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How much will world population continue to grow?

World Population growth


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joko104

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Multiple choice, public poll

A topic rarely discussed now.

The growth of the human population worldwide continues to grow exponentially. Modern medicine combined with enough aid to prevent starvation long enough to allow procreation have allowed the world human population to grow in most of the world, most notably the impoverished regions.

worldpopulat.gif


Worst case predictions? Humans will create their own extinction along the lines of Eastern Island, which so depleted their resources they found themselves starved out.
Humans extinct in 100 years
Humans will be extinct in 100 years says eminent scientist

Some believe somehow the population will level out or there will be some pandemic that will kill off a huge percentage of humans.

Still others believe there earth can support trillions of humans and it only a matter of managing resources.

Your opinion?
 
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Multiple choice, public poll

A topic rarely discussed now.

The growth of the human population worldwide continues to grow exponentially. Modern medicine combined with enough aid to prevent starvation long enough to allow procreation have allowed the world human population to grow in most of the world, most notably the impoverished regions.

worldpopulat.gif


Worst case predictions? Humans will create their own extinction along the lines of Eastern Island, which so depleted their resources they found themselves starved out.
Humans extinct in 100 years
Humans will be extinct in 100 years says eminent scientist

Some believe somehow the population will level out or there will be some pandemic that will kill off a huge percentage of humans.

Still others believe there earth can support trillions of humans and it only a matter of managing resources.

Your opinion?

No one knows what the carrying capacity of Planet Earth is, but it can't possibly be infinite. Sooner or later, there will have to be a natural catastrophe that will reduce the human population.

Most likely, depletion of aquifers will be the trigger that starts global famine, but it could be something else as well.
 
As women become more empowered in the developing world, they choose to have fewer kids. This is why most predictions have us topping out at about 10 billion people or so. Don't get me wrong, I think there are too many of us as it is, but its not going to be catastrophic.
 
I think we have the technology to move forward, maybe even double our current population.
at this point the limitations are political.
Broad wealth is born of political freedom and stability.
The first world middle class lives better than the nobility of the the nineteenth century.
The entire world can live that way, but it will required a stable government to allow progress.
 
What I see as the largest problem of the growth is a residual. It tends to be happening in the most impoverished, bigoted and ignorant population countries - people easily manipulated by religious, tribal, ethnic and other bigotries of murderous proportions. Those are prime solicitation grounds for violent radicalism, for which the ever increasing means of ever more lethal weapons not only can cause increasing civil wars of religious or ethnic implications, but then also increasing military actions by military wealthy powers to try to hold such radicals back.

The economic imbalances in the world are as extreme as it gets. In some regions people watch their children dying because they can't afford a dime's worth of rice. While in other regions people are bitching because they can't buy this year's new-technology gizmo or have to wait another year to buy a new car. Most of us throw away more food than a billion people have to eat to stay alive. Many of us have more crap than we know where to put it, where a billion people have nothing but maybe a cardboard shack for a home - if they can defend it from being taken from them.
 
I think we have the technology to move forward, maybe even double our current population.
at this point the limitations are political.
Broad wealth is born of political freedom and stability.
The first world middle class lives better than the nobility of the the nineteenth century.
The entire world can live that way, but it will required a stable government to allow progress.

I don't know that we can all live like we do in typical suburban American though otherwise we will have no wilderness left.
 
Advanced societies are experiencing declining birth rates, to the point that Europe and Japan are experiencing negative growth (ie decline).


This trend seems to show wherever society gets to a certain point in development, where children become an economic liability rather than an asset for more than one or two generations.


Therefore I think the curve will be more Sigmoid and will actually turn downward before the end of the century, probably before exceeding 10 billion total population.
 
The population growth is a real problem and will result in a lot of resource stress for us if we don't address it.

However everything seems to point a solution where our number one priority should be to improve the quality of life for the world's poor. In almost all developed countries, the populations tend towards negative growth rather than positive growth if you exclude first-generation immigrants. And if you look at birthrates of developing nations, their birthrates are dropping in sync with the improvement of their population's quality of life.

Or said another way, once parents have confidence in their countries health care systems (low infant mortality), their education system (know their kids will be educated), and are confidentthat they will be able support themselves in old age (i.e. retirement nest eggs & social security nets exist); the motivation to have a third, fourth, fifth, etc. child is no longer there.
 
