GENEVA, Switzerland (AP) -- Humanity's reliance on fossil fuels, the spread of cities, the destruction of natural habitats for farmland and over-exploitation of the oceans are destroying Earth's ability to sustain life, the environmental group WWF warned in a new report Thursday.

Humans currently consume 20 percent more natural resources than the Earth can produce, the report said.

"We are spending nature's capital faster than it can regenerate," said WWF chief Claude Martin, releasing the 40-page study. "We are running up an ecological debt which we won't be able to pay off unless governments restore the balance between our consumption of natural resources and the Earth's ability to renew them."

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/10/22/plundered.planet.ap/index.html

(The problem is too many people. This article goes on to try to tell us that if the nations with the highest per capita consumption became more frugal, the problem would go away. In truth, these wealthy nations represent such a tiny fraction of the population the impact would be negligible. What's more important is limited overall population, which is growing exclusively in the third world and China.)

Here are a few facts for you look over.

1. The entire world poulation can fit in a area the size of Hong Kong.

This does not prove anything except the size of human body compared to the size of the available land surface.

A.) The average dwelling space of a humans is about a 1,000 sq.ft dwelling. If every human is given this space the entire world population would fit in a area the size of France or Kenya. If the world population was given twice that amount of space, some 2,000 sq.ft then they would fit in a area the size of Ethiopa, Eygpt or Peru.
B.) The land avaiable for humans to dwell on, habitate, farm ect... is some 57,267,600 Sq. miles. At 1000 sq.ft human dwellings account for about 0.5% of habital land, at 2,000 sq. ft per human dwelling 1% of habital land. the pure math relavtive to fact states that 99.5% of land is free for farming and other purposes. [QUOTE]

This would be OK point if humans needed just space and nothing else. One type of "land" is not the same as another from human's survival stand point.

[QUOTE]
2. The avergae gulten human consumes about 6 pounds of soild food a day. 2 - 2.5 lbs per meal,( thats a pretty big plate of food).

How much resources are spent to grow that food (gas, fertilizers, water from underground sources, machines, pesticides, herbicides? How much meat in the average gluted plate? How much arable land is available to grow the food people can actually eat? Do humans in the particular place need to heat their dwellings? What about cooking? What about transportation? What about recreational needs (parks, etc.). What about forrests (at least groves are needed to protect moisture in the soil/protect soil from excessive errosion)? What about wild life (somebody needs to eat nasty bugs or they will cover the Earth). What about clothing? And so on.

And lastly, would would happen after resources used to grow food will substantially shrink? What will happen to the Indian population (just an example) after they will brainlessly pump all their acquifiers dry?


A.) the average soil yeilds about 2 pounds of consumable food per sq. ft., with a maxium of about 6 pounds given treatment with fertilizer.

You need to specify what food is considered consumable. African people eat tree leaves when they have nothing else to eat. Is it also counted in your consumable food?

B.)At 6 pounds per day to a human, the avergae human consumes 2,190 pounds of food a year. Which accounts for 1095 sq. ft. of growing space or farm land. The entire land resource that are required to feed the world population is 0.5% of all habital land resources.

Such a wonderful arythmetics. Too bad it's too average and overall meaningless. My advice: try to feed (just to feed, nothing else) yourself from 1095sq. ft. of land. OK, I'll be nice, I'll not ask you to feed yourself from 1095 sq. ft. of the Northern African desert. Let it be Ohio (plenty of water, good soil). My guess: even if you'll have all modern science/technology/resources on your side, you'll not be able to feed yourself even if you are a strict vegeterian. If you are meat/egg/milk eater just forget about it, there is no way you'll make it. Now imagine that resources are depleted, chemical fertilizers, etc. are gone. How long it will take to deplete soil if one can rely just on 1095sq. ft. of soil and nothing else? but you shall not worry about, you'd freeze to death in OH long time before your land will refuse to produce anything.

In East Tennessee (plenty of water, soil is so so), just 60 years ago, a farmer needed around 40 acres of land to just stay alive himself and feed wife + few children. Unfortunately, farmers mightily screw up soil by that time (deforestation=gigantic soil erosion/depletion=lesser yields=people ate everything that moved except skunks). Only industrialization, government damming rivers saved rural population from famine.

Also, I am wondering why did "civilized" Europian people kept on starving from time to time no so long time ago (when population was much less than now). Why did Europian peasants try to escape to the land rich USA on any occasion?

Given the facts both the world population and all its nessacary food resource account for about 1% of the worlds habital land resources. it all would fit in a country the size of Iran, Mexico or Indonesia.

Something is wrong with your arythmetics. Today, Humans till much more land worldwide than your estimates predict. Humans use all kinds of resources/machines to produce food and still there are basically two classes of humans:
1) those who are starving from time to time (at least 30% of population)
2) those who are eating hormone/poison/preservative infested 10 times processed shit.


There is no overpopulation problem!!!!!!


