it?

[Dzimas]

People often ask me about getting proper nutrition on a vegetarian diet. I always ask them if they carefully plan their current diets, and the answer is usually negative. There is a blind assumption that the inclusion of meat and dairy means that we're eating properly. It's wishful thinking.

The reality is that if you take 100 calories of plant-based foods (say a mix of legumes, tomatoes and other tasty stuff) and 100 calories of meat, the veggie mix will have almost the same amount of protein, 60x the folate, 10x the iron, 10x the magnesium, 2x the calcium, 70x the vitamin C and lots of other good stuff. In addition, it has dietary fiber (lacking in meat), zero cholesterol and 1/8th the fat.

Think, for a second, why cheese has been historically important. If you step back in time three centuries, making a few large rounds of cheese in the late summer was a very good idea. Cheese keeps for a long time and is energy-dense. In January, when fresh food is scarce, a family couls dip into their grain supplies and bake bread to go along with the cheese. There are animals in the barn and root vegetables in the cold cellar as well, so meaty stews were relatively easy. It was all about survival. However, a high-protein, high-cholesterol diet isn't required when we have easy access to fresh food.

It makes good sense from a health perspective to reduce meat intake and increase the number of fresh veggies and fruits you consume - that's relatively simple for most people. It's even easier to cut out soda pop and junk food because it's just a bad habit.

Food Shortages Non-existant

[nakedhitman]

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.

Re:Food Shortages Non-existant

[EmagGeek]

Right, but how much of that vast open space is committed to sustaining YOUR life? How many acres are required to grow the food you eat in one year? How many acres are required to provide the resources that you consume in one year? How many are mined to provide the energy you use in one year? How about to provide the oxygen you breathe?

There is a lot to a person's existence. The Earth has to provide you that which you need to survive, and it cannot be done in zero space.

Re:Food Shortages Non-existant

[TapeCutter]

I see vast open space on my commute to work and every time I travel.

I've seen almost the same words on several post, how can so called "educated" people be so ignorant about where their food comes from? The empty space you see is called "farmland", there would be no city for you to commute to without it. Globally, we have run out of new farmland, food prices have sky-rocketed over the last decade causing food riots in many places, including Mexico which borders the US. The only thing that will stop this from becoming worse as our population grows is a new green revolution that does not depend on oil to create fertiliser.

Re:Food Shortages Non-existant

[turkeyfish]

You have probably been watching Fox News haven't you?

Yes, like in the US there is lots of open space. Its just that much of it is at high altitude or desert, with very little water to support life.

One can never ceased to be amazed by how little Biology the average slashdotter knows. They have no idea what would happen if they turned ever square inch of the planet into a factory or a farm. Humans would be extinct in short order from the consequences.

Re:Food Shortages Non-existant

[WillAdams]

Yeah, but we still have farms bordering many U.S. suburbs which are up for sale to housing developers who will then build McMansions, necessitating the building of a new school system (and the closing of one closer to the city center), and then the people living in the new homes w/ the postage-stamp lawns too small for a back-yard garden are going to wonder why their grocery bill is higher (when the food is being trucked in from farther away).

Re:Food Shortages Non-existant

[nakedhitman]

Actually, it's not farmland. It's disused private land, open space projects, and state or national parks. I'm not even including the wasteful residential land usage of the american lifestyle, there is a lot of land that is not farmland in the US.

Re:Food Shortages Non-existant

[nakedhitman]

We wouldn't need to use the whole surface area of the earth for factories or farms. We have the technology to do both of these things either in vertical structures or underground. It's unpleasant, it's expensive, but it's possible. We have a lot of potential for expansion, we just need to get creative with it.

Re:Food Shortages Non-existant

[TapeCutter]

Look into the term ecological footprint, you may be surprised to find it takes about 23 acres to support one American.

Makes me think of the FEAR song "Let's Have A War"

[KatchooNJ]

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!

copy movies 1-2 child's max per family / women

[Joe_Dragon]

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.

Watch the starving in 3D HD!

[kawabago]

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.

tiller of fate

[epine]

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.

Re:tiller of fate

[turkeyfish]

I think the deviancy lies in having the hubris to think we can actually take the helm, when until now we have only learned how to drill holes in the boat.

Re:tiller of fate

[hedpe2003]

Well said.

Re:tiller of fate

[chrb]

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.

We don't have a census, we have a population estimate. A census is an enumeration of individuals.

