Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
While I don't think the world is overpopulated quite yet, a billion people are being added every 12-14 years and there's little reason to think this will change for a long time. The population growth rate isn't shrinking as slowly as was once believed. It's no longer exponential growth but it's still robust linear growth. In terms of absolute numbers the world's population isn't growing any more slowly because even though fertility is down the total number of people is up.
I see no humane way to slow down the growth. I think unfortunately we will just have to adapt to overpopulation by consuming less and getting more serious about colonizing space. The only way to actually curb the population growth would be by stripping people of their basic human rights and killing and forcibly sterilizing people en masse.
While I don't think the world is overpopulated quite yet, a billion people are being added every 12-14 years and there's little reason to think this will change for a long time. The population growth rate isn't shrinking as slowly as was once believed. It's no longer exponential growth but it's still robust linear growth. In terms of absolute numbers the world's population isn't growing any more slowly because even though fertility is down the total number of people is up.
I see no humane way to slow down the growth. I think unfortunately we will just have to adapt to overpopulation by consuming less and getting more serious about colonizing space. The only way to actually curb the population growth would be by stripping people of their basic human rights and killing and forcibly sterilizing people en masse.
I disagree, alot of third world countries like Thailand and Iran have stabilized their fertility rates through:
1. Family planning programs
2. Installing a social safety net so people don't have to have a large family in order to not to starve when they're old.
3. Raising living standards to the point where people can afford birth control.
4. Empowering women and giving them control over their bodies and destinies, including through education.
5. Urbanization, as this lifestyle makes smaller families more desirable economically then rural agricultural ones do.
If this continues to progress across the globe and we fight for it, I believe we can stabilize or even shrink the population. Maybe we're just not working hard enough to achieve these goals now that the low hanging fruit has been picked. It's a huge challenge, but this is the ethical way to reduce population growth and avoid the stuff you say. BTW, if we develop technologically to the point where we have the energy and resources to ship off millions of excess population to outer space we'll definitely have the energy and resources to achieve these things, which is the easy way. It's just not going to be happening where we benefit from it in our lifetimes, but we can slow the growth and once our generation begins to die we may see a slight and longterm decline beginning. This graph gives me hope.
If we get a global fertility rate of 2 children per woman, longterm we'll stabilize, although short term growth will continue because of inertia, with a bigger younger generation than older generation dying off. China has the one child policy and a sub replacement fertility rate but is still growing because of this inertia, but it cannot last forever and growth will eventually reverse.
This seems more like a great debate then a politics and other controversies topic TBH.
I disagree, alot of third world countries like Thailand and Iran have stabilized their fertility rates through:
1. Family planning programs
2. Installing a social safety net so people don't have to have a large family in order to not to starve when they're old.
3. Raising living standards to the point where people can afford birth control.
4. Empowering women and giving them control over their bodies and destinies, including through education.
5. Urbanization, as this lifestyle makes smaller families more desirable economically then rural agricultural ones do.
The problem is that urbanisation isn't really a solution because even though people have fewer children in cities the rise of urban capitalism is also leading to more wasteful lifestyles. Birth control is a choice as well, people with religious beliefs that prohibit or discourage it won't use it even if they are educated about its benefits. Also you can throw education at people but a lot of ignorance is willful too.
Birth rates are indeed declining because of the things you listed but not as quickly as was once believed. They're actually going up again in some countries too such as Russia and the UK. There's no guarantee they will continue to decline, especially if people start moving out of the cities again and the economy worsens in the Third World. Many of China's urban developments end up ghost towns.
It's almost inevitable that the world will have 10 billion people in less than fifty years. That's not a magic marker or anything but there seems to be little we can do to grow more food. One solution for water might be desalination through solar power. I don't think the situation is hopeless all I'm saying is that realistically speaking there is no way to significantly curb the world's population growth without resorting to Hitler-type cruelty. Something I'd be absolutely opposed to.
While I don't think the world is overpopulated quite yet
It's because 'overpopulation' isn't an absolute value, it's a term relative to the existing technology that can (and has at various points over the past 200 years of technological growth) produced not enough work for the existing number of people.
Prior to the industrial revolution, food production limited population growth. Afterwards, food became more plentiful, so something else limits it.
If you think of it in that way, there was 'underpopulation' of the industrializing world in, say, the early 1860's and 1940's, but overpopulation c. 1910, 1930 and 2010.
Rapid technological advances reduce the number of jobs available, sometimes for quite awhile.
What we've seen in periods like this is war. Big wars.
Lol "overpopulation"
Everyone in the world can fit in Texas with 1000 sq ft per person.
So what? Can you grow enough food to feed each person in that 1000 sq ft? Actually you need 7500 square feet per person to grow enough food to feed one person. This assumes no land degradation such as soil erosion/degraded soils, and it assumes adequate water supplies, also the ideal growing conditions, and no crop failure. If the soil isn't ideal or the growing season is shorter than, you need additional land to account for these shortfalls. And this is just the absolute bare minimums, this doesn't account for land needed to grow cotton for clothing, land needed to grow the wood that will keep you warm when it's cold, mining to make metal tools to allow the farming of the land, land to drill for oil and refine it to run modern machinery to farm the land etc. I'm sure you'll find when you add up all those additional requirements, the amount of land would be 20 times that amount.
Last edited by TechGromit; 06-21-2013 at 06:15 AM..
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
