The Uncertain Future of Global Population Numbers 279
An anonymous reader writes "The question of global population is a pretty crucial one; how many people will there be in ten years? In forty? The New York Times notes research done by a group called the Worldwatch Institute, research that concludes world population figures are too fluid to make any sort of educated guesses. Childbearing populations combined with severe resource shortages in some parts of the world make pinning down a global headcount unfeasible for ten years from now, let alone out to 2050. The article continues beyond its original borders, as well, with commenters in the field of population studies noting we don't even have a good grasp on how many people were alive in 2007."
Easy question, easy answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Future: Way too many.
Re:Easy question, easy answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Far future: none.
You forgot the last one, which shows we should take more notice of the preceding figures.
Re:Easy question, easy answer (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Easy question, easy answer (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Getting shot in the process would make it a killer.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Easy question, easy answer (Score:4, Insightful)
People have been saying that since Malthus and predicting a massive population collapse. The funny thing is, civilization keeps finding ways to accommodate larger numbers.
You should also note that most industrialized countries are pretty close to zero-population growth without immigration -- Europe is a little below ZPG, America a little above. You want to stabilize the population, focus on industrializing the Third World.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So therefore: the world will never suffer population collapse. Good thinking 86.
Re:Easy question, easy answer (Score:4, Insightful)
There is plenty of evidence. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's quite possible that human population will trend nicely towards an equilibrium, however, our very economic system is based on perpetual growth and not equilibrium. It is a matter of time until we see some limiting factor in the natural world, that will prevent that magic 5% year-on-year growth. At this point, investment will collapse, and we'll be forced to develop equilibrium based economics.
It is worrying that we are tending more and more to keep our system going by drawing down on our resources faster, instead of being conservative and clever about our use of the planet. If human population is going to gently move to towards equilibrium, then there must be careful consideration of sustainable development. If we continue our hack-n-slash approach, we may well end up with a disaster on our hands. We are already seeing signs of imminent future problems with arable land, energy resources, fresh water and climate change.
Perhaps it would be sane to penalize obviously myopic economic activities, like mining oil-sands, trawler fishing, and massive deforestation. Unfortutely, our economic system is structured such that companies can gain "growth" by hiding costs in externalities. That is precisely the problem with "next-quarter" economics, and characterizes much of the mentality of wall-street.
Our growth based economic system is a tradition that has grown out of the folkways of antiquity. It is no more or less wise than bacteria growing exponentially across an agar jell. This economic system co-exists with, and is ultimately subordinate to the matter-energy relationship that we have with the planet. This is analogous to the bacterial growth hitting the edge of the petri dish.
Perhaps you could try to argue that we'll just find cleverer and cleverer ways of doing things. Blind faith in the genius inventor is an excuse for pillaging the world right now. It's just that the scientific method that gave us the industrial revolution is the same scientific method that is saying we need to curb carbon emissions. The problem isn't with science, but with myopic greed and stubborn ignorance about our relationship with the world.
Expect human society to behave no wiser than the bacteria on the agar jell. We'll consume ever faster, and change our ways only after significant insurmountable problems arise. This situation is analogous to how a person sinks into depression, and then resolves to significant change after they realize that depression is not living.
We learnt nothing from the extinction of the dodo. There will be many more dodos in the future.
Re: (Score:2)
Studies involving animals that can only improve their exploitation of the environment through evolution. Humans aren't so limited -- as tool users, we can optimize our use of the environment with technology. The hard-limits of physics -- the amount of phosphorous -- are a long way away.
Re: (Score:2)
This is true, there is no argument there from me.
The point is that if we really were such clever tool-wielding mammals, then we wouldn't (for example) gamble with highly unpredictable and potentially catastrophic climate change, because of a need to temporarily satiate ourselves. This justification through faith in an econ
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As intelligent tool users, the question we should ask ourselves about climate change is at what point the economic tradeoff of stopping it outweighs the economic costs of letting it continue. This is a serious discussion that we should be having, but aren't because conservatives have their heads in the sands about whether it's ha
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I personally think this is as absurd of an issue as the other extremists causes, but it is something to be aware of. I don't understand Lunar environmentalism, or the desire to preserve Mars as some sort of international version of Yellowstone (actually more drastic... they don't w
There is an upper limit. (Score:2, Insightful)
Agreed, but that does not mean it always can. So long as all our eggs are in one basket, we are constrained with finite space, and therefore, finite resources. With unchecked population increase, consumption will inevitably overtake maximum production limits, likely resulting in precipitous—and immensely uncomfortable—pop
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Blind faith in technological progress is particularly dangerous mental disease. Ten years ago the Tofflerians were saying the Internet would never be controlled, that it would bring about some kind of intellectual utopia, and that we didn't government policy protecting its beautiful state of anarchy because i
Who can replace the 3rd world? (Score:2)
Industrializing the 3rd world can not solve the problem simply because the current global system that supports industrialized nations depends upon exploiting 3rd world resources and labor. Note: I'm not even getting into environmental issues.
