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?"

Re:Bird Flu

[amorsen]

Maybe I'm a bad, horrible, terrible person, but I hope that you'll get it first.

Re:Wow...

[felipekk]

Oblig.

"The most important video you'll ever see"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY [youtube.com]

Re:So...

[Dunbal]

Disease and famine can kill far more efficiently than that. Instead of having to be active to cause people to die by going out, lining them up and shooting them, at some point people will die due to inactivity - not enough farming, not enough transportation, not enough construction of basic sanitation, etc. This is why developed nations must hold on to their infrastructure for dear life. Population in poor countries will boom and bust with disease cycles, but most of those diseases (cholera, for instance) really can't gain a toe-hold in a country with modern water treatment/waste processing.

tiller of fate

[epine]

In the earth's long biological history, my take is that whenever an organism stumbled upon a giant resource, the organism either exploited the resource or was soon replaced by one that could. Humans have done with oil what any other species on the planet would do if they managed to stick their long snout into an underground ocean of glucose.

Unlike most any other species, we've invested perhaps 10% of this windfall wisely: primarily in the form of information technology and reading the genetic code. The energy intensity of those technologies is constantly falling (the intensity of progressing those technologies is another story).

Also unprecedented in biological history: we're discussing the consequences of our giant slurp well before the consequence arrives in dire form (excepting the extirpation of megafauna biodiversity, which started long before we found oil, and has subsequently accelerated).

In fact, I'm pretty sure we're the first species on the planet to conduct a census to determine if our numbers were getting out of hand.

If god lobs another rock at the planet--like a late-popping popcorn kernel--I'm sure we'll give Deep Impact the old college try, notwithstanding that this would be our biggest intrusion on the cosmic plan ever and not lose too much sleep over the philosophical implications. Yet here we are doing what every successful species does (expand into the available niche) and wringing our hands as if our current circumstance is some grand exception to the history of life on earth.

Since the way of things seems to be cycles of boom and bust, if we succeed in pulling off the soft landing following our trillion barrel feast, we will all deserve a nice pat on the back for turning a trick not yet achieved by life on this planet. Many people seem to think the task at hand is to address a deviant transgression; I think the deviancy lies in our future efforts to mitigate the consequence of behaving exactly as mother nature made us. The biological tiller of fate has been swinging wildly for many billions of years. Only now do we propose grabbing onto it and taking the helm.

Educate and Empower Women

[Doc Ruby]

The best thing we could do, for population control and in general, is to educate and empower women. That makes them less mere baby factories, for men and for their own self-defeating purposes. And it gives the (small margin) majority of people more to give back to more than just themselves and the few people immediately around them.

Ultimately our problem is not so much the number of us as the ratio of our numbers to our ability to communicate amidst that complexity. But women are globally so uneducated and so weakened that just improving their education and power would dramatically increase the overall power to communicate. Combined with the consequential slowing or perhaps even reversing the population growth, we'd have the whole problem pinched.

Climate change is your friend....

[mevets]

If we keep burning everything we can get our hands on, these vast northern lands will become viable, both for living and farming.

Hans Rosling on TED talks...

[staalmannen]

Hans Rosling got some really interesting statistics on population growth ( http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth.html [ted.com] ) and a number of other issues related to this on TED ( http://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling.html [ted.com] ). His basic message is that the world has turned a lot better and that the average child/woman already is decreased to sustainable levels in most countries that previously were poor and suffered from overpopulation. In fact, the division "developed" versus "developing" countries and the accompanying fear of overpopulation is a heritage from how it looked in the 70:s. Personally, I just marvel at the possibillities. Never before have as many people been able to realize their potential as today. If we assume that the birth of a great genious (an Einstein, Mozart...) is of a certain low probability, and that on top of that that this genious would be born under such circumstances that it would survive and have the means to realize its potential, we can assume that we actually have more of those in our current society than ever before. As a side note.... this is also why I find the whole religious "stuff that are old must be true" a very strange point of view - by virtue of better education and more accumulated experience (exteligence), I think that we are more qualified to design a moral system today than some bronze-age herders somewhere in the middle east.