Do you think overpopulation of Earth is being overlooked?? (solution, military, politician)

[bus man]

Originally Posted by J.Thomas

Bangladesh is my absolute favourite

I wonder how much they pay the guy up front to hold the flag? More seriously, I wonder how the people on the sloping edges of the roofs keep themselves from falling off, once the train gets going.

Anyone who complains about traffic congestion while sitting by themselves in their $25,000 car, listening to their preferred music and maintaining the internal climate to their desired temperature, ought to take a good look at that picture . . . and then ****.

[AndyAMG]

The earth is not over populated. Certain more desirable areas of the earth are over populated.

For instance you could take everyone in the United States and Canada and put them in just British Columbia and they would have enough resources for life. But no one wants to live in a place with an average summer temperature of 65* and brutal winters. Same with Siberia.

[emathias]

Originally Posted by Mircea

...
There's plenty of resources, but they are not being used properly.

Not to worry, the Laws of Economics will eventually fix that.

Anyone interested in resource economics should at least read through this. Even if you end up disagreeing with some of Simon's points, they are good thought exercises.
The Ultimate Resource II: People, Materials, and Environment

[gouligann]

I don't think it's being overlooked, but there certainly isn't a way to stop it unless we get some disease that kills off millions of people.

Modern medicine is great, but it's also fooling with nature. I think nature will win eventually with some super bug or another plague type disease.

[jetgraphics]

Ironically, you can find alarmists complaining over population will doom civilization all through history.

There is a danger if the power structure prevents change necessary to adapt.
Frankly, humanity has a margin of 100 to 150 years, based on current doubling rates and implementation of Environmental amplification - thickening the life bearing volume of the finite Earth. Environmental preservation is suicidal and genocidal.
Humanity needs to harness technology and increase the habitat for man as well as wildlife.

In parallel with that, humanity needs to colonize outer space, via giant vivariums / orbital habitats. Use robotic factories, seeded upon any Earth passing asteroid, and let them geometrically construct hulls, machinery, etc. Then it is only a matter of collecting the hulls and commissioning them with raw materials and crew. All known elements are already in space. The only thing lacking is life - which we will bring.

Conservative estimates that there is enough material and power for trillions of colonies, in all manner of orbits - around the sun, planets, and moons.

Just think - if population doubling rate remains constant at 50 years, humanity may pass 6.520 E+21 in 4000 A.D.
That's 6.52 Sextillion people. Woo-hoo.

The BIG BANGING Theory
YEAR . . . Population. . Doubling rate (years)
2014. . . . 7.200E+09 . . . . 50 . . . . . . . 60 . . . . . . . . 70
Future . . . Yrs. Diff. . . . Population
2050 . . . . 36 . . . . . . . . 1.186E+10 . . 1.091E+10 . . 1.028E+10
2100 . . . . 86 . . . . . . . . 2.372E+10 . . 1.945E+10 . . 1.687E+10
2200 . . . . 186 . . . . . . . 9.488E+10 . . 6.173E+10 . . 4.542E+10
2300 . . . . 286 . . . . . . . 3.795E+11 . . 1.960E+11 . . 1.223E+11
2400 . . . . 386. . . . . . . 1.518E+12 . . . 6.222E+11 . . 3.291E+11
2500 . . . . 486 . . . . . . . 6.072E+12 . . 1.975E+12 . . 8.858E+11
3000 . . . . 986 . . . . . . . 6.218E+15 . . 6.372E+14 . . 1.252E+14
4000 . . . . 1986 . . . . . . 6.520E+21 . . 6.629E+19 . . 2.500E+18
5000 . . . . 2986 . . . . . . 6.837E+27 . . 6.896E+24 . . 4.994E+22
6000 . . . . 3986 . . . . . . 7.169E+33 . . 7.174E+29 . . 9.973E+26


Space Colonization Basics

The key advantage of space settlements is the ability to build new land, rather than take it from someone else. This allows a huge expansion of humanity without war or destruction of Earth's biosphere. The asteroids alone provide enough material to make new orbital land hundreds of times greater than the surface of the Earth, divided into millions of colonies. This land can easily support trillions of people.