- Alternatives:
How about GM food? China has rice that causes birth defects. You already eat GM food like the
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Easy question, easy answer (Score:5, Informative)
You are very mistaken, this is an extremely complicated question, moreso than TFA states. In 1798, Thomas Malthus started worrying about population growth saying because we were growing at an exponential pace. This thought continued and Hardin used at as one of his main points in his famous paper the Tragedy of the Commons [wikipedia.org]. But, as this became a more important question, we have gathered more data and it turns out our assumption that population growth would stay exponential was wrong.
Here [wikipedia.org] midway on the page are some graphs of current population estimates and global growth rates. You can see that global birth rates have already declined. And even the high end estimates for global population start to taper off. Some even predict global population will decline.
The reasons for this decline are also complicated, but the two most prevalent explanations are first, the advent of birth control finally allows women to control when they have children. And second, and more importantly, look at this picture [wikimedia.org] a growth rate of 0 means the population of that country is staying at a constant level (for every birth there is a death), negative means population decline, >0 means population growth. Notice that most of what we call "industrialized" nations are at a maintenance level or are in population decrease. That includes China and India, the two most populated countries in the world. While most the population growth is just in Africa and parts of the Middle East and South America(and note the south africa and egypt don't have growth). The reason for all this is explained as, as a society gets more 'industrialized' the need for families to be larger decreases. While in places where farming is necessary for survival, the incentive to have more children (free labor) is high. Its not that Africans don't have access to birth control, its that its more beneficial for them to not use it.
So the prevailing theory today is that as Africa gets more industrialized, their population growth will go down and global population will stabilize. We could argue about whether or not Africa will get industrialized, but I think in absence of very strong evidence, we have to believe the more industrialized a nation gets, its population growth approaches 0 or even negative.
Re: (Score:2)
Saying we have too many people reminds me of those network admins who whine about ever increasing hard disk capacities and how hard it is getting to back up so much data. The problem is not that hard disks hold too much data, the problem is that we haven't yet figured out a good way of backing up all that data.
People are good (overall). I want more of them. The earth could easily support 20 billion people; we
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Easy question, easy answer (Score:5, Informative)
Almost 7 Billion People... (Score:5, Interesting)
... and all still on the same rock.
We need to get out more.
Re: (Score:2)
Sending two persons to another world at once would cost less than sending them separately.
It is a matter of building a big enough ship. And of not only removing those persons from Earth, but all their future population as well.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Sure you can. It is just a question of dedication. If the ancient greeks could found colonies to solve their population problems and create trading partners at the same time, then we can do it.
The major difference between then and now is resources devoted to the task. I mean if everyone on the planet was in some way contributing to the space effort, I'm pretty sure we could shift some of our population.
Ad
Re: (Score:2)
That will only lower the population of artificial wombs and genetic samples. How will that help population growth?
For the record, I don't support solar system/galactic colonization because of population growth. I support it because I want to see what Jupiter looks like from Ganymede with my own eyes.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Whether it is a good idea to bank on such a future is a different question.
Self limiting to a certain extent? (Score:3, Insightful)
-Eric-
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Then I must notify you that you are thinking an unacceptable thought. With all the fluidity and complexity and variables in population change, it's okay to admit we can't predict, but with all the fluidity and complexity and variables in climate change, we can be certain of Global Warming.
Re:Self limiting to a certain extent? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the GP is right on this one. I'm far more concerned with overpopulation, because it's a driving force for the causes of global warming. As grossly overpopulated areas industrialize - and grow - so to will CO2, CFC, et al, emissions. And that's aside from the other obvious impacts on the environment overpopulation has, including the need for vast amounts of natural resources, which has and will lead to the destruction of the largest forests on this planet.
