Science is only useful in this regard if it is put into practice. So far, human practice has not managed to “keep comfortably apace” with population. It’s just that the damage (to the environment, to other species, to our well-being) is mostly hidden or possible to ignore.
It isn’t continuing at all, let alone forever. You’re extrapolating a temporary situation as if it was a long-term trend. The industrialized nations already have birth rates so low that population is stagnant or even decreasing (due to birth; the nations may have growth due to immigration).
Once a certain level of wealth comes along (and the things this brings, like education, birth control and better medicine), the incentives shift regarding children. In a poor economy, children are an asset because you can put them to work; plus, high child mortality means you want to have a lot to ensure they survive. In the industrialized world, children are a liability because they can’t work and you spend 20 years supporting them before they (maybe) start to support themselves.
In 100 years, the problem we’ll be facing is a decreasing population. In many ways, this concerns me much more than the increasing population.
Soylent Green.
It isn’t.
The population is increasing sigmoidally. Sigmoid curves are often mistaken for exponential curves during the rapid growth portion of the curve, but the growth rate slows down, just as the human population growth rate is doing.
The human population growth rate peaked in 1963. The absolute number of humans added per year peaked in 1989. Yes, the population is still growing, but the rate is slowing down.
Yes.
The problem IS solving itself; population growth is flattening.
Things will be fine, or as fine as they usually are, anyway.
The problem is not the absolute number of people in the world. The problem is the amount of resources those people are consuming.
That number is in fact going up exponentially. Not sigmoidally. Exponentially. China alone already has more middle class inhabitants than the U.S. has people. India is getting close. The rest of East Asia is rapidly upscaling. South America has some of the highest growth rates in the world. Every aspect of the western middle class lifestyle, from autos to electricity use, is being adopted by former Third World economies. Population alone doesn’t mean anything.
Predictions about population are historically awful. Predictions about resource use are even worse. I don’t know what the future looks like beyond the near-term straight line extrapolations. But I’ll bet the sanguine noises posters are making about flattering population growth will look bad, if not silly, in a very few years.
The fertility rate of the world is decreasing.
It is down to 2.5 per woman. In the next 20 to 30 years we should be down to the ZPG rate of 2.1. Europe, North America and East Asia are already below ZPG.
I have no children, and I live in the “Saudi Arabia” of fresh water (20% of the world’s fresh water is in the Great Lakes) so I’m looking good.
Well, great for you, sucks for most of the world’s population. Besides which - agriculture is a world market, and food prices are going to go up across the board. It’s not as if your local market has an obligation to sell to you at rates under what they’ll fetch on the open market. Running out of basically free water is going to have worldwide catastrophic reprecussions.
Speak for yourself. I contemplate this every day.
Also, for psychological reasons I was “permitted” to have my tubes tied at the “young” age of 35 re: the medication I was on. Happy to not be contributing to the problem.
i wish all the bad people in the world would just disappea
In terms of resource use, the two big ones we really need to worry about are food and drinking water. Everything else is negotiable. Fuel shortages lead to people living closer to their jobs, resource shortages lead to consumer goods getting more expensive and people in general being able to afford less of them - which is annoying and sucky for the people concerned, but not life-threatening. In particular, if first world standards of living start getting much more expensive due to rising wealth in China and India, then everybody in <name your country> goes down in living standards at the same time, which is considerably less sucky than having your standard of living go through the floor and your neighbors be fine and dandy.
Here’s a cite on food:world annual meat consumption. Since meat is a fairly inefficient way of getting the calories in, compared to veg, the fact that the levels are pretty high indicates to me that there’s still plenty of fat in the system, and plenty of potential to feed more people. The fact that obesity is still a growing problem indicates the same thing, of course. Here is a cite on how much extra population could possibly be sustained if meat were out of the picture. (BTW I’m a committed and enthusiastic carnivore myself. I don’t WANT to stop eating meat, but I prefer it to vast numbers of people starving)
Drinking water - on a worldwide scale only very small amounts of potable water is used for actually drinking. Masses is used for washing things and flushing toilets, just to name two. Plenty of slack in the system there too.