There is huge overpopulation problem. The less fossil fuels/acquifier waters/arable land will be available the larger problem will become. BTW, fish in oceans is gone for 90%. The next 20 something years will see transformation of oceans/seas into fishless water tanks for human waste. Had we had 14 billions of people, oceans would have been not only fishless but also lifeless by now.

Another problems, humans will not tolerate drop in living standards due to overpopulation/resource depletion peacefully. Culture of consumption + capitalist system will not be able to exist in dirt huts where cold/semihungry people live on the diet of boiled beans.

DwayneD.L.Rabon,

Can you cite and refrence your conclusions, exactly where do you get your numbers?

as exponentially as we're predicted to grow in our consumption of resources, we're expected also to grow exponentially in our technologies, including practical renewable energy, advanced materials, and basically a better system of living that coincides with nature. and since there's clearly enough food (eat grass and bark if you have too, but there's enough grain and meat in the whole world to feed plenty of people and STILL have a healthy ecosystem), we've got at least a few centuries more buffer-time before we absolutely need better methods of coexistence. The problem we have today is that most of us are responsible, but there are the occasional screw-ups that have to ruin it for the rest of us... poachers, whale hunters, illegal rainforest harvesters, etc. etc. etc. if we can find them and keep them from messing everything up, we'll probably be fine.
you give the human-race too much credit, you concieted human you...
we're not yet capable of screwing things up that badly

Nature take care of it this way - if we mess it up - we die - no more problem for nature. Since we are a part of nature and declared the Masters of it, we should proably be treating our Servant less harshly. Still everyone will be judged eh!

Were there no other infrastructure required, D.L., maybe that would make sense. But you will need land at 20 times the size of that, in a bare minimum, and that and the output of that population will deplete earth.

Even if we put everyone in small apartments, feed them vegetables, and don't give them cars or lots of plastic products, there are too many people. And it's getting worse.

Humans currently consume 20 percent more natural resources than the Earth can produce, the report said.

What if we preduce, artificially? Or if we go to Mars? :D

Artificial production requires space and energy. If we solve those, we then only have the problem of concentrating all of humanity into an area the size of France, which would utterly destroy diversity and culture.

That's why I said: "go to Mars"! :D
Well... maybe not.

But the whole point of economics is to allocate scarce resources. If resources are not scarce anymore, we are free! :D

Not all of us could go to mars, not even a few. The rest of us are stuck here on dieing earth. Even if we could shove billions of people on Mars it would be to no avail.

"Once upon a time there was the bacteria people of a petri dish, these people went through a generation every 20mins and would double in population, one hour they knew that in the next 20mins they would consume all the resources on the dish and start to die, thankfully the bacteria astronomers located another petri dish, so they transported there people there, 40 mins later they were starving and dyeing off in mass famine, the end.”

Not all of us could go to mars, not even a few. The rest of us are stuck here on dieing earth. Even if we could shove billions of people on Mars it would be to no avail.

"Once upon a time there was the bacteria people of a petri dish, these people went through a generation every 20mins and would double in population, one hour they knew that in the next 20mins they would consume all the resources on the dish and start to die, thankfully the bacteria astronomers located another petri dish, so they transported there people there, 40 mins later they were starving and dyeing off in mass famine, the end.”
That reminds me.... there was a formula that I learned in calculus that calculates maximum population and how long it takes to reach it.... It was something like that:

P=P_o+P^n-t

Something like that.... :eek: :confused:


Here: http://www.mapleapps.com/powertools/calcI/html/L20-exponential.html

:)

and hence why colonizing worlds is not the answer, not else you can find and colonize a planet at a exponential rate equal to your growth.

The physical limit of the earth's population is the planet's ability to radiate waste heat. I saw the figure calculated back in the 1960s and the population was up in the hundreds of trillions. It involved people living in cubicles stacked five miles deep, with the entire surface reformed so that the oceans and mountains were leveled to hold the cubicles. Passages for horizontal and limited vertical movement would be possible, but the people at the lowest levels would never get near the surface. Most people would do nothing but sit and watch their screens all day, with a small percentage creating the material the rest would view, if the computers weren't already capable of creating it all. Technology could be expected to advance at a pace to accommodate this growth even if the population were still increasing at its rate in the 1960s: doubling every thirty years. The actual surface of the earth would be algae farms to feed us. Other species of animals and non-food plants would be rare luxuries and/or museum specimens.

Eventually the waste heat would raise the ambient temperature to the point that people would start to die off from hyperthermia. Perhaps they would adapt, but it's doubtful that the break-even point would be much beyond 130 degrees Fahrenheit (55 Celsius). At this point enough people would live long enough to keep the technology running. If they failed and the temperature got higher, there wouldn't be enough bright breeding-age adolescents left to sustain the population growth and the temperature would drop. The planet would be left in an equilibrium in which people lived just long enough to reproduce, learn to fix the machines, and die.

If that doubling-every-thirty-years rate had continued (and it hasn't, the population is now predicted to peak before the end of the current century and then start dropping), we would reach this equilibrium in less than one thousand years.

if we create space farms then we can take about 1m of soil from all avor the earths surface, it will make almost no diff but it will double our obility to make fodd

and hence why colonizing worlds is not the answer, not else you can find and colonize a planet at a exponential rate equal to your growth.
So what? sounds more like a solution then a problem!
How long would it take for us to populate Mars!?

