Since the turn of the century, the Russian government has repeatedly stated that a declining population is the country's most acute problem. The reasons listed are numerous... a decling birth rate coupled with a rapidly rising death rate. Declining marriage rate/increasing divorce rate. Drug and alcohol abuse. Prostitution. HIV and other STDs. Poor medical care. Economic burdens. Depression. A very high abortion rate. The sex-slave mafia. Increasing emmigration with no influx of replacement immigrants. It is estimated that 2.5 births per female is required to maintain the population. Russia is down to 1.7 and this is expected to contunue plummeting. Many Russian demographers feel that this situation is now irreversible. The same problem plagues Ukraine and Belarus... Russia: 1991: 148,689,000 2009: 141,909,000 Net: -4.6% Estimated: 2025 - 125,687,000 / 2050 - 104,258,000 Ukraine 1989: 51,452,034 2012: 45,633,600 Net: -12.75% Estimated: 2025 - 39,569,000 / 2050 - 29,959,000 Belarus 1989: 10,151,806 2011: 9,467,300 Net: -7.2% Estimated: 2025 - 9,335,000 / 2050 - 8,305,000 YouTube: RT News: Russia's population decline speeds up Interestingly enough, although the reasons for population decline are varied and myriad, all three border nations suffered exceedingly high population losses during World War II.
I don't believe overpopulation of the Earth is likely, perhaps it can happen in certain areas but other parts of the planet can be used to sustain them. If the human race combined its efforts on advancement we could probably be traveling the stars in 100 years. I read a statistic that is a little outdated being from the 90's but it said if the U.S. reduced its meat consumption by 10% we could end world hunger. this is because it takes significantly more land to produce meat than it does vegetables. Also large sparsely populated and fertile areas can be transformed into mega farms, this combined with fusion tech or other free energy would make feeding double the Earths population quite easy. Petroleum based megafarming however is not very good. Also genetically modified plants that aren't evil like monsanto would help us produce more with less. Overpopulation is a myth. Free energy would require much less wasting of resources.
Overpopulation has and does occur in parts of the earth all the time. Which results in a lot of death through famine when food stuffs are not available. This culls the population back. Which then starts to climb again. No different than any other species. So, it seems we're already at overpopulation for the way we organize ourselves. This is what it would look like - pretty normal huh?
I probably should have said 'natural'. Humans, like all animals, expand their population which collapses, and then expands again. "Overpopulation" IS occurring as it does for all animals. Lots of human populations in African go through population collapse due to overpopulation. Unless you're going to prevent human expansion as China did, then I'd expect it to happen in areas where human population exceeds resources.
My point is mostly that the planet can support the growing population but overpopulated areas can not independently support themselves.
You would agree there is an upper limit to the total number of humans Earth can support? Before we reach that limit there will be a limit that can comfortably be supported. These limits will be reached at various places at different times. I personally think the earth pasted the comfortable limit about 2 billion humans back and would like to see our numbers go into decline through natural reduction in child birth to two per couple.
Exactly how is overpopulation being defined here? 1. One could say as long as you can feed all the people, then you don't have overpopulation. 2. Or you could say, overpopulation can be defined by the stress we are putting our biosphere under. In the first, we are supporting the population growth with our technology, which in reality is more like building a house of cards. The number of ways that house of cards can come tumbling down are to numerous for me to list here. (It will happen sooner or later) But then starving billions of people is natural, which makes it okay,right? In the second, humans are currently causing a major extinction event, which will make our planet a less desirable place to live. But then future generations won't miss what they never had, right?
there is a video thats part of a series some guy is doing. I didn't fact check it or anything but I still believe with some advancements in LENR tech or something like that the human race will prosper on Earth and else where in the solar system.