Re:tiller of fate

[c6gunner]

That was BEAUTIFULLY written, and I commend you on both the style and the content of your writing. However, I must quibble on one point - it's not exactly accurate to state that avoiding the depletion of a particular resource (or transitioning gently to another) is unprecedented. After all, if the deforestation trends of the previous few centuries had continued, North America would be a barren wasteland today. Instead, we've reversed the trend and expanded our forests to an extent not seen in over a hundred years. It's true that deforestation is still a problem on a global level, but we've demonstrated the ability to deal responsibly with the issue on a large scale; now it's just a matter of using the same techniques globally.

Overpopulation is a local, not world, problem

[dwheeler]

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.

Pretty much the standards solutions I figure

[smchris]

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.

Re:We're lucky at Russian Roullette

[turkeyfish]

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.

Did they actuall verify they were humans?

[Timmy D Programmer]

Mwhahahahahaha!

Re:There are only a few choices...

[shutdown -p now]

He's not. US is not philantropic, and has been involved in numerous relatively small-scale conflicts like Iraq or Afghanistan (to name the recent ones) strictly to protect its interests, but so long as Pax Americana is in place, we don't have large-scale total wars along the lines of WW1 and WW2.

it's not about any particular technology

[roman_mir]

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?

Re:There are only a few choices...

[DustoneGT]

In the 20th century, the number of people killed by their own governments far outnumbered the people killed in war. Google Democide to see what I'm talking about.

If only we could be so lucky

[turkeyfish]

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?

Re:If only we could be so lucky

[wierd_w]

What you refer to as "humanity" is little more than a currently accepted social more. Look for example at ancient spartans. They put newborn babies outside in the cold to weed out the weak, and also culturally subjugated a native culture they called "the helionauts", in the same ways we subjugate and exploit animals, or machines.

These were people, and every bit "homosapien" as you or I, yet they would have no problems accepting and encouraging the acceptance of the "unpopular" reality presented by the GP.

The problem then becomes one totally borne from culture, and society's views on morality and acceptability.

There are many modes of cultural development that could persist and thrive through such a decline.

Re:If only we could be so lucky

[Anonymous Coward]

Look for example at ancient spartans. They put newborn babies outside in the cold to weed out the weak,...

Look where it got them. Seen any Spartans recently?

Re:If only we could be so lucky

[couchslug]

"It makes a person question our own effectiveness of our own humanity, for what it is worth."

No, it makes a person question the merit of CURRENT POPULAR BELIEFS.

The idea that competing herds are not competing herds is quite new and highly debatable.

Watch birds sometime. We have painted buntings where I live.

Beautiful little things, but without illusion. They don't hesitate to fight for space on the feeders or for other territory.

They don't appear to ask if this competition is a threat to their "birdality". They are busy being birds.

NO VACANCY

[drwho]

1.5 children per person, maximum. Thank you. The doctor will see you now.

Re:NO VACANCY

[camperdave]

1.5 children per person would be disastrous. You'd still have exponential growth. 1.5 children per couple, maximum... then you've got something.

Re:There are only a few choices...

[ElectricTurtle]

You missed the point. Population density in Europe may be higher but it's moot because so many nations there are having fertility rates below replacement, so they are shrinking (if immigration it ignored) without intervention. Central and South American countries might have very low population density nationally but the fertility rates are much higher.

I think any and all concern is paranoid fear-mongering bullshit as fertility rates on all continents have been dropping for almost half a century and show no signs of stopping. All the most populous nations have seen whole number reductions in that period.

Re:So...

[turkeyfish]

But after you perform that trick, what happens when someone higher and more comfortably ensconced in the social order decides that you become the one who is expendable next?

Solution

[jordan_robot]

I've A Modest Proposal, if you've an ear to listen...

War over Food, Fuel, Land & Water Yields FAMIN

[BoRegardless]

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 ...

Re:There are only a few choices...

[Kyusaku Natsume]

I will try to remember that when here in Mexico we found -again- another mass grave and found -again- that the DEA and ATF sent thousands of weapons to the drug lords.

Re:So Bad Things Will Happen Unless Good Men Unite

[turkeyfish]

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.

My (Probably) Unhelpful Solution

[Mech610]

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.

Re:My (Probably) Unhelpful Solution

[Wyatt Earp]

And where are you even going to put even a billion?

Mars? 28% of the surface area of Earth so it might support a half a billion or more, but it would take centuries for it to be self sufficient.

Logan's Run

[tedgyz]

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.

This planet could easily support 40 Billion

[Qbertino]

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.

Re:This planet could easily support 40 Billion

[drwho]

Ihre Probleme sind in erster Linie mit der Rechtschreibung.

