World population

As of 18 July 2009 (UTC), the Earth's population is estimated by the United States Census Bureau to be 6.772 billion. The world's population is expected to reach about 9 billion by the year 2040.

[image=http://nakedmaninthetree.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/world-population.JPG]

How many people can the world sustain?
What do we have to do to prepare the world for that?

Or do we at one point have to introduce drastic birth control measures?
And if so, how?
And what?

 

The odd thing is that isn't this population growth primarily taking place in non-first world nations? It tends to be that as a nation develops the birth rate begins to trail off.

Probably the primary growth would still be in India, South America and Africa -- and to an extent in the Middle East. China I'm not sure but they've started some real draconian measures to keep the rate down.

 

India's population is set to surpass China's within a few decades. Nigeria and Indonesia are also supposed to become much bigger. Western Europe, Russia, and Japan are losing population. The United States will slowly, gradually, continue to grow.

But there will be demographic changes, with the U.S. set to become a Hispanic nation, and Russia and Western Europe set to become Muslim nations.

It's the 3rd world countries that are undergoing a population boom.

Once a country becomes developed, women are more educated and independent, there is better sex education and birth control is accessible, so birth rates go down.

 

Every problem I described in my environmental thread is caused by one fundamental problem: the size of the human population. The human race would be helped immeasurably by a halving of the global population, although that might not be enough. If something could take us down to a 200 or 300 million global population, the species would be a lot better off in the long run.

 

Or we could develop technology that will sustain us, by giving us greater access to resources, such as by fusion power, expanding into space (for more space, as well as mining and energy purposes), genetically-engineered food, maybe nanotechnology or an advanced robotic workforce.

But until then, we should definitely try to stabilize Earth's population. But it's not a problem for 1st world countries, only poor and developing countries. So I don't know what the United States or Europe or Japan or Russia or any Western country can really do. Empowerment of women seems the best way.

 

If recources were used properly...vertical farming and living, alt energy, etc..the Earth could support many trillions. Think Coruscant but green-tech within. You don't even need the buildings to be miles high, just a few hundred feet. There is actaully a project building in the works in NY which is to be 900 feet tall and will not only house people but will have crops gorwn within as well as be energy efficient. Cover the world with such buildings and it'll be awhile before people complain about crowding.

 

But we also have to come up with an alternative energy miracle like fusion power (or beaming solar power from space, or improved geothermal) first, to be applicable worldwide. If we get a clean, essentially limitless, source of energy then we will no longer worry about the scarcity of oil or fresh water, or of drought and famine. But until then, our main sources of energy (the fossil fuels) remain scarce, and fresh water is running out. Desalination plants still too expensive. Even solar/wind plants require oil to make, and they are dependent on weather conditions and geography.

 

You don't need fusion though that would be nice. There is plenty to be gained by solar and heat can be stored for 24 hour energy needs. The incidental sunight on the Earth is something like 1,000 times what we use/make right now. So for energy you can use just Earth solar for something approaching 1,000 times thcurrent world population. Fission works right now, solar off the Earth is in abundance.

 

I don't have facts and figures at hand but isn't the problem really the disproportionate distribution of the world's existing resources. A small percentage of the population retains a high proportion of the world's resources and wealth, so that you have families in one part of the world who have to survive for a year on what it costs some people to buy fancy cofee for a week.

 

What Gonk and Hoth are saying reminds me of something I was taught way back in high school:
[image=http://www.worldproutassembly.org/population-3.jpg]

Supposedly, out-of-control population growth is history once all the world achieves a certain standard of living.

Once all the world achieves a certain standard of living. When hell freezes over! I'm sure we'll have a population of 15 billion before that could even remotely become a possibility. So the question remains: how many people can the world sustain?

 

SuperWatto,

So, looking at your profile, you were in high school twenty years ago. Did your teacher mention when we will enter the "Post-Industrial" stage?

The earth's population could increase many times before we reach that point.

Of course, there's always "Mother Nature" and her nasty little viruses that crop up from time to time. If the swine flu (goodness forbid) should mutate to a stronger, more lethal variety, then a lot of the world's children in poorer nations will be at high risk of dying, because there won't be enough Tami-Flu or flu vaccine to go around.

SARS could make a come-back, too.

Of course, we really shouldn't wait on a major epidemic to do our work for us. We really need to cut the birth rate in poorer countries like India now. Only problem is coming up with a plan that would be workable. Fat chance of that happening, tho.

 

It's not just oil becoming scarce. There are other nonrenewable resources.

We are running out of aluminum, copper, silicon, platinum, even uranium. Solar panels and wind turbines are made from oil.

The biofuel comes from farms, farms that are dependent on petroleum-based agriculture and pesticides, and biofuels are even worse for the environment.

Uranium mining and reactor construction is based on diesel, more oil-powered machinery.

