Tymp wrote:
Damn.
I’d hoped that thread would have been one of the older ones that got “archived” and was now inaccessible.
Damn damn damn damn damn.
Curse you, Tymp!
I seem to recall seeing some statistics that show as countries industrialize, their birth rates go down. I don’t think you can place current birth rates on a future industrialized Africa.
In that case, I hope India industrializes pretty soon. Damn, but that country’s getting crowded.
Mebbie if we stopped trying to bring peace about for them we would stop having to worry about their population. Although we will most likely to be able to use fusion to house energy in the future. (and cold fusion will be discovered in 2024.134831)
So the reason why we deny others the lifestyle that we have is because they don’t want it. Sheesh people like you sailor are why Americans are called arrogant. Or do you think that the whole world should enjoy SUVs?
I agree with Phobos. It’s a version of what China is currently running right now (except that they have it at only one child).
I would like to throw out some possible–though far reaching --solutions. Abortion, War, Massacre, Restraint, Sterlization, Getting off the planet, Law.
Another thing to look at is not food supply or available space, but how humans would behave in an inflated population.
continuum, go back and read what SPOOFE and Akatsukami (among others) have posted. We do not need to impose birth control on or encourage disasters in other countries in order to “control” population. The surest way to reduce birth rates is to bring a society into the late-20th/early-21st century industrial and post-industrial economies. Rather than encouraging war, we should be helping them reach the North American standard of living while helping them avoid our earlier (and their current) environmental mistakes.
I am not advocating that we impose American culture, only that we aid them in acquiring a standard of living within their own cultures that will allow them to choose to reduce birth rates on their own.
Disasters (famine, plague, warfare) have the net effect of increasing the birth rate as people feel that they need to produce enough children who will survive to carry on their genes and care for them in their old age.
A society in which people feel comfortable knowing that their one or three children have an excellent chance to become adults is a society that stops producing six and eight kids, knowing five or six will die.
That’s right! Cold fusion is the energy source of the future … and always will be.
And Manhattan cannot support itself. It has to import its water, food, & electricity (& clean air for that matter) and has to send its waste materials elsewhere. If the whole world was at the same population level, what would happen then? (there would be no elsewhere to import from/send to)
Actually, I do just fine, thanks.
Actually, birth rates are dropping even in the 3rd world, so it’s not exclusively linked to wealth. Bangladesh has seen a drop in birth rate from 7.6 children per woman to about 3.6. Similar drops have already occured in India, China, and in fact pretty much every country in the world.
We’ve gone over this a million times before, but the current U.N. projection has the Earth’s population levelling off at somewhere around 9.5 billion people and staying static. That will happen some time around 2050 if the most likely projected scenario happens.
HOWEVER, that ‘most likely’ projection has already been lowered twice since it was first authored in 1994, and the latest figures suggest it will be lowered again.
The U.N. also has a ‘low variant’ projection, which is actually tracking closer to measured population growth than is the ‘likely’ scenario. And if the low variant projection is correct, the population of the Earth will start to decline after about 2040, until it bottoms out at about 3.6 billion people, or slightly more than half the people we have now.
In the industrialized nations, there is actually a danger of severe population decreases, that could lead to a crash in real-estate prices and a severe shortage of labor. Most industrialized nations are have natural birthrates below replacement levels, and only maintain their populations through immigration. This is going to result in some pretty big demographic shifts in the next 50 years. Japan, which is more insular and has very little immigration, is actually facing a crisis of depopulation. Japan’s population could be cut in half or go even lower in the next 50 years.
As for China’s birth control policies - not only are they a violation of basic human rights, they are also totally unneccessary. China’s natural birthrate has dropped from 7.2 to 3.6 under their draconian birth control laws. India, which has no such laws, has seen its birthrate drop over the same period of time from… 7.2 to 3.6
Sam Stone writes:
I would disagree with this only to the extent that the wildly extravagant wealth seen in the First (i.e., industrialized) World is not necessary. Any increase in real wealth that sees the bulk of the population move away from subsistence agricultural is adequate for this purpose.
As Daniel and others have pointed out, the nature of the population problem is not the amount of room. It is absurd to posit that population density is a global problem.
All those people have to be supplied with fresh & clean water, food, housing, health care, waste disposal, energy, employment, and the various and sundry resources that go into consumer goods. The situation in some of these categories is good (e.g. food), but in others is poor (e.g. health care). The problem is that even supply in one of these areas fails, life can become rather unpleasant for millions if not billions of folks.
If supply fails in a critical area, such as the supply of fresh and clean water, those that don’t have it are likely to fight those that do, making life unpleasant (or ending it) even for those who are not directly involved.
With a sober assessment of the potential risks, and taking care not to bring more people (by birth or immigration) into areas that cannot support them, we can probably (IMHO) avoid these problems.
If we pretend the danger does not exist, we are likely to run afoul of it.
So wevets, do you deny the advance of technology will attenuate, or even eliminate the difficulties you’ve posited? If so, how do you account for the last 13,000 years of civilization and the population growth thereof? Does not 13,000 years of successful experiments argue pretty conclusively against this?
[Edited by UncleBeer on 10-18-2000 at 04:35 AM]
HUSH, UncleBeer, now you just hush, now. Don’t risk conjuring him up. Actually, I’ve considered cutting and pasting quotes of his at random for comic relief here. I could start with the one where he lists every nation on the planet in alphabetical order. :rolleyes:
Seriously, I wish there were a way to purge that thread of the more ridiculous posts, and pare it down to what really was a good discussion of population, rate of growth, ecology, and resource distribution. There actually was good information and a good debate in there.
there is an article in this weeks ECONOMIST magazine about china having water supply problems right now.
Dal Timgar
Atlanta faced a serious water shortage this summer, partly owing to drought, but also because Atlanta has surprisingly limited water resources to begin with. As more people move here, we will have increasing difficulty withstanding future droughts.
HEalth care? Employment? My God, man, those aren’t neccesities! IF they were then mankind would not have been able to hold out until the 20th century. I doubt that those words even existed prior to the early 1900’s.
And I am not even going to touch on “clean” water and “housing”.
Water, shelter, food. Those are the needs, and all are renewable, inexhaustable and ubiquitous.
Whoops. By “those words” i meant “health care”, not “employment” Although, I doubt more than 10% of the world was “employed” prior to 1900.
Thank you Mr. Z.
Atlanta and China had/have serious water shortages? How many people died in Atlanta from lack of water? Not many, I’d bet. I really don’t think having to curtail watering your damned lawn counts as a serious water shortage. And anyway, the technology exists at this very moment to relieve water shortages if people feel it necessary. It’s called desalinization. Does no one remember the huge desalinization plants set up for the Gulf War?
Mr. Z.: *By “those words” i meant “health care”, not “employment” Although, I doubt more than 10% of the world was “employed” prior to 1900. *
Huh?! What were the other 90% doing, then?
Also, of course they had the concept of “health care” before 1900, although they tended to call it something like “public hygiene” instead. Viewing some form of medical care for the whole of society as a “necessity” of civilized life is hardly an exclusively 20th-century idea.