Does anyone else spot the issues about the increasing world population?

This argument lacks insight into the human condition. People are not like plants which only require the minimum sustenance and space required to sustain life. Humans need to explore, expand, build and grow. The ideal human population should be based on the available resources for humans to perpetually strive to improve their existence, not merely sustain it.

In this country at least, (I don't know about other countries) people don't have that many children. IIrc the average woman born in 1965 has had 1.91 children. The thing that is really boosting the population is the fact people are living longer. But any attempt to stop that is unethical, so I don't really know what the answer is, it is a very difficult question.

In my geography course I remember hearing something like the world could support 5 billion Americans or 19 billion third world people. The problem we face is not the amount of people we have but the increasing greed of those people


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There is enough food for everyone, if only it was fairly distributed and no food was grown for fuel.

ok. lets be open about this shall we -- maybe i can speak more openly because i am an immigrant stock.

for the vast majority of human history population it did not grow hardly at all. population was stable at well under a billion people for all of human history up until the start of the industrial revolution in the 1800's.

however. the vast, vast, vast majority of population growth has happen in the last 50 years and virtually all of it has all happened in the third world.





one of the reasons why this issue cannot be spoken about is because of the authoritarian shackles imposed on this society. it is simply not allowed to speak of where this disastrous population growth is coming from.

I say. people have to be a bit more open about the issue and not so concerned with being seen to be politically correct.

ok. lets be open about this shall we -- maybe i can speak more openly because i am an immigrant stock.

for the vast majority of human history population it did not grow hardly at all. population was stable at well under a billion people for all of human history up until the start of the industrial revolution in the 1800's.

however. the vast, vast, vast majority of population growth has happen in the last 50 years and virtually all of it has all happened in the third world.





one of the reasons why this issue cannot be spoken about is because of the authoritarian shackles imposed on this society. it is simply not allowed to speak of where this disastrous population growth is coming from.

i say. people have to be a bit more open about the issue and not so concerned with being seen to be politically correct.

That does not mean wasting so many resources.


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Was just wondering if anyone else has realised that with 7 billion people on our planet already and it rising every day, that life will become a lot harder in the near future.

Not meaning to sound like a lunatic, but apparently the world will be most sustainable if it had only 4 billion people, is there any suggestions anyone has on how to keep the world population size down?

The 4 billion figure is almost certainly out of date; these concerns aren't new. Back in the 1970s there were people predicting global famines by 1980 and that these would keep the population in check - that's probably the origin of 4 billion.

Our technology has kept pace with population growth and there is every indication that this will continue to be the case. The growth rate is declining and growth is expected to stop by the end of the century at about ten or eleven billion. To elaborate on our technology in a two key areas:

Food and Agriculture: we already have the technology to sustain probably about ten billion people - the main problem we face in this areas is that the technology isn't available to everyone for largely political reasons. If one compares the agricultural output of Africa with India or South America one can clearly see that Africa has largely not applied the technologies developed during the "green revolution". The reasons for this are complicated, but to be concise it's because most of the continent is under the control of kleptocrats.

In addition to existing technologies there are of course new developments being made. Genetic modification can augment the progress already made during the green revolution; artificial meat greatly increases the efficiency of meat production while better herding techniques allow for greater amounts of conventional meat production in developing countries (and without environmental degradation - there is a TED talk on this); and aquaculture is a rapidly growing industry which will reduce our dependence on fishing (which is essentially a form of hunting).

Energy: Fossil fuels are more abundant than previously thought, but as their use can cause undesirable climate change we ought to focus on the alternatives. These alternatives are primarily in three categories; Renewable energy, Nuclear Fission, and Nuclear Fusion. Renewable energy does not depend on any kind of fuel source, while the fuel sources for nuclear power (thorium and uranium for fission, and hydrogen for fusion) are very abundant - enough to last tens of thousands of years with the latest technology (billions of years in the case of nuclear fusion, hundreds of millions for nuclear fission if we can recover a significant portion of the fissionables in the Earth's crust). These predictions are all based everyone having the energy consumption far greater than the average Westerner by the way; they are potential sources of energy for a so-called "Type 1" civilization. The main problem with these energy sources is that they have a very high capital cost (especially fusion), hence why fossil fuel use is still favoured.

With abundant energy we can also solve problems like water shortages using desalination, and could hypothetically remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and recycle any element without limits.

For the reasons outlined above, and others, I do not believe that overpopulation will be a problem for our species.

Inferno

According to the graph above there will be no problem with over population. At last it'll stabilise or fall naturally.

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Of course we have, but there is little we can do. You can't physically stop people having kids ...

The third world digs a deeper hole with population growth.

He never said there was infinite resources, but the world is more than capable of feeding a substantially larger population that it already does. We haven't started to harness the resources of the oceans yet, and considering the earths crust is between to 4 to 20km deep with the deepest mine only going down to 4km.

People have been reporting the end of the world for a long time.

Introduce competition. Release some predators into built up areas. That seems logical.

Inferno

According to the graph above there will be no problem with over population. At last it'll stabilise or fall naturally.

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