Of course, their estimate is wildly conservative and timid.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKendree_cylinder

A McKendree cylinder is a type of hypothetical rotating space habitat originally proposed at NASA's Turning Goals into Reality conference in 2000 by NASA engineer Tom McKendree.[1] As with other space habitat designs, the cylinder would spin to produce artificial gravity by way of centrifugal force. The design differs from the classical designs produced in the 1970s by Gerard K. O'Neill and NASA in that it would use carbon nanotubes instead of steel, allowing the habitat to be built much larger. In the original proposal, the habitat would consist of two cylinders approximately 460 km (290 mi) in radius and 4600 km (2900 mi) in length, containing 13 million square kilometers (5.1 million square miles) of living space,[1] nearly as much land area as that of Russia.
As originally proposed, the McKendree cylinder is simply a scaled-up version of the O'Neill cylinder. Like the O'Neill cylinder, McKendree proposed dedicating half of the surface of the colony to windows, allowing direct illumination of the interior.[1] The habitat would be composed of a pair of counter-rotating cylinders which would function like momentum wheels to control the habitat's orientation.[1]

McKendree Space Colony (290 mi x 2900 mi)
5,284,158.84 sq. mi. (outer most shell)
76560 decks (10 ft)
2 x 10,127,094,564.45 sq.mi.
= 20,254,189,128.9 sq.mi.

Capacity :1,012,709,456,445 (@50 per sq.mi.)
1.01 trillion people

For without space colonization there can be no world peace, and without world peace we cannot afford space colonization.

Once humanity is free from the limits of Earth, we have millennia of expansion in our own solar system.
In time, our descendants can colonize near by star systems, filling them, and expanding outward.

[antinimby]

Mother nature most certainly will win out. All it would take is a supervolcano erupting, asteroid/comet slamming into the planet, gamma ray burst, snowball Earth and other extinction events. It's killed off many species in the past and most certainly will do so again in the future. Just a matter of time.

[SFBayBoomer]

Originally Posted by AndyAMG

The earth is not over populated. Certain more desirable areas of the earth are over populated.

I would prefer it if new immigrants, refugees, etc. were not allowed to emigrate or sneak into the more desirable areas until they have been productive for at least 10-20 years in a less desirable area of the United States.

Also, I think the problem of huge numbers of family members coming over on the basis of one "anchor baby" or even one legitimate new citizen is a loophole that should be closed.

My childhood was great, but we were a more homogeneous group (not all white, but mostly white, and there was more of a melting pot, with English spoken well by nearly everyone). I like a certain amount of diversity, but it's becoming a divisive mess in recent years.

Library resources are strained as every new group wants massive amounts of materials in their native language.

Sorry, but stocking shelves with the various Hmong dialects just isn't useful to most library patrons.

[silverhead]

Logan's Run (1976) - IMDb


Was this film was a prediction of the future waiting for us?.The other big problem for the future is the dementia timebomb.The doctors can keep the body going through various medical procedures but they cannot "repair" the brain so we are going to left with millions of older people still alive but virtually brain dead.Maybe "logans run"might not be such a bad idea.30 great years then bang.

[Arktikos]

Originally Posted by censusdata

Over population is NOT about paving over all of Earth's surface. Each person needs so many acres of farmland, so much fossil fuel, etc to have their urban existence. Fossil fuels will at some point run out, many crops are grown by rapidly depleted aquafers, and there's only so much fresh water to go around.

Thank you for stating what should be obvious to everyone.

The number of extinctions our species causes, and the damage we're doing to our oceans are a couple more indicators of overpopulation. Welcome to the Anthropocene.

What is the Anthropocene and Are We in It? | Science | Smithsonian

[Old Gringo]

Yes, clearly.

The worst aspect is that the areas with the highest increases are those least able to support their ballooning populations. If we don't get this under control, at some point in the not too distant future, nature will. And it won't be pretty.