Neither mundane or pointless:
7 Billion
3 minute video by National Geographic Magazine.
But really vague… 7 billion what?
Since it’s NG Magazine, pendulous boobies.
d&r
Sorry, for some reason I thought it would be obvious: People!
Okay. And?
I am sorry, I thought it was interesting and wanted to share it.
Again, I am sorry I seem to have made a mistake.
Hamburgers served, of course.
I mean, I guess there are some interesting tidbits in there, but it’s not like anyone’s surprised that there are 7bn people on this planet now.
and if the goal of this was to present it as a problem, then I guess I’d have to ask what they propose to do about it?
Great video. Interesting and a little scary. I don’t get the comments above, by the way. Quite obviously, the point was to get us to think about population growth, rate of growth, use of natural resources, and related issues.
and do what about it? I mean, I don’t have kids, likely never will, so… OK, I’m thinking about it. Is being sad going to be enough for me to have done my part?
there’s no shortage of people pointing out problems and “raising awareness.” There’s a real shortage of people with solutions.
I liked the video, on the same theme here is an infographic showing various changes between 2000 and 2010. The change in power consumption in China is alarming though it baffles me why they chose to use different units of measurement of Chinese power consumption vs American.
Huh. I thought we hit 7B a few years ago. Or has it gone down, from 7.3B to 7B or something?
Hey Foggy! PLEASE don’t apologize to anybody for posting this! It’s a great story. Saw this on the front cover of the National Geographic magazine and thought it was very interesting, indeed. Sadly, so many of those 7 billion will miss the point of the series as proven by previous comments. Some people just don’t care about the impact of the population growth on the planet. I think the NG series will be interesting to keep up with.
Thanks, Foggy. FYI - the video has had almost 51,000 views on Youtube in 3 days so it looks like quite a few people share your interest.
You thought it was interesting; but not interesting enough to make the effort to quote *any *of the article to let us know why we should click on the link - despite being nudged in that direction…
No attempt at discussion on *why *this is interesting - despite being nudged in that direction.
It’s interesting, but what about all those scientists who think the Earth can sustain over 10 billion people?
Well, that’s what you get for nudging rather than being clear.
What would a world with a trillion people look like though?
Surface area of the Earth
Total surface area of the Earth(water and land) is 510 million sq. km.= 1,960.8 people per sq. km.
Land only (149 sq. km.) =6741.4 per sq. km
Off the top of my head, I can think of a lot of possible solutions:
-Colonizing the moon
-Reducing the western standard of living to something more sustainable
-Finding different ways to grow food and power cars so that we can use what we have more efficiently
-One child policies
-Forced sterilization
-Letting nature take its course and allowing people to die off as resources become scarce.
-Engineering a highly deadly, very easily transmitted disease that only a chosen number of people have been vaccinated against in order to thin the herd
I think the idea is that we should be discussing this problem to try to find ways to enact solutions that are feasible and morally acceptable. If we ignore it, the odds are much more likely that we’ll wind up with a solution a lot of people won’t like.
So the solutions are either a very clear “have/have not” divide regarding the ability to have a child or mass slaughter (and of course the moon thing). And you wonder why people are against solutions to the population bomb?