Re:This planet could easily support 40 Billion

[thesandtiger]

The problem is obesity.

I don't mean dietary obesity, but financial and resource obesity.

What do you call someone who consumes far more food than their body needs? A fat fuck.

What do you call someone who hoards far more resources than they need to take care of themselves for the foreseeable future? A success!

Why do people look at the Buffets, Gates and Forbes of the world differently than they do the massively overweight guy who's stuffing his face with the fourth Whopper of the day?

The Only Problem With Your Thinking Is

[turkeyfish]

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.

Re:There are only a few choices...

[CAIMLAS]

They might say that, but they would be wrong. The region hasn't been "stable" for millennia. The only time I can think of when it's been stable is under foreign autocratic rule.

Re:So...

[Wyatt Earp]

The US used roughly 2 billion rounds of ammunition per year from 2002 to 2007. There are enough bullets made.

Re:There are only a few choices...

[CAIMLAS]

Yet, the populations in those countries is still growing (or, in the case of Mexico/Central America, coming to the US... and growing there.) Therein lies the point.

re: #2, if you were to have US consuming a percentage, per its population, it would revert the US to 3rd world status immediately. Birth control would not be affordable. Populations would increase, requiring more food - requiring more arrable land. Not only that, but agriculture would revert to 3rd world toil-in-the-fields work, and there would be markedly less food production.

Overall, I think a global war, with populations dying quickly from starvation, disease, and of course war, is immensely preferable to populations dying off from starvation and disease over generations.

Re:Basically, we're screwed

[TapeCutter]

The population will crash and rebound.

The crash will likely leave behind a world suitable for goat herders and not much of anything else. As for growing your own food, that will work out like it did for the peasants under Chairman Mao.

Re:There are only a few choices...

[CAIMLAS]

Yet, consumption is growing with the population decreases. That's the problem, not the population rate of increase or decrease.

China's population has not been shrinking for 50 years, by the way.

Re:We're lucky at Russian Roullette

[SuricouRaven]

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.

Re:So Bad Things Will Happen Unless Good Men Unite

[Dunbal]

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.

For those interested in maturing populations

[Wyatt Earp]

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

Birth Control?

[Moof123]

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.

Re:Birth Control?

[w_dragon]

I would add some form of old-age government-guaranteed pension. People who think they may rely on their kids for money when they become infirm in old age are still going to have more kids then if they're pretty sure they'll be able to cover the essentials themselves.

Viable solutions

[taucross]

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.

Re:There are only a few choices...

[Anonymous Coward]

You think Bangladesh is an Arab country? You could be the dumbest person I've never met. Look at a map some time. 98 percent of Bangladeshis are Bengali.

Re:weed out the weak

[TaoPhoenix]

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.

Efficiency

[crossmr]

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.

Re:Efficiency

[russotto]

Lots of large tower apartment blocks with good amenities nearby as well as well-planned farms world-wide to cover food usage.

Great, food farms to supply people farms. Not how I'd like to live.

Re:Efficiency

[crossmr]

It's all about how you build them. If you build them like some communist era tenements then no probably not. But if you build good sized, well maintained places with lots of shine and quick access to outdoor leisure activities, like big parks, pools, and the like, then they'd probably be more than enough for most people. Those who wanted to be different could still move out of the city or into different areas.
The key here is using our vertical space and using it well. Efficiency doesn't mean that it has to be drab and boring. Buildings could have wonderful roof top spaces on them with bbq pits, pools, play grounds, etc. (all properly enclosed of course)
they should have fitness centers, be multipurpose with supermarkets in them (Good ones, not quickie over priced ones), small businesses, and other services readily available.

Re:There are only a few choices...

[ElectricTurtle]

Fertility rate is not the same as population growth, dunce. China's fertility rate has shrunk over that period just as nearly everywhere else.

Solution to Overpopulation?

[nani popoki]

Make the practice of medicine illegal.

Re:So Bad Things Will Happen Unless Good Men Unite

[SuricouRaven]

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.

Easy

[bgspence]

WWIII

Re:There are only a few choices...

[SuricouRaven]

The Mexican drug lords only wish they were in Hitler's league.

Re:weed out the weak

[wierd_w]

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.

Namecheck

[JeffElkins]

Thanks for the SF references, submitter. Soylent Green and a Star Trek TNG reference mean extra geek cred!

Re:There are only a few choices...

[shutdown -p now]

Like I said, US is not a philantropic organization. It will go to war to protect its business interests, and it will kill people in other ways. Just like any other country.