I think it is as if we are a human virus upon a sentient living entity, the Earth. Same as humans develop antibodies to fight infection and disease, the Earth automatically compensates for damage causing circumstances. We damage continually, without consideration of our unintended consequences. CORPORATISM is our curse upon the planet.
 
I haven't had any contribution to this growth yet.I blame parents :mrgreen:

I dont trust every modern medicine or agriculturel improvement because human beings keeps harming the earth's resources in direct proportion to all those and nothing else can prevent the human's potential for destroying the nature and its all sources
 
I do not know and neither does anybody else.

Frankly, I do not much care either.

It's like global warming (assuming it is as bad as some think), if humanity damages itself hugely because it is too stupid to stop polluting (or breeding in the above case)...then they got everything they deserved.

Besides, I will be long gone no matter what the outcome...and since I try to not pollute and I am not fathering lots of kids, my conscious is clear on these issues.
 
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Multiple choice, public poll

A topic rarely discussed now.

The growth of the human population worldwide continues to grow exponentially. Modern medicine combined with enough aid to prevent starvation long enough to allow procreation have allowed the world human population to grow in most of the world, most notably the impoverished regions.

worldpopulat.gif


Worst case predictions? Humans will create their own extinction along the lines of Eastern Island, which so depleted their resources they found themselves starved out.
Humans extinct in 100 years
Humans will be extinct in 100 years says eminent scientist

Some believe somehow the population will level out or there will be some pandemic that will kill off a huge percentage of humans.

Still others believe there earth can support trillions of humans and it only a matter of managing resources.

Your opinion?

It'll hit an equilibrium one way or another.
 
I don't know that we can all live like we do in typical suburban American though otherwise we will have no wilderness left.
Density in suburbia is moderately high.
There is a lot of empty land out there, it will just take energy to properly use it.
I do think we will need better planning to reduce out impact on nature,
I think many urban planners like the high density city center model,
but that answer may not be a one solution fits all.
 
We have our own plague that we use periodically to deal with this.


It's called war.
 
Density in suburbia is moderately high.
There is a lot of empty land out there, it will just take energy to properly use it.
I do think we will need better planning to reduce out impact on nature,
I think many urban planners like the high density city center model,
but that answer may not be a one solution fits all.

We have developed over 50% of the world's land surface already. For example, the largest suburb of Kansas City, Overland Park, has a population density of 2,316.6 per square mile. It is a fairly dense suburb as its been around a long time, yet it's density is still only about 10% of what NYC's is and only 5% of a city like Paris. Now granted, we are not going to all live in this world in Hong Kong / NYC densities, but we certainly can't all live in Overland Park densities either. For example, if Guangzhou had the same population density of the typical American suburb, it would cover an area of approximately 6 times the size of Yellowstone National Park.
 
It will continue to grow, absent a catastrophic extinction event, until such time as the population exceeds the resources available to sustain that level of population.
 
We have developed over 50% of the world's land surface already. For example, the largest suburb of Kansas City, Overland Park, has a population density of 2,316.6 per square mile. It is a fairly dense suburb as its been around a long time, yet it's density is still only about 10% of what NYC's is and only 5% of a city like Paris. Now granted, we are not going to all live in this world in Hong Kong / NYC densities, but we certainly can't all live in Overland Park densities either. For example, if Guangzhou had the same population density of the typical American suburb, it would cover an area of approximately 6 times the size of Yellowstone National Park.
The main reason for a lot of the uninhabited land, is that we do not have the energy to make it livable.
Once energy is no longer an issue, we can spread out.
Enough sunlight falls on the earth, that once we start accumulating the energy as fuel,
we can all live a first would lifestyle, your are correct, that may not look like a 3000 sf mac mansion
on 1/2 acre of land, but it means everyone could have climate control, hot running water,
refrigeration, ect.
 
The main reason for a lot of the uninhabited land, is that we do not have the energy to make it livable.
Once energy is no longer an issue, we can spread out.
Enough sunlight falls on the earth, that once we start accumulating the energy as fuel,
we can all live a first would lifestyle, your are correct, that may not look like a 3000 sf mac mansion
on 1/2 acre of land, but it means everyone could have climate control, hot running water,
refrigeration, ect.

