Last semester my anthropology teacher stated that experts claimed that the worlds population would reach 9 billion by the year 2050.
Assuming this is true, I am concerned about the strain that this will put on the earth. Which resources will this affect the most. What can I do to make things last longer.
Is there anything going on right now, that is helping sustain our resources?
Should i recycle my Kleenex and dirty diapers? 
I imagine that this will get moved to GD sooner or later, but what the heck, I’ll try to give as factual an answer as I can.
Nobody really knows. The thing is, as technology improves different resources become less or more critical. Moreover, a shortage in some resource can spur us to work around it or to imrove our techniques for acquiring that resource.
There was a celebrated wager a few years back between “doomster” Paul Ehrlich and “boomster” Julian Simon. I found a link here: http://www.overpopulation.com/faq/People/julian_simon.html
Of course, we can’t say for sure that there isn’t some critical resource that we will run out of; that can’t be replaced; and that we can’t use more effeciently to make up for some shortage. The classic example of this is wood and Easter Island. But there’s really no telling.
Even though technology will allow 9 billion people to live on Earth for a while, no amount of technological advance can sustain us all indefinitely. The fact is that we are using resources faster than nature can create them. This is the reason why some form of population control must be implemented worldwide before we suffocate ourselves.
It seems to me you’re awfully confident given that we don’t know where technology is headed. Would you care to give the specifics of which resource or resources will be short enough in supply to prevent a world population of 9 billion from being sustained indefinitely?
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Which resources? I think that the topic is worth discussing, but it seems to me you need to support your position with specifics.
No I didn’t want to debate this issue, maybe I wasn’t asking what I thought I was.
I wanted my hypothetical scenario to include a similar lifestyle to the one we enjoy today. I. E. no new magical resource to solve the oil situation. No new, more efficent ways to process materials.
So i guess a better question to pose and one that may keep this out of GD is:
If tommorow, 3 billion extra people of all ages and races appeared all over this planet, which resources would we currently be in immediate or semi-immediate danger of running out of. I would guess that water, oil, and maybe phosphorus (for fertilizer) would be the first to go.
Or a more speculative question to add to the first is, what changes, in general, would we have to make as a population to support (with current technology) a population of 9 billion?
Adopt kids instead of having them the old-fashioned way. Encourage your friends to do the same. Advocate (in whatever way seems best to you) for smaller families.
Recycling and advancing technology will make it easier for more people to live on this planet, but eventually (and not a very long eventually at that) there will simply be too many of us.
Well, the steps you take are up to you, I’d personally go in for the bottles and cans thing.
I don’t think we can be nearly that unequivocal about what will happen. Can the Earth support 9 billion people right now? No. But who knows what technology will do. I personally expect that we’ll probably have some major wars, diseases, etc to slow things down if we don’t implement population controls… but who knows, maybe we’ll figure things out in time. The carrying capacity for manking has increased many times over the course of history, maybe we’re about to hit something equivalent to the agricultural revolution…
Now, if we maintain our reliance on fossil fuels, don’t develop more compact ways of growing food, and don’t figure out a way to scrub greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere (or reduce the amount that’s produced dramatically), sure, we’ll have problems… but it’s entirely possible that we’ll figure these things out.
My anthropology teacher (who may or may not be an expert on this I have no clue) said that scientists estimated the carrying capacity of the earth at 9 or 9.5 billion people. Or in other words, the earth could support no more than that many. Once that level of population is reached, the earth, (in theory) would reach a natural state of equillibrium. And the population growth globally would reach +/- 0.
lucwarm - (sorry Otto3883) Maybe we don’t know where technology is heading and that there will be advances that enable indefinite sustenance, but can we afford to wait for it? As for the resources, I mean those that enable us to live in the style to which we are accustomed, ie energy-producing resources. Fossil fuels. They will not last forever.