The question at hand is, how many more people would have died if there were several smaller (but still major) players in the game instead.

In some cases ...

[PPH]

... its just a forwarding address.

Re:Time for Eugenics

[keller999]

Can I please say from anyone with two shreds of compassion for their fellow humans...

Fuck.
You.

Re:There are only a few choices...

[alonsoac]

There are really only two options.

1) Reduce the populations in India, Central America, China, Muslim countries, and Africa.

Central America?? There are only 41 million people here (says Wikipedia). Each of your other examples is 1 billion or more.

Re:Time for Eugenics

[ianare]

"Can we have controlled plagues, and population-breaks? Please?!"

Yeah. We'll start with you and your family.

Re:There are only a few choices...

[Kyusaku Natsume]

I got your point, but most USians even today buy the fake idea of american exceptionalism when clearly that is not the case, and really believe that most of US's wars in the last century are for justice, democracy and the sugar-coated-crap-of-the-day and not because those wars where in US or US' oligarchs interests.

Re:There are only a few choices...

[Kyusaku Natsume]

They are not racist, only ruthless, savage business men but if most of them were a little bit more educated, I'm sure they would think of themselves as a modern day East India Company. Since the ones that started the show of horror were trained in the USA and most weapons come from the USA too, many people here believe that they are under control of Americans too.

Re:So...

[NevarMore]

Well I'm the man with the gun.

If that doesn't work, you always save one bullet for yourself.

Re:There are only a few choices...

[turkeyfish]

"and the US specifically, has been a stabilizing force in world "

I wouldn't wander down the streets of Bhagdad, Serbia, or Mogadishu saying that, if I were you. The notion that we have been a source of their population boom could get you killed.

Re:There are only a few choices...

[turkeyfish]

Actually if the world got rid of more Americans, there would be room to pack even more in as non-Americans consume so much less than Americans.

short answer, bottom line

[MrKaos]

what viable solutions will enable us to survive on this increasingly crowded pale blue dot?

Get off this rock.

Re:short answer, bottom line

[KeensMustard]

Viable is the term you missed.

Re:short answer, bottom line

[camperdave]

Getting off this rock is not a viable solution. Expansion is proportional to time cubed. Population growth is exponential with respect to time. At some point the population will outstrip our ability to expand from rock to rock. Technological solutions based around slowing consumption, or increasing production efficiency, or finding new resources is ultimately doomed. The only solution - the only solution - is to cut population growth.

Re:short answer, bottom line

[lennier]

what viable solutions will enable us to survive on this increasingly crowded pale blue dot?

Get off this rock.

Into a hole filled with vacuum? That's... an interesting alternative, yes. You first?

Re:short answer, bottom line

[MrKaos]

Viable is the term you missed.

Sorry, I mistyped Thermo Nuclear War.

Re:short answer, bottom line

[MrKaos]

The only solution - the only solution - is to cut population growth.

But having the capability is, access to the resources and the ability to manipulate space is, a viable solution compared to achieving ZPG (Zero Population Growth - that could have been mentioned in the summary for extra geek cred I suppose). Nothing will shut the human race down until the earth is devoid of the resources for us to do anything about it by which time it will be too late.

We have to do it anyway to ensure the survival of extinction level events so since we can't stop the passage of time or the growth of population, in comparison, getting off this rock is not only viable but simpler. I'm not saying it's easy but the technologies involved in doing that are the same ones we will require to live in the ocean - as under utilised as it is. As long as the human race is alive, it will expand. The ability to deal with these sorts of issues is why we have the problem in the first place.

Think about it.

It only takes a concerted effort to overcome the problems with creating long strand carbon nanotubes and that becomes a gigantic technological leap in terms of our species capabilities. That material can be used to create Space elevators, allow us to build skyscrapers tens of kilometers high or cities on the ocean floor.

What you are suggesting is make the majority of the human population go against basic human instincts which is close to impossible and certainly more unlikely than anything I've mentioned here. If it can be achieved we will be left with the entropy of our entire civilisation as is decays around us and we watch helplessly. Start down that path and what purpose was there in stepping out of our cave in the first place. We've grown up as a species, time to start moving us out of our parents house.

The bottom line is this is either the beginning of civilisation or the end of it.

Re:short answer, bottom line

[camperdave]

Okay, let's you and I think about it together. Suppose we discover a means of building colony starships capable of moving ten billion people at the speed of light. Further, suppose there is an empty, habitable "class M" planet around every star.

