Saturday, December 28, 2013

The Homo sapiens bubble….


The current rate of human population growth cannot continue for more than a few decades.

In the time it took you to read that sentence, Earth's population increased by about 300 people. Think about your whole neighborhood growing by 100 households every two seconds.


This is an almost invisible threat to our way of life.

It should put some starch in any argument you want to make about global supplies of food and drinking water, global climate change, fossil fuel reserves, international politics and conflicts, international and domestic terrorism, air pollution in China, traffic jams on I-405 in southern California, parking spots in London or Hong Kong, beachfront summer rentals, you name it….

The human population of Earth is increasing by about 220,000 people EVERY DAY. That's about the population of Scottsdale, Arizona. Imagine that a new city the size of Scottsdale will come into existence somewhere tomorrow in Michigan. The day after that, a new Scottsdale in southern France. And then Zimbabwe the next day, and so on….

It took modern man, Homo sapiens, about 200,000 years to create a living population of 1 billion people—that was the estimated world-wide population in 1800.

It took 130 years to add the second billion (1930), then less than 30 years for the next billion (1959), then another billion in 15 years (1974), then 13 years (1987), 12 years (1999), and 12 more years to reach a total of 7 billion in 2011.


I'm picking a dreadful fact almost at random: right now, close to 1 billion people don't have access to clean drinking water.

At the current population growth rate we'd get to 14 billion in 2095, but I really don't think the planet will support another 7 billion people.

Do you?

    


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