National Geographic magazine had an interesting article about this, especially in terms of how growth will be increasingly concentrated into megacities. It was in the November 2002 issue (US). They have an excerpt available here
http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0211/feature3/index.html
The article doesn’t answer the OPs exact (if a little nebulous) question, but it came to mind as a good place to start if you’re interested in the topic.
So we had better start making some of our own!
This planet could support 18 billion people or more, but the fossil fuels would disappear in a century or so- we need to move to renewable resources within that timescale.
I believe we will have a population of hundreds of billions in the long run- but most people will live on artificial habitats in orbit around the sun, near the gas giants, everywhere there is resources…
there is a trillion times the energy available in the solar system than the people of Earth currently use, and we should be considering the whole solar system as a resource rather than just this planet;
humanity is only using a fraction of the crust of our world… out there are solid bodies corresponding to the entire mass of the Earth and more, available for use in a low gravity environment, and that is wthout considering the gas giant planets and the mass of the sun itself.
eventually I recommend humanity should move off the earth altogether, to allow the wildlife room to develop in peace-
the ones that survive the next hundred years, that is.
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
Eventually the religious idiots who insist they have the right to make as many babies as they like will realize how stupid they’ve been and we will have government mandated population control. Now wether or not it will happen in time is another story all together…
Ok I started a thread in Great Debates about this stuff:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=197338
First, remember that numbers like “carrying capacity” are inherently unreliable. They are premised on the assumption that society, technology, and the general state of the world will remain unchanged far into the future. We don’t know very much, but we do know that none of those assumptions are valid. Technology in particular is constantly changing.
Second, it’s important to know about the Demographic Transition. Every industrialized society we know about has gone through an initial period of explosive population growth (as the death rate plummets due to improved living conditions, but the birth rate stays the same) followed by a very dramatic fall in the birth rate.
Indeed, the birth rate has plummeted so much in many of these industrialized countries that it has fallen below the replacement rate. Places like Japan and Italy, for example, will see a fall in population in the next 50 years, unless there is substantial immigration.
This is one of the major reasons why UN estimates of the world population in 2050 have fallen in the last few years, from 9.4 billion to 8.9 billion. (The other major reason, sadly, is AIDS.)
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2003/02/26/32867-ap.html
Since the Demographic Transition appears to apply to all industrialized countries, regardless of geographic location or national ideology, and since more countries industrialize with each passing decade, it’s quite likely that the world population in the 22nd century will be shrinking, not growing.
Last, there’s already a mechanism in place to let you know what resources are in scarce supply–prices. If the people whose business it is to know about these things become convinced that we’re in imminent danger of running out of fossil fuels, for example, you won’t need to pass some conservation program to get people to use less oil. Instead, you’ll see a substantial and permanent increase in the price of fossil fuels. This price increase will automatically encourage people to use less fossil fuel, and switch to other forms of energy.
Oil is about the last thing anyone would run out of; currently oil companies keep track of 20-30 years of oil reserves, so there’s plenty of known oil. As oil gets more expensive, oil fields that are not considered worthwhile to exploit at the present time become cost effective, and well-known but somewhat expensive techniques become worthwhile (like various methods of synthesizing oil).
Fresh water at current western drinking quality is almost entirely a man-made resource, since 1st world people today have higher standards for water than all but a very few natural water sources provide. These 3 billion extra psople might exhaust local water supplies wherever they appear and might force people to use lower-quality water, but that has a lot more to do with them magically appearing than with absolute limits on the amount of water in existence.
I’m not aware of any phosphorus shortages, there would certainly be food shortages if the people suddenly appeared, but for a long term solution one should bear in mind that a number of governments pay farmers not to produce food. The US, for example, is a net exporter of food despite paying billions of dollars per year to artificially lower food production.
Bongmaster, if you have a problem with religious people or with any particular belief some of them might have, you will have it outside of this forum.
This is not a request.
Doh! Forgot to mention:
Speaking of this forum, this question is well beyond the scope of it. Since there’s an active thread on the subject in GD, I’ll just close it here.