Now, the human race has been expanding exponentially at the historic average of 2% per year. That means that, on average, the number of people doubles every 35 years. It's crowded here, and we've got a starship and an empty planet only 4 light years away. So we load half the population and take them to Alpha Centauri. It took (according to some estimates) 20,000 years for homo sapiens to get where we are today. Do you know how long it will take us to populate Alpha Centauri to today's levels? Only 35 years.

Okay, it's 39 years later (Four years transit time plus 35 years of growth), 2050, and now you have two crowded planets. No problem, Barnard's Star is only 6 years away from Earth, and Wolf 359 is 8 years from Alpha Centari. So we pack up half the population of Earth and send them to Barnard's Star, and we take half the population of Alpha Centauri and send them to Wolf 359. Again, it will only take 35 years to fill each of the planets. By 2093 we will need to find 8 more planets. We now have a colony on each of the stars within ten light years. 35 years after that, and we will need 16 planets, 70 years and we'll need 32, then 64. By 2200 we will have colonized all the stars within 20 light years.

By 2360ish we'll hit a snag. We will have populated all of the stars within 35 light years of Earth. Colony ships leaving Earth at this point will not arrive at their destination before it is time to send out another colony ship. Of course, all the other colonies will be sending out their colony ships as well. We'll need another 512 planets. At the end of another 35 year cycle, we'll need 1024, another cycle and we'll have used up all the stars within 50 light years.

Scientists estimate that there is about one star per 280 cubic light years. In 800 years or so, our empire will need 34 million new planets. However there are only some 19 million stars within 800 light years. In other words, we will have outgrown our ability to travel.

So, either we break the speed of light, or we limit population growth. Which seems more possible?

Re:short answer, bottom line

[MrKaos]

So, either we break the speed of light, or we limit population growth. Which seems more possible?

Oh, I see the disconnect. I'm only thinking of colonising the solar system, not leaving it. Breaking the speed of light is a much bigger issue than I'm addressing here. I think colonising the solar system is a viable option for the human race and within our reach technologically.

Re:short answer, bottom line

[camperdave]

When we were last on the Moon, the Earth's population was 3.8 billion. Now it's 7 billion. We'll hit 8 billion before we set foot on the Moon again, let alone Mars, and we'll probably hit ten or twelve billion before we have anything resembling an actual permanent colony there. Expanding to a new frontier doesn't address the problem. It only delays the inevitable. The problem is that you cannot have an ever increasing drain on finite resources. You will run out. It is a mathematic certainty.

Re:short answer, bottom line

[KeensMustard]

So you are proposing mass genocide as a solution to the population problem?

Many people would consider that monstrous, but then, so is flying away and leaving billions to die. In either case, the choice as to who lives and who dies is arbitrarily taken.

Come to think of it, the argument that space travel might somehow be a viable option in the face of a major disaster is not just wrong, but quite psychotic. Interesting.

Re:short answer, bottom line

[MrKaos]

So you are proposing mass genocide as a solution to the population problem?

Many people would consider that monstrous, but then, so is flying away and leaving billions to die. In either case, the choice as to who lives and who dies is arbitrarily taken.

and I would agree with you, but even though you don't seem to understand my flippant sarcasm, in the vicarious sense of our entire race it is a viable solution.

Come to think of it, the argument that space travel might somehow be a viable option in the face of a major disaster is not just wrong, but quite psychotic. Interesting.

O...K. Well it is *your* idea.

Re:short answer, bottom line

[KeensMustard]

and I would agree with you, but even though you don't seem to understand my flippant sarcasm,

Let us then review your "sarcasm":

what viable solutions will enable us to survive on this increasingly crowded pale blue dot?

you -> Get off this rock.

Viable is the term you missed. Which, in case you lack comprehension, means that transport off the planet is not a viable solution

Sorry, I mistyped Thermo Nuclear War.

Any sensible person would interpret this remark as replacing the phrase "get off this rock" with "Thermo Nuclear War".

Come to think of it, the argument that space travel might somehow be a viable option in the face of a major disaster is not just wrong, but quite psychotic. Interesting.

O...K. Well it is *your* idea.

Zero points for trolling.

Re:short answer, bottom line

[MrKaos]

Zero points for trolling.

That's great but I neglected to add;

in the vicarious sense of our entire race it is a viable solution... much better you than I.

I wouldn't take any of my responses to you too seriously, I don't have anything invested in them other than amusement. Relax lest you disturb your creamy yellow texture exposing your vinegar.

Re:There are only a few choices...