You guys haven't been reading your memos. The second derivative of population went negative in the early 1980s. I.e., the rate of growth has been steadily dropping for thirty years. The first derivative (rate of growth) is universally predicted to fall to zero sometime near the end of this century at a peak population right around ten billion. At that point the rate of growth will continue to fall. In other words it will become negative and population will begin to shrink. The reason is that prosperity turns out to be the best contraceptive. As poverty decreases people have fewer children for a variety of reasons. They can afford contraception. They don't need to have ten children to ensure that two of them will reach adulthood. They don't need progeny to take care of them in their old age. They have other interesting and entertaining things to do at night besides staying home and reproducing. Just a few years ago we reached the milestone at which less than one billion people live in poverty. At about the same time we reached another milestone: For the first time since anybody's been keeping track, less than half the population of Africa lives in poverty. As a result, in places where families typically had twelve children they now have seven. Where they had eight they now have five. Where they had four they now have two. In the Western countries the birth rate has already fallen below replacement level--approximately 2.1 children per woman, allowing for childhoold mortality. This phenomenon is masked by immigration in the USA and Europe, where, paradoxically, many native-born people rail against the immigrants who are propping up their social security schemes. Japan does not welcome immigrants and makes it very difficult for them to become citizens, and in that country the falling birth rate is a crisis as a smaller number of working young people support a larger number of retired old people. So stop worrying about a problem that no longer exists. The still-sparsely populated Western Hemisphere can grow enough food to feed more than ten billion people and still restore our rainforests. Even the USA is a net exporter of food, although in shame I must admit that it's largely corn ("maize" to you Brits), not one of the world's more nutritious plants. Start worrying about the problems that are already starting to hit, such as (in the USA) the imminent collapse of Social Security. When it was launched there were something like six workers for every retiree. Today there are only three. You kids will be retiring at age 80, although you may not notice because you'll still spend all day sitting at your computers. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Perhaps the biggest problem is that every economic model since Adam Smith implicitly relies on a steady increase in the number of producers and consumers as its engine of prosperity. The last time the population of Homo sapiens underwent a major shrinkage was something like eighty thousand years ago when we were still nomadic hunter-gatherers with tools made of stone and wood. So we're not really prepared for this. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Technology is increasing logarithmically. We are 10 years away from having laptops that are as powerful as a human brain; cell phones that have enough logic to know when you're addressing it and process requests accordingly; and weak AI in larger computers. We are 25 years away from laptops having more computing power than every human brain on Earth, strong AI in numerous devices, augmented reality and nano-technology the likes of which we cannot imagine Pretty cool. All I need to do is make it another 30 years and I'm home free. After that, I can die peacefully (if at all). ~String
Nothing ever happens as fast as we might like and I'm betting your predictions are a bit optimistic. But I do believe higher populations are responsible for faster advancement. More people researching and inventing means faster advancement. But whether we are going to advance fast enough remains to be seen.
I'm betting they are not. People have been saying since Moore's Law that "it would never happen that fast" because they either cannot fathom or are uncomfortable with the prospects of the technological advancement. One of the most researched technologies right now, who's size cuts in HALF every two years is nano-robotics. Robots have already been engineered the size of human cells. Fully functioning robots the size of human cells. Computer technology has doubled at least every 18 months. Do you doubt that? Well, all you have to do is plot it on a chart and see what that means. It means, in absolute terms, exactly what I said. And people--of course--have been saying, "Well, yeah, we're here now, but it won't be that way in the future." I remember Kurzweil predicting talking phones, with cameras and access to the WWW by 2015 back in 1995. People literally called him nuts. Back in 1990 when the Human Genome Project had mapped 1/10,000th of the human genome, they predicted needing another 20 years. Kurzweil predicted they'd need less than ten. They finished mapping the human genome by 1997. Technology advances logarithmically. Technological advancement is increasing, and the rate of increase is increasing. The most powerful computer today in the USA is over 100,000,000 times as powerful as the most powerful computer just 20 years ago. ~String
Really???? Nature has ways of fixing its problems....wars are not the only way Regards, Ekei, Americanwritingcenter
Ah, yes, technology. Wonderful stuff yet a double-edged sword, the resources for which are contributing in large measure to many of our environmental concerns. Still, it acts also as a contraceptive in my observation. No one is going to get pregnant while texting or playing video games. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Population densities are variable around the globe and wherever a region cannot support the population, I would consider the habitat to be overpopulated. To examine the population in a global aspect is a false paradigm, IMO. The math might work but demonstrably human nature does not follow such simple logic. Why don't we share the resources with those who have none? What is preventing us? Simply using the ability to produce food as a parameter is also inadequate for our nutritional needs are but a small part of the total impacts of our species on this planet. :bugeye:
Over all advancement might be moving alone at the pace you are talking about. But you simply can't point to any one technology and say with much certainty where it will be in 10 or 20 years. I've been involved with computers in business and privately for over 40 years now. I'll admit that looking back it seems like advancement was fast, but that sure was not the way it felt at the time. Also, we are coming up against the limits of silicon and while they do have promising research in non silicon computing, I won't be holding my breath waiting on it or trying to predict it. But I know you are still young enough to believe in the promise and hype and who knows maybe you'll be right. I just wouldn't count on it.