TruthSeeker,

You don't get it, even if we could shove billions of people on Mars at are exponential rate of growth we will just be delaying the inevitable by a few decades.

Ok. Then please explain exactly why. Is our population growth big enough to populate Mars instantly? And couldn't we go somewhere else, also? Like the moon? And with enough technology, couldn't we someday go to other solar systems and populate the universe? :cool:

Colonizing other worlds would be great, if we as a species had our shit together. Yet most humans are so... lacking.

TruthSeeker,

Are technology is simple not answering our problems fast enough, what your asking for is faster then light travel and extremely cheap space travel in under this century! It would require a incredible breakthrough in technology to make that happen.

TruthSeeker,

Are technology is simple not answering our problems fast enough, what your asking for is faster then light travel and extremely cheap space travel in under this century! It would require a incredible breakthrough in technology to make that happen.
Yeah. I know that we need that. That much technology is coming soon (http://www.eet.com/at/news/OEG20021230S0015 )....

(Couldn't find the article I wanted... :/)

Naw truthseeker, its got a fair bit to go yet. At least a few decades. Then you seem to asume that superintelligetn AI's will actually make breakthroughs, something that we can have no knowledge about, therefore it is unwise to assume that it will happen.

No, the answer is the human race die off and is replaced (or some evolve into) it’s successor.

It isn't that bad; the only resource we are going to run out of in the near future is energy. Everything else on our planet is recyclable; almost nothing is lost to outer space.
Given enough energy we can support the present population of the world indefinitely at american standards of living;
it is widely observed that once a population reaches a certain level of wealth it restricts childbirth voluntarily.

So where do we get this energy from?
The Sun, and/or fusion.
Fusion technology is a long way off, but I think we will get there eventually; but we may not need it at all if solar power can be collected in large enough quantities.
The Sun produces a billion times as much energy as we recieve on Earth; all we need is a strategy to collect it.
With such nearly limitless power we could support a vast population.
But will the oil run out before the infrastructure for solar power collection can be built?


That is the question, and to be honest, I am not sure.
Then again, the power from the Sun is not going to disappear; if our civilisation does not get round to exploiting the Sun, another one may do hundreds of years from now...

Naw truthseeker, its got a fair bit to go yet. At least a few decades. Then you seem to asume that superintelligetn AI's will actually make breakthroughs, something that we can have no knowledge about, therefore it is unwise to assume that it will happen.
The completion of the first computer of that kind is still scheduled for 2011. Once that is done, discoveries will happen at a much larger rate (exponentially). I read about that in a book years ago, and in an article about a month ago. I tried to get a link for the article, but I haven't been able to find. The name is "After Deep Blue", and I cannot remember the author (I have to check it on my english book)....

i can see two more "positive" possibilities:
#1- a massive war destroys a large population of the species, thus allowing a little more time to find a solution.
#2- Humans develop a new technology that delays destruction for another while, and after some time, this new technology allows us travel the stars or whatever
im betting on one of these two, but not sure which. maybe a combination of the two. I dunno when though. :m:

#3 the human races split off into new cybernetic and AI species which eventually supersede the homo sapiens, kill off all who challenge them and what remains of the homo sapiens eventually die off of their own accord.

Technology is advancing exponentially, and has been.

Alright, so some how we fly 100,000,000 people to Mars. Now they do what? Suffocate on a barren, lifeless, frozen desert, void of water and atmosphere?

You guys can't even agree on what's happening on good ol' terra firma; what makes you think we could possibly terraform martia firma in any recent time set?

were doing a pretty good job of heating up our own planet even when most of us are trying hard not to, if we send polluting machines to mars then we will have it heated in on time, as for oxygen, just plant a few trees, they do a good enough job. then your only problem is gravity

And water, and inital temperature, and no atmosphere, and no soil nutrients, and no way to get that stuff there.

Maybe if we just burnt fossil fuels on Mars for millenia....

us, of the human race's capabilities, technology, and intelligence doubles every 8 years on average.

(The problem is too many people. This article goes on to try to tell us that if the nations with the highest per capita consumption became more frugal, the problem would go away. In truth, these wealthy nations represent such a tiny fraction of the population the impact would be negligible. What's more important is limited overall population, which is growing exclusively in the third world and China.)

Population is not the problem at all.
Earth's population could double and we'd still be fine.
The problem is waste.
Look at America as a perfect example.
The country itself is very sparcely populated and can support many more people than it does.
Yet, it produces more waste than any other country (even China, who has, what how many more times people?).
Much of that waste comes from the people that gather around the metropolitan areas like hobos around a burning trash can.
The cities are far too crowded and create waste in great proportions.
We could probably feed all the hungry people in the world JUST on the food we waste.
The same goes for energy, wood, paper, water... EVERY resource.
Prosperity breeds complacency.