I agree that everyone can certainly have climate control, hot water, sewers, refrigeration and so on. However, I don't see a lot of uninhabited land as a bad thing. I think having functioning ecosystems and wilderness is a very good thing. Particularly considering its such a finite resource. Even in a country that is not overly dense like the United States, the furthest you can be from a road in the lower 48 is just a little more than 20 miles (as the crow flies) in the southern end of the Yellowstone ecosystem. In all my backpacking / backcountry fishing trips the furthest I have ever been from a road as the crow flies was just 18 miles in any direction. The furthest you can get from a road in the east is just 12 miles in any direction in the Everglades or 10.5 miles in any directions in the Boundary Waters. In the whole state of Texas you can't ever get more than 2 to 3 miles from a road in any direction. In Northeast the furthest from a road you can get is about 5 miles in the middle of the Adirondacks. This is all in the United States where we have done a lot to preserve our wildlands. The situation is much worse in the majority of countries. In fact, I would say the only countries were its better would be Canada, Australia, and Russia and those only because of much lower population densities and the shear size of them.
 
We have developed over 50% of the world's land surface already. For example, the largest suburb of Kansas City, Overland Park, has a population density of 2,316.6 per square mile. It is a fairly dense suburb as its been around a long time, yet it's density is still only about 10% of what NYC's is and only 5% of a city like Paris. Now granted, we are not going to all live in this world in Hong Kong / NYC densities, but we certainly can't all live in Overland Park densities either. For example, if Guangzhou had the same population density of the typical American suburb, it would cover an area of approximately 6 times the size of Yellowstone National Park.
Even in overpopulated California, there's a lot of empty land. That there isn't is a lot of water. That will be the limiting factor, particularly as we use up the aquifers that have been filled up over thousands of years.
 
Even in overpopulated California, there's a lot of empty land. That there isn't is a lot of water. That will be the limiting factor, particularly as we use up the aquifers that have been filled up over thousands of years.

The furthest you can get from a road in the entire state of California is 12.53 miles in any direction:

Peakbagger.com Large Map Page

Looks to be in the middle of King's Canyon National Park.
 
The furthest you can get from a road in the entire state of California is 12.53 miles in any direction:

Peakbagger.com Large Map Page

Looks to be in the middle of King's Canyon National .

Yes, that's what it looks like. That canyon next to the red x is the Middle Fork of the King's River, near Tehipite Valley. As the crow flies, it may only be a little over 12 miles, but it would take several days of hiking to get out from there.

And, while there are lots of dirt roads in the Coast Range and the foothills of the Sierra, there is still lots of empty space there.

Then there's the empty quarter, the north east part of the state. Siskiyou county has less than 8 people per square mile.
 
As women become more empowered in the developing world, they choose to have fewer kids. This is why most predictions have us topping out at about 10 billion people or so. Don't get me wrong, I think there are too many of us as it is, but its not going to be catastrophic.

i think in the long run it'll have more to do with birth control. Tons of men don't want kids either, but now there are so many methods to avoid unwanted pregnancy. Think i read somewhere half of pregnancies in the US used to be accidental

It's pretty catastrophic already: 70F in antarctica, 98% of species wiped out by 2200, pollution so thick in shanghai you can't see the sun
 
The furthest you can get from a road in the entire state of California is 12.53 miles in any direction:

Peakbagger.com Large Map Page

Looks to be in the middle of King's Canyon National Park.

Yeah and even in the middle of the amazon, you can only travel 100 miles without running into modern human cities

Pretty undeniable that nature is dwindling into nothing as a direct result of human activity
 
i think in the long run it'll have more to do with birth control. Tons of men don't want kids either, but now there are so many methods to avoid unwanted pregnancy. Think i read somewhere half of pregnancies in the US used to be accidental

It's pretty catastrophic already: 70F in antarctica, 98% of species wiped out by 2200, pollution so thick in shanghai you can't see the sun

I have been in China when you could not see two blocks in front of you because of the pollution and when you went outside your eyes burned. Spend a little time in China and anyone will be worried about overpopulation.
 
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