The resource needs of the technology that drove the previous paradigm shift, the Industrial Revolution, had far more drastic environmental consequences than the resource needs of the Electronic Revolution. Look at how China gave everybody a telephone without cutting any trees down to turn them into telephone poles. Look at how telecommuting promises to reduce America's petroleum consumption by 25-35%. Look at how Estonia has become a player in the software market using almost entirely intellectual capital rather than physical--and how Russia launched an effective attack against it without damaging a single molecule of the earth's physical structure. As I noted earlier, prosperity is widely hailed as the most effective contraceptive since it eliminates most of the traditional incentives to have large families, such as infant mortality, keeping a farm running, no social security, nothing else to do at night. All of these diminutions are the direct effects of industrial and/or electronic technology: modern medicine, the ascendence of non-agricultural work, huge economic surpluses, and a dizzying variety of hobbies and other entertainment. But that too is a function of technology. As we already know: Paleolithic nutrition technology (hunting and gathering) could only support a world population of a million or two. Neolithic technology (stone age farming and animal husbandry) could feed maybe ten times that many. Iron age technology (metal plows, traction animals towing wheeled carts, etc.) added another zero. Industrial technology (machines driven by the chemical energy in fossil fuels rather than human and animal musclepower) pushed that into the billions. So depending on the level of technology penetration in any given region of the planet, there can be a phenomenal difference between the carrying capacity of two regions of equivalent size, climate and resource availability. There are still quite a few places that are barely out of the Stone Age and can't quite feed their people. At the other extreme there are industrialized and largely-computerized regions like NAFTA that could feed something like half of the world's population without breaking a sweat, if only the food distribution network could reach them. As I've pointed out before, the (by world standards) ridiculously underpopulated USA, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Argentina and Chile could probably feed twice as many people as there on earth. As the end of the current ice age (whether or not our own carbon contributions are accelerating global warming) turns Greenland and Siberia into farmland, we could probably feed the Klingons and Vulcans too. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! You're looking at the problem from the wrong side. The impediments are at their end, not ours. Non-governmental charities in the United States alone ship a veritable mountain of food to the Third World. Unfortunately when it arrives it comes under the control of their despotic leaders. They sell it on the black market and use the money to buy champagne, armored SUV's, Swiss villas, and of course lots and lots of weapons to make war against the despot in the next country over, or against their own highly dissatisfied population. Fortunately even this problem is yielding to technology. The main weapon of a despot against his own people is not guns but ignorance. The internet and cellular telephony have opened up the entire world to its most downtrodden people. They're learning to read, arguably their own most powerful weapon against repression. They're making contact with each other so they can organize, and with people outside the country who can provide at least encouragement and information, and sometimes even tangible help. Twenty years ago village leaders in the world's benighted countries blessed Jim Henson and CTV for "Sesame Street" because it appeared so innocuous that their leaders didn't crack down when the village's one TV set was tuned to it for half an hour every afternoon. That one TV show taught their children that it was okay to strive for a better life than their parents had, and gave them the basic tool to begin striving: reading and writing. Imagine how those village leaders feel about the internet. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! With every passing decade, the number of people living under despotic governments drops precipitously. (Even though by our smug Western standards we still call China "despotic," the people who live there with their jobs, cars, TVs, computers and Confucian philosophy of respect for their elders no longer think so.) Sure, but don't forget Maslow's Hierarchy. We have to feed everybody (Step 1: Survival) before we can even begin to contemplate taking their hands and escorting them to the higher steps.
? China is unambiguously "despotic." There's an authoritarian oligarchy that maintains absolute control. That's the definition of "despotic." Plenty of Chinese will tell you this if you ask them - and are you unaware of the long-standing democratic activist movements there? Or the Tibet issue? And "respect for elders" doesn't so much apply to a state that's run by "princelings." The next big "preciptious drop" in people living under despotism will very likely occur when China's current system of government fails.
I hate to be the isolationist here, and I can only imagine the losses. In American, the borders need to be closed and immigration reduced to 1960's levels. That's when America's population began to rapidly expand. The the process, I feel that the original intentions of the Founders has been lost. I have to blame the Cold War and Communism. If the Red Menace didn't have the overwhelming authority in hand to hand combat, we might have been able to set our fears aside and control the numbers of people entering and staying in America. Too many people and too few jobs might hurt the economy, but it keeps the barracks full in out all volunteer military. One thing is already certain. America will be the most powerful 3rd World Country by 2050. Dumb as door nails too boot.
