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The problem isn't exploding population. There are lots of ways the world could end. What will happen if all those billions of people try to access the internet simultaneously?
I think we could have many billions more people, if we used the least polluting technologies, instead of the most polluting technologies. There are so many people running things that seem to love disabling & killing people. The US govt, because of bribery from corps to Dems & Reps, gives those corporations permission to slowly kill us. It's sort of like being on death row when no crime has been committed. That is why I must vote 3rd party. They don't try to kill us, as they won't take bribes. They care about public.
The # of people the world has in the future will depend on the governments & corporations. If leaders of countries consider their main obligation to help the general public, we could have longer lives and better health, if we choose to want that. I don't have the policies of every govt at hand, but have heard of limits on # of babies allowed. Should they be allowed to do that? Is it cruel to bring any more children into this world, as freedom including the right to best medical treatment may not exist?
I think there are some counties in the US that have about 100 people. Should multi-billionaires be allowed to buy nearly an entire county, thus keeping it off limits to house more people?
Umm, have you ever looked at the life expectancy statistics of less-developed countries where corporations play a much smaller role? Subsistence agriculture societies tend to have average life expectancy of as little as 50 years, on a par with the US in 1850 or 1900.
Corporations bring fresh food from four continents to my neighborhood grocery store along with thousands of other items, corporate-made clothing costs the smallest fraction of our wages in history, corporations make the building products and construct our dwellings and places of business, corporations make the treadmills we exercise on, the medicine we take when we are sick, corporations provide the jobs we need to earn our necessities and our wants.
North Korea has no corporations. The people eat tree bark and grass, and die young. Can you name a society that has no corporations and superior health than the US?
Umm, have you ever looked at the life expectancy statistics of less-developed countries where corporations play a much smaller role? Subsistence agriculture societies tend to have average life expectancy of as little as 50 years, on a par with the US in 1850 or 1900.
Corporations bring fresh food from four continents to my neighborhood grocery store along with thousands of other items, corporate-made clothing costs the smallest fraction of our wages in history, corporations make the building products and construct our dwellings and places of business, corporations make the treadmills we exercise on, the medicine we take when we are sick, corporations provide the jobs we need to earn our necessities and our wants.
North Korea has no corporations. The people eat tree bark and grass, and die young. Can you name a society that has no corporations and superior health than the US?
First of all, correlation does not equal causation.
Our increased life expectancies are not necessarily the results of corporations. While corporations are responsible for all that you mention above, corporate practices do plenty to lower the life expectancy of countries' populations.
Excessive pollution kills millions of people in countries like India, China, Nigeria, etc. Risky production practices kill thousands more in these emerging countries as well.
A better measure would be government policies. Life expectancy in the United States did not go up until the government passed laws that made corporations improve worker safety, limit hours, and provide minimum pay. The food system got safer once the government set minimum standards for food safety. Pollution was greatly reduced only after the government mandated it. Starvation is non-existent because of the social safety net provided by the government.
Most of all, the government provides our sanitation systems. Clean water flows out of every tap. Waste is processed and water is made clean once again.
Of the 41 areas across the world that have better life expectancy than the US, nearly all, if not all, have universal healthcare.
North Korea is an example of extreme governmental indifference, and while Cuba's life expectancy is lower than that of the United States, it trails the US by only 1.3 years.
For everyone in the world to have the same standard of living as Westerners do we would need something on the order of 3-5x as many resources just to sustain that level of development. Overpopulation is only a problem insofar as people are consuming resources for goods and services that aren't essential to life.
When I was in college I remember one of my geography professors saying the Earth at then current levels of food production could support around 11 billion humans.
If you look at the problems today, it's not really that we don't have enough food or resources - in the U.S. along we throw away enough food every day to make the 3rd world obese.
The problem isn't resource availability - it's resource distribution and money distribution. The countries with hungry people don't have the money to bring food to the area and feed them - the food is out there, the money is harder to come by.
The Earth does not have the ability to provide all 7 billion people, much less 9 or 10 billion, with lifestyles like middle class Americans or even Europeans at the current level of resource consumption. That's another resource distribution problem.
Is there a point where there is too much people? What is that number? 10 billion? 20 billion? 50 billion? 100 billion?
Have you not researched this topic much? Scientists have said for some time that 2 billion people would be the most we could support at modern standards after fossil fuels peak and fade away (they've created a false sense of abundance). The economic system encourages people to defy the limits of nature, while we allow other species to wilt in our presence.
The destruction of nature alone was bad enough with just 3 billion or so. People are literally eating nature to death. Those who make excuses for endless growth ignore the ruination of nature and focus on narrow parameters of human wants. But chronic hunger and poverty debunk anthropocentric measures of progress, also.
When I was in college I remember one of my geography professors saying the Earth at then current levels of food production could support around 11 billion humans.
If you look at the problems today, it's not really that we don't have enough food or resources - in the U.S. along we throw away enough food every day to make the 3rd world obese.
The problem isn't resource availability - it's resource distribution and money distribution. The countries with hungry people don't have the money to bring food to the area and feed them - the food is out there, the money is harder to come by.
The Earth does not have the ability to provide all 7 billion people, much less 9 or 10 billion, with lifestyles like middle class Americans or even Europeans at the current level of resource consumption. That's another resource distribution problem.
Remember that fossil fuels make most resource distribution possible, in addition to fueling modern agriculture. The definition of overpopulation should be based on local carrying capacity, not shipping stuff around the world at hypothetically affordable costs. True population scenarios account for Peak Oil and the decline of all fossil fuels. 2 billion is the sustainable number I keep seeing.
Liquid fuels for transportation may never be replaced by electricity, even if we destroy half the world's scenery with wind turbines and solar arrays. You can't run heavy trucks, trains and ships on batteries in the foreseeable future, though a solar recharging system (on the fly) may help.
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2 billion, according to scientists
