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Earth Officially Home To 7 Billion Humans
New submitter arcite writes "It's official: planet Earth is now home to over seven billion ugly-bags-of-mostly-water (otherwise known as humans). We're adding ten thousand new humans every hour, or one billion every nine years. Head over to 7 Billion Actions (put together by the UN with the help of SAP) and check out the population map data. Short of adopting a strict diet of Soylent Green, what viable solutions will enable us to survive on this increasingly crowded pale blue dot? What will the role of technology be in supporting this many people?"
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.
Maybe I'm a bad, horrible, terrible person, but I hope that you'll get it first.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Human population is projected to peak at 10 billion.
Oblig.
"The most important video you'll ever see"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY
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.
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.
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.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Can I please say from anyone with two shreds of compassion for their fellow humans...
Fuck.
You.
Get off this rock.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
"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.
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:
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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.