Growing populations are clearly more of a detriment to the environment than global warming, which is still arguably "part of nature". By your own admission, there are many variables in climate change, and given our inability to determine even the most basic weather phenomenon or reach consensus on global warming, the *certain* effects the overpopulation are far greater AND more likely.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In the article, it was estimated that the U.S. was going to reach a peak of 1.1Billion
Yeah, sounds like an underpopulation problem to me. The article had very rose colored glasses on and completely ignored maj
Re: (Score:2)
Assuming we ever get there. Have a look at Jared Diamond's Collapse [newyorker.com]. I agree that it could be an issue if we do get there, but it is not clear to me that we will.
Plese st
Re: (Score:2)
You are more optimistic than I am.
The population crash will reduce the number of people on the world by 99%. Depending on what we do today, the remaining 70 million people will either be pushed back into a stone age existence, or be ready to usher in a Golden Age that could last a millenium or longer.
If we package our current knowledge in ways that will survive the turmoils of the great crash, and are easily accessible to the survivors, then they will have the wealth of the emptied cities and farmlands to
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Its theorized that diseases that hit a high po
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
A perfect storm for a disease is what happened when Cortes met the Aztecs. There appear to have been very few or no diseases in Precolumbian America, so once European diseases were introduced, they ripped through the native population with an estimated 90% lethality rate. For a perfect storm to occur again, you'd need a completely virgin population, which doesn't exist in the modern world.
Re: (Score:2)
The idea is that two or more bad things that are both rare individually happen at the same time, so that any response system is overwhelmed. In the movie, it was a typical Nor'easter (a big winter storm off the coast of Massachusetts) that was given additional fuel by the remnants of a hurricane moving in from the south. A fishing boat is big enough to handle either one of those, but not both.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The reason we will peak is because if it wasn't for immigration developed countries would have had a negative growth rate, that coupled with the AIDS virus and effective birth control. poor countries will develop and large families will not be needed anymore. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1108-global-population-to-peak-in-20 [newscientist.com]
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yet.
You do realize (and perhaps this is rhetorical since you don't seem to) that "210 years" is, let's see ...
A quick search for "age of humans" [sciencedaily.com] comes up to about 1.5 million years.
So a tiny fraction of the denominator.
So give Malthus a break, it's hard to be that accurate when you're working with big numbers. Unfortunately, I think he will be correct sooner or later. "Sooner or later" being fai
Re: (Score:2)
And your evidence is...? (Score:4, Interesting)
Looks to me like the optimists actually have some evidence behind them. The more crowded the world gets, the more expensive it will be to have many children, and the fewer people will have.
-Grey [silverclipboard.com]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And your evidence is...? (Score:5, Insightful)
Econimists are now saying we must account for waste as a cost (insurance underwriters were saying it first), we need them (among others) to find a 'soft landing' for when oil declines and coal becomes expensive (due to sane emmision controls). However when I look at the politics and past civilization that have succum to rapid environmental change, I think it's more than likely that we will see a global population crash this century. Of course we will call the crash a war and blame the whole thing (including the initial shortage of resources), on the loser's nastyness.
Re:And your evidence is...? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And your evidence is...? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, when a society gets to a certain economic and technological stage, your birth rate declines (and in some first world countries is already below the replacement rate). So as the rest of the world catches up to our standard of living, we'll eventually reach some sort of rough global population plateau, but I seriously doubt we're going to hit that limit in a matter of decades. Africa could easily hold another one or two billion people with no new technology, just economic maturity.
Yeah, peak oil and whatever other resource issues crop up will be a pain in the butt to deal with, but eventually they will be dealt with and the population will keep growing. Even the looming global disaster of fresh water is just a single technology breakthrough away from being an interesting historical footnote.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:And your evidence is...? (Score:4, Interesting)
For the life of me I can't remember or find the source, but a particular person in the field of sociology had figured out if the current rate of population (which is still exponential) there would be more humans than atoms in 17,000 years which he concluded something has to give at one point between now and then.
