“The world’s population has risen from two billion in 1930 to 6.8 billion now, with nine billion projected by 2050.”
I pulled this from an article On BBC, check it out here if you like.
In every major city across the United States you find appartment buildings in clumps and clusters, all strategically located near some sort of commercial hub. They are essentially boxes stacked on boxes stacked on boxes for people to exist in. What happens when there is no more room for any more boxes? Do we start living in trees? But, assuming that there are still trees to live in, what do we do with all the life forms already in the trees? Do we put them in boxes in the name of scientific progress?
In 1966 Rober Heinlein wrote a book " The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress" in which the moon has become a penal colony. Are we (the human race) to be sent to populate the moon, or perhaps Mars? I know thats a stretch, but not much of one, after all Heinlein’s story was set in 2075 and according to the BBC article scientists expect the global population to be around nine billion people twenty years before then. With our technolgies and advances on the International Space Station now, who’s to say that in that time we won’t have the capablilties to colonize another planet or some other satellite floating near earth’s orbit?
I know this is really broad and spans more than just the issue of population growth. I see it as all tied together and I hope all of you reading this will have some interesting ideas and comments.
There’s no such problem as over population in modern countries. You’d think there is, but there isn’t. There are more than enough resources on Earth to supply 10+ billion people with food, water, clothing, shelter and entertainment – comfortably.
And, people stop breeding once they have a moderately decent quality of life – look at Russia, Ebgland and the USA. Some even have declining, rather than just mostly stagnant populations. The USA is still growing in population, but not nearly as fast as it used to.
Also, why would we start living in trees when we ran out of boxes to live in? We could just build more boxes. Also, apartments are in no way inferior to homes, homes are just boxes that are lonely.
In regards to the US people seem to complain either way.
We’re either living on top of eachother too densely with no elbow room in “boxes stacked on boxes”
or we’re part of the urban sprawl with lots of motor vehicles and 1/2 acre lots.
A mix of both is nice and it’s what we seem to have.
And space really isn’t an issue. If we wanted to we could build another New York City in the middle of Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming to put another 25 million people into.
Global population is projected to flatten out around 2050 at around 9 billion as growing prosperity and access to contraceptives cause people to have smaller families.
Space isn’t really a problem, Canda’s about 10 billion square kilometers, so we could move the whole projected maximum world population up there and everyone could get their own square kilometer. And something like half the worlds current population live in densly populated urban areas, if we all lived at the population density of Manhatten, we could all live in Ohio.
Resource allocation is a more serious problem, but that probably has more to do with growing prosperity then population growth. We can’t support the current population level at a Western level of prosperity with todays technology, so future population growth just adds 50% to an already existing problem regrading limited resources.
Not really; there aren’t enough resources to supply us long term right now. We are using up nonrenewable resources like water deposits left over from the last ice age and oil. And our farming practices deplete the topsoil. When those resources run out we’re in serious trouble.
Raising the population to 10+ billion would just make matters worse.
So long as we aren’t firing billions of tons of resources into space, they’re all still here on earth. We just have to figure out new ways of getting them.
Maybe, but it seems the correct order in which to proceed is to create a system which utilizes them in an effective, responsible manner FIRST and only THEN proceed to procreate…
Among the stupidest projections is a flattening of the population growth when we’re all pleasantly wealthy. Right now the growth is occurring in countries that are unpleasantly poor, and exactly what is the evidence they are going to get developed before we overrun the planet? Even if we get 'em rich and get 'em to stop reproducing, what is going to be the collective ecologic footprint of 10 Billion wealthy people, since we put Getting Stuff well ahead of everything else, including our collective ecological impact? It’s ridiculous and naive to assume we are suddenly going to back off our consumption. See Al Gore for an example of someone Deeply Concerned about our collective footprint while Personally Consuming like there is no tomorrow. (Which there may not be)
We’ve done a great job surprising the OverPopulation Doomsayers so far with technology such as advances in food production. But we’re living on the edge kids; one big crisis and it’s Farewell, Humans. There’s no margin for error. And we are already pushing Gaia to the limit, always putting humans first.
If we have a hungry human and the only thing left to eat is the world’s last passenger pigeon brood, they’re goners.
Place all your bets on us sucking the earth dry until it kills us, with lots of hoopla and no actual personal sacrifice–including placing a limit on reproduction (China being a modest exception).
As for colonizing space, or the Moon, think for a minute. If you can build a closed habitat on the Moon that can support human life, why not build that habitat on Baffin Island instead? It would be a heck of a lot cheaper, plus if your habitat springs a leak everyone doesn’t die.