It would take every single one of California's 13,000 wind turbines operating at 100% capacity (they usually operate at about 30%) all at the same time to generate as much electricity as a a single 555-megawatt natural gas fired power plant.

In order to offset a 10% reduction in U.S. petroleum consumption, the amount of installed solar and wind energy would have to be increased by 2,200%.

The amount of energy distributed by a single gas station in a single day equivalent to the amount of energy that would produced by four Manhattan sized city blocks of solar equipment.

We would need to build hundreds of new oil plants to just "switch" our economy to something else, like a hydrogen-based economy, and cost over $210 Trillion (trillion with a T) dollars.

Like the chart says, empowering women, better sex education, more accessible birth control will bring down birth rates.

But how many people can the world sustain, at current levels?

I think I've heard 250 million people.

And we are approaching 7 billion, when we had less than 1 billion a century ago.

A "post-industrial society" just means going from a creditor nation with an economy based on manufacturing and industy, to a debtor nation with an economy based on services with a negative trade balance. We already did that.

If you mean the stage on that chart, it depends on whenever women equality and empowerment is achieved worlwide, with sex education and access to birth control. Who knows when that will happens, if ever. There is no predicted timetable for that.

 

Darth-Ghost,

Unfortunately, there's way too many religions out there that deny women rights. Our world population will be at standing room only long before all the world's women have the right to education, birth control, etc.

China's solution was to limit families to only one child. Unfortunately, males are valued way above females in that society, so girls are given away and live in orphanages.

 

The key indicators that people should be following are global per capita industrial output and global per capita food production. Given constraints in arable land, fertilizer resources, water and energy, can expansion in food production keep up with expansion of the population. Global per capita food production grew from 1961 to 2005, but has declined in the last 4 years. More or less by definition, if global per capita food production drops low enough, the population will start to collapse.

 

Actually wikipedia said something along the lines of it reaching 9.2 before stabilizing -- meaning it peaks there.

Unfortunately is seems to be the nations with the highest rate of population growth are those most in place to pay the highest price for the problems likely to come about.

 

That's one side of the balance sheet. On the other side, there should be the maximum amount of people our planet can sustain (once all energy and food needs are sufficiently met without messing up the biosphere so much that that becomes insustainable). You can offset the resulting number with the number you get if you replace the max amount of people with the current amount of people. The result is a negative or positive world happiness index.

Does that make sense?

 

The number is not going to make anyone happy. Currently, no broad human effort to secure a food supply is sustainable. Soil erosion, soil salting, water table depletion, river depletion and poisoning, deforestation, ocean overfishing and ocean habitat destruction. Not one of those problems can be solved, in my view, without to a large extent depopulating the Earth.

Add to that of course the effects of an industrial civilization: pumping millions of years of stored carbon back into the atmosphere, environmental destruction to get at needed ores and minerals and fossil fuels.

 

Not meaning to sound flippant or draconian, but if people are worried about the world's growing population, why don't they do their part to lower it and offer to give up their own lives and those of their family members? I'm not aiming this at you, Jabba -- but it amazes me how many people (especially after they've had their couple kids) feel they have the obligation to tell other people that it's time to stop reproducing -- or telling other people how many kids they can have. If someone is worried about the planet not being able to support the population, let them be the first to sacrifice their own lives to save the planet and the rest of us. The level of barbarism and elitism that flows from someone saying, "We have to get such and such a country to lower their birthrate" is not only astounding, but reeks of delusions of godhood. People who don't believe in god often put themselves in the role of god -- assuming they know what's best for the rest of the world.

The planet is not the problem. The problem is the manner in which resources are managed.

 

I've given my views on this issue many times in the past, boc. The problem is intractable, the human drive to procreate overwhelming.

The planet is not the problem. The number of people is the problem. We cannot successfully manage resources to sustainably maintain a permanent population of 7 billion humans, let alone 9 or 10.

No one has the will, the military or political power, or the Hitleresque qualities that would be needed to liquidate a large percentage of the human population to pave the way for a sustainable future.

So what is going to happen instead? Mass starvation and resource wars. Localized genocide.

Rwanda, for example, looked like politically motivated genocide at a cursory glance but upon closer examination was a Malthusian collapse. There were too many people on too little land. The population had increased to the point where many families did not have enough land to feed themselves. The result of the mass genocide was that families were able to obtain enough land to feed themselves. Hutus killed perhaps more than 100,000 Hutus in areas where there weren't enough Tutsis to kill - the primary motivator being to take over the neighbor's farm plot and so increase the family's caloric intake.

Unfortunately, the Rwanda genocide is a recognizably practical template for third world population control. We'll see more Rwandas in our lifetime.

 

BOC, I hoped we can keep this discussion nice and clean without throwing vague accusations at unnamed people.

 

From a ecosystemic perspective, how many people can our world even support? More people means more food, which means more crops (we're already highly inefficient with how we use our carbohydrate and protein sources), which means more pollinators like bees and moths.