[Grishnakh]

What I want to know is: how would the 20th century have played out if the US never got involved in WWI?

IMO, the US was wrong to get involved there. There was no "right" side, all the participants in that war were in it for greedy reasons, not for any lofty goal like self-defense. The US only got involved (at a late hour) because it looked like their buddies the Brits were going to lose, and mainly because a bunch of financiers had lent a lot of money to the Brits, and only a little money to the Germans, and they were worried they'd never get repaid if the Brits lost. The USG should have just stayed out of it, and let the stupid bankers lose their money. That's what happens when you take bad risks.

If the US had stayed out, I think it's fairly obvious the Germans would have won, which is fine; the British and French shouldn't have picked a fight with them. Then, some loser named "Hitler" never would have amounted to anything more than a Corporal, and WWII would never have happened (it only happened because the Allies abused the Germans after they lost WWI). Of course, I guess the Germans could have abused the Brits and French, causing a different kind of WWII, but it's hard to say how exactly that would have played out.

Anyone ever write any alternate history novels about this?

Re:There are only a few choices...

[Grishnakh]

You can thank Obama and his buddy Eric Holder for that one. It hasn't affected only you guys, a few of our own Border Patrol agents were murdered with those weapons. Obama should be impeached and tried for high treason. Unfortunately, this would only bring justice, and wouldn't actually fix the problem, because we'll probably get a Republican next, and whoever that is, he's going to be even worse than Obama.

Re:There are only a few choices...

[Grishnakh]

Like I said, US is not a philantropic organization. It will go to war to protect its business interests, and it will kill people in other ways. Just like any other country.

I completely disagree. I've never heard of Switzerland, for instance, going to war to protect its business interests, or running around assassinating people in other nations. Same goes for Luxembourg, Andorra, San Marino, Monaco, and Iceland. Sure, the big powers like US, China, Russia, Britain etc. will go to war for economic/business reasons, but that doesn't mean every country does so.

Every time I see this argument

[Eskarel]

it pisses me off.

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.

Re:There are only a few choices...

[Grishnakh]

Yep, wars have never done much to reduce overpopulation. The Spanish Flu of 1918 killed more people than those killed in WWI in the same timeframe. Diseases have probably been the biggest population-reducers, with the most famous being the Bubonic Plague which killed 1/3 of Europe's population. Of course, these days we're a lot smarter about sanitation and letting rats run around our houses, so any big epidemic would have to be a lot more complex and hard to prevent than that.

Re:Blody planet

[turkeyfish]

Looks as if we are right on schedule.

Re:weed out the weak

[djlowe]

as most people in the western world have no conception of how to survive even a plane crash

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

Re:Blody planet

[turkeyfish]

You need water to grow cellulose and even that will become in short supply as far too few plants are able to tolerate the heat that can be expected on the planetary surface in a few hundreds years time at the current rate of global warming, ignoring the tremendous boost to temperatures that gas fracking and tar sand oil production will generate as these fuels are burned and the carbon dioxide is dumped into the atmosphere.

nt

[shentino]

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.

Re:nt

[lennier]

On a strictly theoretical basis, it's better to take something than nothing.

No, only in very artificial situations occurring in a vacuum with free money dropping from the sky from psychology researchers is this even remotely the case.

In a world filled with competitive players, everything that your rival gets is not only something that you don't get, but gives your rival the ability to hurt you. Take a look at how, say, Apple and Microsoft compete. Does Apple think "well, it doesn't hurt me if Microsoft builds a tablet, that's sales I wouldn't have gotten anyway?" Heck no. The smart CEO thinks strategically and says "if I don't leave my rivals as utterly broken, smoking craters, every dollar they get from a sale can be turned into armies of marketers and lawyers who will take me out."

I'm not saying this state of affairs is good - in fact this ruthless tendency towards infighting is a lethal disease of capitalism - but the globalist Pollyanna talk in business today about "thinking on the margins" and not worrying about strategy, the competitive environment or where your industrial base is being outsourced to, is just silly.

On a strictly theoretical basis where your trading partners are also your ruthless enemies who want you out of business by fair means or foul, it makes perfect strategic sense to take a temporary short-term loss yourself in order to avoid manufacturing your own downfall later.

This kind of paranoid thinking also leads to huge stuffups later down the line, but there's a reason why CEOs are paranoid, and it's not just that they're mentally deficient. It's that the rational demands of business are not Econ 101, they're Art of War.

Educate and Empower Women

[Doc Ruby]

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.