The fact of the matter is that someday humans will have to stop having kids in order to make life comfortable for the living. In fact its arguable that mass death is often followed by times of economic prosperity such as the emergence of the middle class and renaissance after the black death of the middle ages. Now I'm not arguing for humans should die off but rather they should focus on accepting birth control as a societal norm until the individual is ready to actually have a child.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's something that most other countries on the planet will probably have to do eventually; WTF do they want a country with a huge population and out-of-control birth rates to do? Let people breed as they want, seeking to meet immediate, individual needs, so that they can collectively cause a huge starvation die-off a couple of decades later? Or collectively enforce birth control so the die-off does
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know why it is pessimistic to believe population will grow to 9 billion, I'd think that was the "good news" scenario, where mortality declines and resources are used more effectively, the way both trends have gone for the past several hundred years.
Let's look more closely at the numbers. [earth-policy.org]
That is basically an increase of half a billion children younger than 7 years. I think it is a bit much to expect these youngsters to be providing us with knowledge about how to use our resources more effectively; we will need to accommodate their needs with what we already know. In fact, since they are still growing, we can expect these kids to more than double their drain on r
Re: (Score:2)
The pesimists use the same data than the optimists, with different interpredation:
Richer people have less kids.
Just the optimists think everybody will get rich in the future, while the pesimists think that the dropping in resource availability will cause countries to tumble down to a pre-developed state at some time (including those nice 7.x children per woman rates we can still see in some african countries).
Nope (Score:4, Informative)
If that were the case, then wealthier people would be having more children and poorer people would be having fewer. In fact it is the EXACT opposite; the people who can afford the least children, have the most, and vice versa. There are many reasons/factors that come into play, e.g. cultural (it's become "socially unacceptable", for example, amongst the "educated class" to have lots of children - you are considered low class now if you have lots of kids, this was not true even just a few generations ago in our own culture, e.g. my gran was one of over a dozen kids and that was 'normal' then; conversely in many African cultures here, for example, having many children IS regarded as 'wealth'). Another factor I believe is a kind of instinct present in many animals too whereby when times are tough and infant survival rates thus lower, more offspring are produced to increase chances of survival.
The biggest drop in fertility rates amongst the world's wealthy educated minority did not actually coincide with education though, it coincided with the development and widespread availability of 'The Pill' in the late 60s / early 70s. Most of the world's poor either can't afford good contraception or aren't terribly interested in it.
For various reasons the poor are still able to survive in big numbers - their basic needs, like food, are mostly taken care of. In some cases this is thanks to welfare and AID, in others thanks to industrial agriculture allowing the earth to produce a lot of food at low cost. Also things like basic medicines/vaccines are comparatively widely available now globally. So average infant survival rates are MUCH higher than they were even fifty years ago. People just aren't dying much, even in poor countries, so producing children IS very cheap UNLESS you actually want to house and educate them properly, but most do not do this.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
MODS (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Strife and even war has historically been caused by men wanting more, the kind of more (gold, fur, shiny stuff, bigger SUV) that woman expect him to deliver.
So behind every war there is an greedy woman...
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
More precisely there will be 15 billion Republiborgs and 15 billion Demoborgs.
You may think voting is futile, but you wouldn't want the wrong borg to get in would you?
Carrying capacity overshoot (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course when you look at some examples:
Easter islands, where the polynesians peaked at about 10000 inhabitants before falling to about 2000 because they chopped down all trees. (no more boats -> no more fishing, no more houses -> starvation, disease)
Haiti, where the population has stripped their half of the island almost literally bare (almost the complete population survives on food-aid, now you can imagine what happens when the food-aid stops.)
China, where groundwater continues to fall and many areas are already dry.
Great Britain, which is extremely densely populated, has to import about half of it's food and is stupid enough to let half a million immigrants in every year.
It becomes clear that the world just can't go on like that forever. It probably can't even go on like that for more than a couple of years. The green revolution has been made possible by oil and gas and both are getting much more expensive each and every year now.
And no, it's not a "global problem" like the one-worlders want us to believe. Some countries will be able to manage well (like Iceland which with almost zero immigration and geothermal energy plants is well prepared), some will be average (like France which can keep the lights up with nuclear power, but has a huge 3rd-world immigration problem on the other hand or Japan which is overpopulated but may solve that problem with low birthrates and not mass-famine), some will turn into hell-holes (like England which has an even bigger trade deficit than the USA per capita and cannot feed it's population even now while oil and gas is still cheap and there is still some coming from the North Sea oilfields. On top of that immigration has transformed a once cohesive population into a society that with a huge potential for civil strife or even civil war, London is already one of the most crime-ridden cities in the world.) or continue to be hell-holes (like most of the 3rd world)
I would be very surprised if there will be more than 3 billion people living in 2050.