The fly in the ointment, of course, is inequality - it’s perfectly possible for the resources to be there in toto, but not actually getting to people who are starving. That’s a huge problem, but really it’s a problem with human politics rather than the actual carrying capacity of the earth, and the problem existed at 3billion just as much as at 7billion and is just as fixable in the future IF there were sufficient will to fix it among the wealthy and powerful (which will undoubtedly not be the case in the future, just as it wasn’t the case in the past)
I see what you did ther…
For most of the 20th century, scientists urged Americans to adopt a “eastern-style” diet, of mostly grains with little to no meat as the only way to protect against the coming food crisis. I can provide dozens of examples, all of them saying essentially exactly the same thing as that 2007 cite. Vegans still make this an article of faith.
And so what? Most people like a high-meat diet once they have the chance to try it. Americans went through this once, though everybody has forgotten it. In the late 19th century scientists finally figured out the values of the components of food and tried to rationalize the diet based on the cheapest components that would provide health. Ellen Richards, the first woman at MIT, set up a model kitchen at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair to teach people how to make meals that consisted of baked beans, brown bread, a roll, butter, and apple sauce. Middle-class do-gooders went on campaigns to get the working class ethnics to buy liver and kidneys and brains because they could get pounds of meat for pennies. The workers told them to go stuff themselves, because they worked six-day weeks and liked the tiny luxury of having a steak for an evening meal after their 10- or 12-hour day. (We now know that the totality of the do-gooders’ advice was medically ridiculous, so it’s a good thing nobody followed their diets, but at the time it was, um, class warfare.)
People in Asia who have been introduced to the middle-class meat-filled diet are not suddenly going to back off because of the “good of the planet.” They will tell you to stuff it, and rightly so. This is the only prediction about the future that I will make, and I guarantee that it will happen. Every plan you make better take this as a postulate.
The problem is actually solved quite easily, though no one will ever want to change anything to fix it. There’s a lot of land, a lot of water, and a lot of food on the planet, it’s just that people have chosen to build cities and huddle together and even on top of one another in condo towers and apartments. We’re all tightly packed into small areas like rats, thus creating a situation that wouldn’t exist if we were spread out. People forget that money is the problem, if there was no need for money we’d all be self- sufficient, growing crops for ourselves and hunting only for our needs. Technology wouldn’t exist, hospitals and such wouldn’t exist, therefore people would die before reaching the old age they do now, thus keeping the population down anyway.
I know, I’m basically saying go back to the stone ages, but if we don’t figure something out, stop polluting the vital water supply and spread these giant cities out far and wide, we run the risk of mass scale death anyway. For that matter, if a terrorist actually got a nuke into a massive city then all hell will break loose, if it happened in the US it would be a crippling blow indeed…one of many major reasons I do not live in a populated area :eek:.
(don’t worry, I know my theories aren’t popular, I’m just stating what I’ve observed for many years and pointing out the pink elephant in the room)
War, famine, natural disasters, AIDS, abortion, malaria, unequal distribution of resources…
I think we’re OK for now.
I don’t think you can make a judgement based solely on what resources are available for consumption. What must also be considered is the amount of destruction to the land, seas and atmosphere that occurs with such enormous populations. We can’t continue to think science will find a way to compensate for a lack of common sense and prudence because that’s an unsustainable proposition.
We too had just one child, in large part because of concerns about overpopulation and yeah, I’m a little freaked out thinking about what kind of a world it’ll be that she and the next generation will inherit.
Interesting… it’s been represented by anti-sprawl advocates that your hypothesis is entirely 180 degrees backwards, and that high density living (within limits) actually makes much more efficient use of limited resources vs spreading out over the landscape.
How many of us complaining tho are gonna contribute something the next time Haiti gets hit by an earthquake or some African tribe is threatened by war or famine?
Come on, folks, get serious! If they be likely to die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population!
Slackers.