Re:Educate and Empower Women

[Doc Ruby]

You obviously have never had a female speak with you. Your interest in sex is purely hypothetical.

Our Greenhouse Will Solve the Problem

[Doc Ruby]

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.

Re:Basically, we're screwed

[turkeyfish]

"invest in the resources and knowledge to be able to produce your own food,"

But what happens when we have burned enough fossil fuels and tar sand extracts that global temperatures become too high to permit much soil moisture and most plants simply won't grow because of the heat? A number of current climate models suggest, for example that places like Kansas City could see a hundred days a year with temperatures over a hundred degrees F within 100 to 200 years and perhaps less?

Sounds like your plan may well let your immediate or second or third generation progeny being among the last humans living in caves, but its not really much of a long term solution.

At least we can look on the bright side as it would seem as if we will have a lot of low budget home movies, where future citizens of earth roam the deserts, attacking one another for the last few drops of water until the tires melt on their vehicles to entertain ourselves with.

Re:weed out the weak

[morari]

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.

Pangloss Returns

[turkeyfish]

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.

Bon Appetite

[turkeyfish]

After you.

The problem is

[turkeyfish]

that there aren't nearly enough of them to constrain the greed and gluttony of the average anti-environmental conservative.

Re:Stop feeding the overpopulators

[turkeyfish]

You do realize of course that one of every four or five children in the United States now lives in poverty don't you?

well

[n3r0.m4dski11z]

there goes the neighbourhood!

Climate change is your friend....

[mevets]

If we keep burning everything we can get our hands on, these vast northern lands will become viable, both for living and farming.

Note to self

[Zamphatta]

Install Flash so I can see a map.

Hans Rosling on TED talks...

[staalmannen]

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.

Re:Hans Rosling on TED talks...

[jack the ex-cynic]

I think that we are more qualified to design a moral system today than some bronze-age herders somewhere in the middle east.

Human nature hasn't changed since the bronze age. Don't confuse that with cultural religions. "Love others as yourself" is simple enough, but if humanity was capable of that as a collective (irrespective of individual success) we'd have done it already.

Re:Hans Rosling on TED talks...

[c6gunner]

"Love others as yourself" is simple enough

It's simple enough to say; it's a ridiculous thing to actually expect someone to do (and would be evil if it could actually be done, IMO, since it would completely eliminate all competition). The only reasonable moral guideline is "try to treat others the way they want to be treated".

Re:Hans Rosling on TED talks...

[c6gunner]

not sure how it would be evil/eliminate all competition

Because if you truly "loved your neighbor as yourself" you'd be setting yourself up to be taken advantage of by everyone. Neighbor wants your car? Sure, go ahead! Neighbor wants to screw your wife? No problem! Neighbour wants all of your food? Well, I'll starve, but that's ok, I love you!

Yes, telling people to be suckers is evil. Being a sucker isn't really evil, but it is ... sucky.

, and i disagree with your last statement for 4 reasons:

1. often, people need what they don't want.

Here you're assuming some moral or intellectual superiority which gives you the ability and the duty to determine what others need. If you don't understand just how egotistical and wrong that mindset is, I don't think we can really talk about morality.

2. there's no connection, just transaction.

There doesn't need to be. The only things you need for moral conduct are tolerance and some empathy. If you want to throw some "connections" in on top, fill your boots, but they're not required.

3. there's no personal accountability for failure.
4. there's no requirement for introspection.

Good. These are points in favor, not in opposition.

Of course, #3 applies to your "love they neighbor" spiel, too, so I'm not sure why you'd object in the first place.

Re:weed out the weak

[tbird81]

as most people in the western world have no conception of how to survive even a plane crash

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.

Re:weed out the weak

[tbird81]

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!

Re:weed out the weak

[donaldm]

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.

We Saw This Coming in 1972

[jIyajbe]

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:

In 2008 Graham Turner at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia published a paper called "A Comparison of `The Limits to Growth` with Thirty Years of Reality".[5][6] It examined the past thirty years of reality with the predictions made in 1972 and found that changes in industrial production, food production and pollution are all in line with the book's predictions of economic and societal collapse in the 21st century.[7]

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.

Re:Corn != Beef

[thegarbz]

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.

Re:weed out the weak

[Neil Boekend]

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.

Re:Time for Eugenics

[Arlet]

Don't worry. A few days without meals, and your compassion for fellow humans will disappear quickly enough.

Two men enter.

[RoboJ1M]

what viable solutions will enable us to survive on this increasingly crowded pale blue dot?

Thunderdome?

Decimation?