Of course the human species will carry on, future historians will probably think of the 20th century as some crazy period full of socialist (in the late 20th/early 21st-century USA usually called "liberal") experiments.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re:Carrying capacity overshoot (Score:4, Informative)
Maybe the Polynesian who chopped down the last tree on easter island had exactly the same thoughts? Who knows?
First of all, many of these problems DID already occur, the easter island die-off occoured before the island was descouvered by Europeans, probably somewhen around 1500 AD.
Second, many problems occured (like Haiti's complete lack of forest despite being a tropical half-island) but are merely covered up. (The do-gooders are sending food aid to Haiti to make sure the population continues to breed like crazy)
Third, problems occur when they occur. To say they never occur because they didn't occur 2 decades ago is just plain nonsense.
we aren't running out of oil anytime soon
True, but the oil will be harder to get, more expensive to extract and there will be less of it.
inspsite of what the rabid global warming nutters want you to think.
Global warming has nothing to do with the end of cheap oil.
most of the price rises are due to artificial restrictions on supply.
It's true that the oil industry has shown a general lack of interest in building new refineries in the last years. (and that was a problem during Katrina because refinery capacity was not enough)
However the reason for that is that the oil industry knows very well that oil and gas will peak (or already has peaked) and it doesn't make any sense to build a refinery which needs 10 years to pay itself when there won't be any fuel for it after 5 years. (Not because we are "running out of oil" but because the old, refineries can manage the slowly declining supply)
Re:Carrying capacity overshoot (Score:5, Informative)
I have done research (serious, major oil-company-funded research, so you know where the money lies) on some new ways to find, extract, and process oil. The oil companies are VERY interested, mainly because the future looks pretty bleak. The very fact that Shell is considering as "promising" their MASSIVE in-ground processing, sandwiched between two groundwater reservoirs in the lamosite Green River formation in Colorado and Utah should tell you something about desperation.
Re: (Score:2)
It wasn't abandoned. It just lost most of it's carrying capacity (and hence population).
no it's nonsense to claim something which has been the status quo for decades (england importing most of it's food) is suddenly going to become a major problem for no reason.
England destroying it's industry (outsourcing) and using up it's coal (they even have import most of their coal now) plus higher and rising oil prices are very good reas
Re:Carrying capacity overshoot (Score:5, Insightful)
So, Mr. Huntington, what do you think is the world's greatest problem today?
Re: (Score:2)
Plus the United Kingdom is only #51 on the list of population densities, for example The Netherlands is running one of the healthiest European economies from spot #25.
South Korea is in place #21 and doing extremely well.
Besides, the UK being an Island Nation seriously needs to stock up it's limited gene pool
Re: (Score:2)
Also, England has a horrible trade deficit in almost everything. Essentially England exports just printed paper (pound-notes, stocks, etc) and gets indebted more and more. Even without Peak Oil, England could not function like that forever.
You can try to insult me if you like ("lacks self confidence
Re: (Score:2)
No, that comment was not sound, but nonsense. Wether a country is overpopulated or not doesn't depend which place it scores in the ranking, it depends wether it can support it's inhabitants. Greenland would be overpopulated with 10 people/km, some highly productive farmlands may support over 500/km.
Now, with tha
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's quite an exaggeration. I would be surprised if there will be less than 8 billion. After doing extensive world traveling in 2007, I think non-travelers forget exactly how absolutely huge the earth is. Of course there will be some individual nations (like China, to name just one) that start to give us a window into what happens to an overpopulated land area, but I don't believe it will become a global problem befor
Re:Carrying capacity overshoot (Score:5, Informative)
You state that as fact, but as far as I know the concept of "carrying capacity" is not defined or even studied. Whilst it makes intuitive sense that there must be some limit, it also makes sense that this limit would itself be fluid - changing with the march of technology and changes in living standards. I've never seen anybody calculate a carrying capacity for 21st century Earth, especially not scientifically. People who use the term invariably assume it must be lower than our current population - how much lower is usually pulled out of thin air.
Your list of societies is disingenous - you list a primitive, fully collapsed society like Easter Island right alongside Great Britain, which last time I lived there imported half its food because you can't grow strawberries there year round, not because it was about to collapse. Britain could feed itself tomorrow simply by converting some of its farming capacity from meat production to cereal production.