Not too long ago we had some sort of mini-crisis involving bees mysteriously dying, which would supposedly cause mass food shortages. How many of these guys will we need to support an additional 3 billion or whatever number of people? What else does our food supply rely on? What do bees and all the other creatures up and down the food chain need to survive, and what happens to us when they don't get it?

 

Seriously.

And the idea that people who stop reproducing after two children are supposed to "sacrifice" themselves and their families so that other people can have 10 children because their "god" tells them not to use birth control, is so disgustingly barbaric that I'm not even going to dignify it beyond this comment.

I'm not following how it's "playing God" to empower women in these Third World countries to stand up to their partners and say, "No, I don't want to be pregnant for the 15th time and I am not having sex with you if you don't wear a condom." Sadly, while some women may have multiple children because they have chosen to do so, many more have multiple children because they either don't know how to prevent pregnancy or feel helpless to do so. Some cultures have not evolved into the 21st century and they still treat women like wombs on legs whose only purpose is to be pregnant and have children. Even when they are putting dirt in their tortillas to feed those children because they are out of flour (based on some information I read in college, I'm not mentioning tortillas to be ethnocentristic, this was a real account of one of the Central American countries, Honduras I believe).

Again, I'm not in favor of Chinese-style mandates on birth, it's one thing if people are having large families because they want to do so and they have the resources to support those families. I might have had a couple of more children myself if we could afford it and I were younger, but we can't.

But I would be really interested in statistics in how many families are large by choice or by accident. There's a huge line between advocating family planning and giving people the tools when they don't have them, then allowing them to make the choice, and Chinese style mandates on families. The former is a very good thing and would solve a lot of the problems currently caused by poverty, the latter is not a good thing.

 

I've given my views on this issue many times in the past, boc. The problem is intractable, the human drive to procreate overwhelming.

The number of people is the problem. We cannot successfully manage resources to sustainably maintain a permanent population of 7 billion humans, let alone 9 or 10.

So what is going to happen instead? Mass starvation and resource wars. Localized genocide.

Yes, I know you've given your opinion, and I respect your right to do so -- but I disagree with you. I think man is more innovative than you give him credit for. More than enough food is produced right now to feed the world -- we simply can not get it where it needs to go -- and not for lack of ability, but lack of desire and the greed for profit. The same goes for water and materials needed to build shelters. That is really all "the planet" needs to provide. The rest: medicine, education, security -- are not thing the planet will run out of. I trust man to be able to produce, but I do not trust him to provide.

Rwanda, for example, looked like politically motivated genocide at a cursory glance but upon closer examination was a Malthusian collapse. There were too many people on too little land. The population had increased to the point where many families did not have enough land to feed themselves.

I think you are oversimplifying. There were ethnic/political troubles that overshadowed any sustenance troubles. Here are some great links to the National Security Archives. In all the message traffic I ever saw about Rwanda, lack of food was never mentioned as a player in the violence.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB119/index.htm
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB117/index.htm

 

Thomas Homer-Dixon has written on the issue of resource scarcity and violence:

Gerard Prunier's extensive research into the Rwanda crisis confirms that this is pretty much exactly what happened in Rwanda: widespread scarcity of the most basic resources leading to intergroup competition of the worst possible variety.

From the World Bank report, 1994:

Rwandan farmers have historically defied predictions of disaster by keeping food production ahead of population through a variety of measures but that this success stalled in the early 1990s because of increasing land scarcity, low use of fertilizers to improve soil fertility, a high risk environment due to thin markets, lack of irrigation, and little intercropping, and excessive government intervention in favor of coffee and in opposition to other crops, including food crops. By the late 1980s the country was experiencing localized famine.

 

I partially agree, that is why we have to seriously try and overcome resource scarcity--develop fusion power, geothermal power, solar power beamed down from space, lunar mining, asteroid mining, nanotechnology, advanced robotics, etc.

Earth simply does not have the resources to sustain the population we have now, not at current technology levels. We may appear to have the farmland, but it simply isn't sustainable because of soil erosion, dwindling water supplies, an agricultural system based on oil, etc. It's heading towards catastrophe.

Non-technological ways we can do this are empowering women, sex education, and birth control. Now, I know you dont agree with birth control, but don't you think that empowering women and sex education would be worthy goals?

Also, another reason why developing countries have high birth rates, why those families have lots of children, is because not all those children are expected to survive to adulthood. Infant and child mortality rates are high, and the parents usually need as many helpers as possible for life on the farm. If we also helped other countries by training their doctors and providing medical supplies, that could eventually go a long way too, families would no longer feel the need to produce as many children.

That's not taking into account resource scarcity, but when they expect the birth rates of developing countries to fall to match the death rates. And it's only a projection. I've also heard 15 billion.

Less than 1 billion.