Actually if you look at the numbers, fertility rates have decreased quite a bit in all countries, rich and poor, north and south, capitalist and communist, religious and secular, hither and yon, … The human population is expected to stabilize in the 9-10 billion person range around the middle of this century. As for resources, what resources are we in danger of running out of? Food? Thanks to improved technology, the human race farms roughly the same acreage as we did in 1950. As modern technology gets put into use throughout the third world, those countries will produce more. Fuel? We already have the necessary technology to power society without fossil fuels. The idea of “overpopulation” is simply false. There’s no such thing.
See, because overpopulation is a politically incorrect thing to advance, folks like you want to say stuff like “We already have the necessary technology to power society without fossil fuels.” Without even bothering to refute that, I’d just like to point out that…we don’t use those technologies. Maybe we got enough resources to sustain 25 Billion without any adverse environmental consequences…but see, ITR; here’s the thing. We won’t. We haven’t and we’re not gonna. We’re gonna do what’s easy. And we’re gonna get Stuff. What’s possible is irrelevant. The question is, what is? The Tanzanian wants to be me and I want to be Al Gore. The Tanzanian’s looking to go from his scooter to a Hummer and I want to go by private jet instead of coach bus. He wants his first house and I want a third one. Plus I want to eat as good as Al Gore.
So, for instance, if you care about AGW, make the following calculation: Half the population makes half the AGW impact. And by the way, twice the population is going to HUGELY worsen AGW (if buy into the concept) because the population growth is occurring in the areas which currently have minimal footprint, and our plan is to get them rich so they don’t reproduce so vigorously. Getting them rich means Tata Nanos and also lawnmowers and other Stuff. And right now Stuff is what creates carbon footprints. There is no chance people waiting for Stuff are going to wait for you and your buddies to fix the energy grid and demand Stuff only when we find non-fossil fuel technology to make their Stuff with.
While I recognized the political sensitivity around shouting “Stop having babies!!!” it is nevertheless what we need to do.
The moon has a surface area about the same as Africa. Even if we could transport people to the surface of the moon for free, it would still cost a lot more to support them on the moon than to support them on Baffin Island.
There are vast areas here on planet Earth with essentially zero people. For the next hundred years or so, I predict there will be more people living in Antarctica than on the moon, by two orders of magnitude. That is, if we had a lunar settlement with 1000 people, I’d predict at least 100,000 people living in Antarctica. And this is basically because anything you can build on the moon you can build at least 100 times cheaper in Antarctica.
Anyway, cities are the most ecologically friendly way of living. 1 million people living on Manhattan have a smaller ecological footprint than 1 million people living in single-family suburban homes. Space for housing isn’t the issue, go out into the midwest and you’ll see miles and miles of cheap land, you can buy some and build a house there and you won’t have to see another human being for months.
Shortages of water is looming a serious problem in many parts of the world, especially those that rely on glacial sources.
And you can’t just assume that technology repeatedly boost food production to keep up with population growth. Beware the principle of diminishing returns.
And if the technology exists to power society without fossil fuels, there has been tremendous foot-dragging in implementing it. We’re still a long ways off.
But it’s ironic that you seem to be saying that the threat of overpopulation is is not a problem because one day that problem will be solved. It’s like saying, “we don’t need to call the fire deprtment to put out the fire, because the fire will get put out by the fire department after we call them”.
People reducing their fertility is indeed the solution. So people need to make sure that they reduce their fertility. It’s ironinc that many of the people who claim re can rely on technology to solve our food and energy problems oppose oppose the use of technology to reduce our fertility.
As for the claim that there’s “no such thing” as overpopulation, the issue is much more complex than simply comparing the Earth’s population with the total amount of basic resources theoretically availble. There are all sorts of barriers and bottlenecks–political, economic, and practical–preventing resurces from being distributed in a timely fashion. Not only would any supply-side solution be socialism in spades, it would only be temporary without the predicted/hoped-for reduction in fertility.
Overpopulation can exists side-by-side with underpopulation, such as accross national borders or even socio-economic class lines. It might be said that overepopulation is the reason that inner-city neighborhoods and schools are such a mess. And overepopulation South of the Border might be said to be driving illegal immigration, while much of the opposition to it is concern about its overpopulation-y effects.
I heard a Paultard ranting in public the other day about overpopulation.
(Imagine lots of slobbering, and flailing arms. Actually, just imagine Animal from the Muppets as a fat 30 year old with dishwater hair and you’re pretty much there.)
And we’d all be happy and comfortable and our food would materialize from nowhere and our waste would dematerialize to nowhere :smack:.