Also, the green revolution was triggered mostly by the development of nitrogen fertilisers, weed killers and crop varieties that could handle being treated with them. Although we use hydrogen from natural gas to make nitrogen fertilisers today, you can produce it using electrolysis without problem. And whilst it's true that today farm machinery is mostly gasoline powered, that's something independent of the green revolution. If you haven't already read it, I suggest checking out Stanifords Food to 2050 [theoildrum.com] for a data-based analysis of whether the green revolution can be sustained.
Only a small proportion of Icelands power comes from geothermal. Most of it is hydro. Iceland has much bigger problems than electricity anyway - there's basically nothing there, and whilst it has energy in abundance the economy is mostly based on industrial fishing. Once the fish stocks are exhausted, there'll be little left to sustain it.
Ah ha, I knew it. As soon as I read the term "carrying capacity" I was waiting for the ass-pulled number. Why 3 billion? Why not 2, or 4? Or 100 million? I don't see any particular constraints on slow population growth - it's been boringly linear for most of the 20th century in most developed countries, and in large parts of Europe is going to head sharply downwards soon due to natural demographic trends anyway. Whilst places like Africa or Chian might get miserable, Africa is already miserable and there's no obvious reason why in the long term China would see different population trends from other developed countries.
Re: (Score:2)
I tip my hat to you.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Actually, no. The ultimate bottleneck for human population growth is the amount of available phosphorous. There are theoretical work-arounds for every other limiting factor, but the phosphorous limit would require mass-scale transmutation of matter to get past. Assuming we strip mine the entire solar system for phosphorous, the upper bounds for the human population on Earth is 10e22.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Uh? Why do you claim that few people realize this?
It's quite obvious, except that of course the "carrying capacity" depends a lot on the technology and the way of living of the people..
[cut]
>some will be average (like France which can keep the lights up with nuclear power, but has a huge 3rd-world immigration problem on the other hand
This show quite well your bias: the
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The rest of the post consists of either misrepresentation of the current situation as in your use of England as an example of the dangers of overpopulation or clear repudiation of the beliefs of
this problem is actually pretty easy to solve. (Score:2)
Stop brining people back from the dead.
When somebody dies don't strap electrodes on them and shock them back to life. When somebody dies don't give them mouth to mouth and bring them back to life.
Leave the dead alone.
Now I know this will be difficult if your child has died from drowning or your grandpa died from a heart attack but we as a society must accept that people are going to die eventually. No matter how many times you bring them back to life they are going to die anyway.
Maybe n
Re: (Score:2)
What if that person is hanging off the edge of a cliff, sure to lose his grip at any moment. Are you going to pull him back from the dead?
Re: (Score:2)
The vast majority of these are outside their breeding years.
This has no bearing on birth or death rates - they rarely last too long anyway.
There are few people medically worth resuscitating due to the futility of it anyway. But we do it because society demands we try, and we can't predict which ones will be successful too well.
Why not advocate getting rid of antibiotics? That would be about the most significant medical
Re: (Score:2)
What? Do they even have the medical means to do this in countries where overpopulation is the worst?
What you are saying is like going to a starving country in Africa and telling them they shouldn't eat so much because it causes obesity. Its not the problem! The problem is that there is no food!
maybe J. Stalin had a point? (Score:2, Insightful)
The solution is obvious (Score:2, Funny)
Environmental extremists (Score:2, Informative)
The solution (Score:3, Funny)
Oh wait, someone's knocking on my door. BRB.
Infuriatingly presumptuous bastards (Score:3, Interesting)
Thirty-five odd years ago, there was a similar group of scientists trying to figure the same thing out (or so they said). They made some crazy predictions; namely, that the world would be over-populated, and primarily due to the heat put off by large cities, the global temperatures would result in us all looking like overdone chicken. TEOTWAWKI kind of stuff, all largely targeted at the gas guzzling, "consumerist" way of life.*
Or, at least, that's how the policy and information filtered down to school-aged kids in the late 80's/early 90's, and how it was communicated through laws and national/international (US and other Western countries) efforts to sap some of the world's hunger - primarily in Africa - to hopefully offset the problem now, so maybe in the future they could take care of themselves. Problem: Africa's population exploded, as did the disease and warfare. And the West is still funding this destructive cycle today, even though it's been proven - time and time again - to make the situation immeasurably worse, not better.
