Earth Officially Home To 7 Billion Humans

New submitter arcite writes "It's official: planet Earth is now home to over seven billion ugly-bags-of-mostly-water (otherwise known as humans). We're adding ten thousand new humans every hour, or one billion every nine years. Head over to 7 Billion Actions (put together by the UN with the help of SAP) and check out the population map data. Short of adopting a strict diet of Soylent Green, what viable solutions will enable us to survive on this increasingly crowded pale blue dot? What will the role of technology be in supporting this many people?"

The growth is slowing

[Hentes]

Human population is projected to peak at 10 billion.

Re:Wow...

[Nadaka]

No, in the long term population expansion will cease. The per capita birth rate in nearly every nation on earth is falling. In some cases (Europe, Japan and the non Hispanic parts of the US) below 2 children per woman. Human population will likely plateau around 10 billion and stay there.

Re:The growth is slowing

[Atroxodisse]

http://overpopulationisamyth.com/

Or thereabouts. By 2100 we'll be back down to 7 billion and it won't be because of a pandemic or zombies. Population growth is naturally slowing down. It may seem like 1 billion was a lot but relative to recent growth it's actually slowing down. The math is done in one of them fancy overpopulationisamyth videos.

Re:Corn is too high...

[turkeyfish]

"There is a "well known" racial difference of malaria susceptibility vs sickle cell anemia"

There is a relationship between malaria and susceptibility to sickle cell anemia because having the sickle cell trait is beneficial in the presence of high concentrations of malarial mosquitoes. It is the condition, which is a heterozygous trait, is benefitcial to those in areas of high incidence of malaria. It results from by a single base pair difference leading to a single base amino acid substitution in a haemoglobin subunit and is associated with partial collapse of the erythrocyte wall giving the phenomenon its name. Unfortunately, for homozygotes the condition can be fatal.

However, the relationship is not racial, except in the sense that the frequency of the haplotype varies among people of different races that live in different areas where there is a high presence of malaria.

Re:Guaranteed solution

[PopeRatzo]

>>Here in the US for example, economic mobility has been steadily decreasing for 30 years.

Lies. (Or Socialist talking point, same thing.)

Here you go ShakaUVM - Some data to support my assertion from that well-known Socialist organization, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston [frb.org]. I know that may not be as authoritative as the Wikipedia entry that you provided so triumphantly, ShakaUVM, but it's probably a little more reliable since it's less likely to have been edit-bombed by a bunch of interns at the American Enterprise Institute trying to work off that grant from the Koch Foundation.

For those of you who don't want to clickthrough and download a PDF file from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston's website, the paper is called Trends in U.S. Family Income Mobility, 1967 - 2004. I'll give you a little taste from the abstract:

By most measures, we find that mobility is lower in more recent periods (the 1990s into the early 2000s) than in earlier periods (the 1970s). Most notably, mobility of families starting near the bottom has worsened over time. However, in recent years, the down-trend in mobility is more or less pronounced (or even non-existent) depending on the measure, although a decrease in the frequency with which panel data on family incomes are gathered makes it difficult to draw firm conclusions. Measured relative to the overall distribution or in absolute terms, black families exhibit substantially less mobility than whites in all periods; their mobility decreased between the 1970s and the 1990s, but no more than that of white families, although they lost ground in terms of relative income. Taken together, this evidence suggests that over the 1967-to-2004 time span, a low-income family's probability of moving up decreased, families' later year incomes increasingly depended on their starting place, and the distribution of families' lifetime incomes became less equal.

I added emphasis to the most important part because ShakaUVM tends to be a little thick. He likes to rely on Wikipedia when some really good primary sources are very easy to find.