J.

Psych fail

[jc79]

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

[tlambert]

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

UN does not fully say stabilisation

[aepervius]

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.

Re:There are only a few choices...

[terjeber]

You have never read a history book, have you?

Re:There are only a few choices...

[terjeber]

Really? Who destabilized the entire Middle East? Your ignorant statement implies that the Middle East was at some point in the past, prior to the Cold War, more stable than it is today. Could you please point to that time period? It was reasonably stable under August Caesar, but since?

Re:There are only a few choices...

[terjeber]

The 5% of the population that the US represents, consumes 25% of world resources, approximately.

I thoroughly despise this statement. I have seen it over and over since I went to school. It is correct, but it is also utterly misleading. There is only one way this can be true, and that is if the US population is five times more efficient at producing resources (resources are produced and consumed, not just consumed). They generally have been.

So, the US isn't gluttonous because it has an insatiable appetite, it is gluttonous because it is so effing good at doing stuff while (in general) the rest of the world are lazy slackers.

Re:There are only a few choices...

[terjeber]

Sigh. If ignorance is bliss, you must be astonishingly blissful.

The world has seen dramatic drops in starvation rates, not despite of, but because of the US. The most effective measurements for driving down the number of people starving to death in the world has been US companies outsourcing production to poor countries. Countries who have embraced this model has prospered, countries who have shunned the model have fallen behind. In 1970, for example, South Korea was poorer than most countries in Africa. Where are they now? Why?

The western world is the reason starvation rates have been dropping so much, which makes calling the western world a "parasite" somewhat odd. Without the western world these countries would have been far worse off then they are today.

It is also funny to seen dumb-ass statements from ignorant idiots like follows: "Reduce consumption in the blood sucking western world, and everyone else can live just fine". It is such a clueless statement I am not even sure where to begin refuting it. If the US stopped its "blood sucking" activities and significantly reduced consumption it would have two rather immediate effects. Firstly, industrialization in the developing world would hit a brick wall. It would stop dead in its tracks. Secondly, millions upon millions of people in China, Korea, India, Malaysia and other countries would die of starvation.

Companies like Nike and Adidas, long reviled for "exploiting" poor people have saved more people from starvation in a year than all the worlds aid throughout history.

Before ranting and raving about things you have no knowledge about, get an education.

Human hypocrisy

[gshegosh]

"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.

Re:Or...

[terjeber]

There is plenty of food on this planet, it is just not distributed equitably

You are absolutely right, and you are so bloody wrong. Yes, there is ample food in the world. If the west cut its consumption of said food, the amount that would become available to the starving world would increase by exactly zero percent. Even in the starving world (Africa being the main example) they produce and throw away more food than they need.

People in the third world are, believe it or not, not suffering from our over-consumption. They are suffering for reasons that generally are local.

The most devastating thing the west has been doing to the poor countries is in fact to give them aid. If we want Africa to stop suffering, we can just stop giving them aid. They'll be fine within a decade. Note, this does not apply to emergency aid, only systematic aid.

Re:weed out the weak

[jellomizer]

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.

Re:There are only a few choices...

[AlterEager]

* Tens+ of thousands of Kurds and Sunnis are alive today who would've been genocided by Saddam. This would be going on today.

ITYM Shia, not Sunni. Saddam was Sunni

Tens of thousands may have been saved, but at the cost of around a million excess deaths of others. Saddam's murder rate was tiny compared to what happened during and after the invasion.

Re:weed out the weak

[wierd_w]

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.

Re:weed out the weak

[dcw3]

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.

Re:weed out the weak

[morari]

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!

Re:There are only a few choices...

[polymeris]

You are, of course, correct, like others pointed out. That was very dumb of me. Was trying to think of an overpopulated Arab country, gave up, and then started looking for a Muslim country (which the GP mentioned). Forgot to change the first part of the sentence.

You are totally wrong son.

[REALMAN]

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.

Re:Time for Eugenics

[c6gunner]

Can I please say from anyone with two shreds of compassion for their fellow humans...

Fuck.
You.

What's more compassionate - killing a billion in order to save the species ... or doing nothing, allowing 6.5 billion to die, and having the remainder be left in a primitive state, living in fear and reverent awe of the god-like powers of their ancestors?

I don't actually agree with him - I think most of his assumptions are horribly flawed - but if it could be conclusively shown that the only way for the species to avoid extinction is to embark on a program of eugenics ... I wouldn't let your idea of "compassion" get in the way. It's not a question of compassion - it's a question of what you believe.