The supporters of these policies would say "oh, but this just proves the policies were effective!" (with regard to the initial population decines after those seminal works were published) - but they would be wrong. The world population was already in decline before these "runaway population" projection supporters tooted their horns. And since then, world population increase has been anything but exponential. China's population shrank markedly due to birth control; the Western countries (including Russia) have all shrunk substantially in population, and India is moving that way now.
What we should be trending and looking at predicting is what the next politically-foisted, crack theory will be. Just look back over the past 5 years, and you'll see an obscene amount of variance in just the "global warming/cooling/etc." argument; look back 30 years, and they're using the same models to predict something different still: the globe is cooling, new ice age - oh wait, it's warming, and we'll all look like overdone chicken by 2010... oh, what's that? 2008 is the coldest year on record in 30+ years so far?
And the same thing applies to population hokum. You can not predict something this complex: there are simply too many factors, internal and external, which have sway. It is significantly more complex than the global warming/cooling argument, because it directly depends (and bases most of its assumptions) on the global warming/cooling expectations. Then you've got cultural changes (ie, women having fewer/almost no children - which is exactly what happens when countries become "westernized", and what was directly overlooked/unknown in the "explosive population" projections), wars, famines, poor land management, extinction of bees (needed to fertilize all flowering plants), epidemics/panemics, and any number of other things.
* while some of it was noble, it went about it in such a reckless, dishonest manner that the message was largely discredited through the approach. yet enough was absorbed by members of my generation that much of the stupid policies and beliefs impregnated in our minds at a young age, and have taken root now that we are adults. yay, brainwashing.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This whole approach irritates me.
snip
The world population was already in decline before these "runaway population" projection supporters tooted their horns. And since then, world population increase has been anything but exponential. China's population shrank markedly due to birth control; the Western countries (including Russia) have all shrunk substantially in population, and India is moving that way now.
From what orifice do you pull this information?
The only significant country with a factual decline in population is Russia, or a little wider, parts of the Former Soviet Union.
China's population is still increasing rapidly even though the government does since decades it's best to control it, your statement to the opposite is plain stupid.
What we should be trending and looking at predicting is what the next politically-foisted, crack theory will be. Just look back over the past 5 years, and you'll see an obscene amount of variance in just the "global warming/cooling/etc." argument; look back 30 years, and they're using the same models to predict something different still: the globe is cooling, new ice age - oh wait, it's warming, and we'll all look like overdone chicken by 2010... oh, what's that? 2008 is the coldest year on record in 30+ years so far?
That's what applied science is all about, you continually adjust your experiments with the latest knowledge.
And the latest knowledge (that's not the same as
In Other News... (Score:2)
Our planet is in imminent danger of being eaten by an enormous mutant star goat!
Peak Oil will result in a global die-off (Score:5, Informative)
Industrializing 3rd world nations will only hasten the global die-off. Look at the HUGE impact on commodities that China & India have place since they industrialized. If China was to consume like we do in the US, it would take 7 planet earths. A real good DVD to watch is A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash [oilcrashmovie.com].
I strongly urged all
Let's put this into numbers... (Score:5, Interesting)
The water outflow of the Columbia River would provide each and every person with nearly 26 gallons of fresh water per day (cites: Columbia River [wikipedia.org]).
We could feed all those people - about 500 square meters per person - with the existing farmland within the US (cites: vegan food estimates [vegansociety.com], farmland in the US [usda.gov]).
Essentially, we could live mid-density, and feed and provide potable water for every single person on the face of the earth, and not require a single person living outside of Texas - no one on the other 6 continents, the oceans, or any other State. No one in Canada or Mexico.
We could feed everyone without a single acre converted from farmland - wouldn't need to touch a single acre of forest, nor city, nor ocean, nor park.
The earth can support a LOT of people; the problem is distribution of the resources. And that is a purely political issue. Concerns about too many people on earth are demonstrably false.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Food, or land for growing it, will not be the upper bound for population. Think about the ocean, think about the underground and vegetation growing under lamps. Using the "harder to use" or less hospitable food growing areas will take a lot of work or, more precisely, energy. Energy sources could provide a boundary, but from the atom or from the sun we should have plenty of energy. Infint
Re: (Score:2)
Why not grow meat in vats? Its already being done in experiments and if you don't mind the thought of it, it will generally taste just as good as the real thing.
The problem is that most people never think out of the box on these issues because they see problems as something that can only be solved with today's technology and not realize that in 5 years things will b
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)