Without sounding unfeeling, do we really want to add to the overcrowding and population explosion problem that much?
Earth is full. Our population has doubled in the short time I've been alive. Doesn't that scare the shit out of anyone else?
Imagine what would happen if you suddenly cured all forms of cancer. People would live even longer. Population would shoot up. Lack of housing, lack of jobs. More pensioners...
edit: Downvote brigade... why am I wrong? What's going to save us from our own 'success'? How many more billion people can the planet take?
1) Despite your disclaimer you are sounding unfeeling.
2) It seems convenient for a (presumably) relatively healthy and youthful person to be advocating large sacrifices that will hit others first.
3) Many of us don't share your pessimistic view of human progress. If we can figure out how to thwart death from disease, we can probably figure out how to deal with overpopulation.
4) And of course the obvious, and entirely heartless rejoinder: if you're so keen on death to reduce overpopulation, isn't it a bit selfish of you to keep on living?
5) He hasn't offered a sensible and complete policy - what counts as saving lives? Cancer treatment? What about transplant surgery? What about amputations? What about medicines that prevent many conditions from becoming serious? Or lets make things really fun - what about mental illness? How about a person who's solving overpopulation in some way who suddenly contracts cancer? Where does one draw the line and who gets to draw it?
This is a slippery slope and the only solution is not to go down it.
There is no solution I can see, and that's worrying. While we're all running around curing diseases, solving global warming etc, the thing that will kill off our species is our own "success".
6. You're expressing yesterday's fear. Population growth in the first world is stable, low, or even negative. We currently have no reason to believe that the third world's population growth won't do the same. Current projections for peak world population are "a little bit larger than now" instead of "trillions and trillions", and the problems of providing for them indefinitely "surmountable".
* Population growth in the first world is stable, low, or even negative.
A quick google search shows that whilst population was pretty stable in UK in the 80s, since then it's been steadily rising. Growth is now 0.75% a year.
The US has a similar story, fertility rate below 2.0 plus migration from the third world results in net population growth, even though the population of the US is no longer "exploding".
Don't know if you noticed, but in western countries the population is aging, due to a decrease in birth rate/fertility, a decrease in mortality rate and a higher life expectancy, all leading to a sharp decline in population growth. Europe has a Wikipedia page about it, check it out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_Europe
Population growth is not really exponential, it's rather an S-curve. As soon as the quality of life reaches a certain threshold, that growth stagnates. And btw, we have long surpassed the need to be healthy in order to reproduce. Assuming somebody that dies at 35 for various reasons, by then that person could have given birth to 10 children already, something which happens quite often in the impoverished populations of third-world countries.
At this point, what we really need to do in order to survive as a species is in fact to eliminate premature death, to raise the quality of life for everybody and to find ways to drop the cost of energy and food to zero - a long shot, but in such a future money wouldn't be needed anymore to simply live, the economy wouldn't depend anymore on birth rate and maybe we would stop feeling the need to destroy our environment for profit. And maybe we won't feel the need to give birth to children in order to survive.
Besides, unless you're a selfish jerk (and selfish jerks don't contribute much to our species btw), you should agree with me that nothing is more valuable than human life.
Earth is not full, it is just badly managed. And overcrowding is only happening for poor people in parts of the world historically exploited by people who are now rich.
Even if we accepted that Earth is full, surely we don't just let all the poorest people die? And extending that reasoning, why treat any diseases at all?
The fact is that we could feed everyone and cure some of the biggest killers in the world today. These are not insoluble problems, they just aren't priorities for the richest nations because they're happening elsewhere.
It's still awful and hugely expensive and unpredictable. If you don't want anyone over 60, let's get people living healthy 'til 60 and then go all Logan's Run - it's horrifying, but only more horrifying than the current situation because we're a little bit used to the current situation. And maybe we'll find that we don't need to.
In Malthus's model, new people only consume food and breed. But we do this other cool thing, too, we also think about human problems and how to solve them. We all add resources to the computer of humanity.
Some really cool, like Norman Borlaug, go around the world and teach people how to grow more reliable crops, stopping famines, increasing the reliability and scale of the food supply while lowering the resources it takes to produce the food. It's sometimes said he's saved a billion lives. He did so without increasing the strain on others, but by spreading knowledge and increasing efficiency, maybe even lowering the strain on the planet.
Humanity's ability to solve problems isn't in a flat linear relationship with how many people we have either. If we just have 100 people, they all have to farm all the time, and can't stop and think about much. With a billion people, we get economies of scale, so we just need 40% to be farmers, and we can have, say, 20% work on logistics, 10% work on massive aqueducts and public infrastructure, and 10% be scientists and inventors.
At a certain point, every additional person makes it easier for more people to survive on the planet. And yes, there is some raw physical limit to population on this rock... but visit the Russian Taiga, Wyoming, Namibia, or Mongolia. We're nowhere near that point yet, it's several orders of magnitude away. And if you note Rosling's points, we probably won't keep growing anyway.
He notes that population growth is really a switch towards health systems with lower infant mortality. You have previous generations that keep having 10 kids because only one or two of them will survive, then the health conditions improve and suddenly all of them survive. The next generation or so reverts to normal family planning, having just one or two kids. Malthus was wrong to suggest that people just breed as much as humanly possible.
All that said, I don't think you should be downvoted for asking a question. If we buried every premise we disagreed with, we'd never get a chance to lay out the reasons we believe the opposite, we'd never convince anyone. We'd just be insisting on dogmatic agreement, rather than any actual understanding of the complex issues.
Norman Borlaug is the father of the Green Revolution. Green revolution agriculture techniques require a massive amount of oil and gas as inputs. Eventually we're going to run out of those. When oil prices start to spike, people will starve. Also it has decreased diversity to only a few high yielding varies of crops making our food supply more susceptible to pathogens because of lack of biodiversity.
As well as a whole host of other problems, such as people switching to profitable crops to export rather than to feed the local population.
I'm familiar with the criticism, but remain unconvinced that:
1. oil and gas are strictly "required" as an energy source
2. energy consumption of these methods is higher per yield than traditional farming
3. oil/gas will run out in any meaningful time frame
4. peak oil/gas will be sudden or catastrophic
5. adaptation to new conditions is impossible
6. exporting profitable crops is a net social loss for a local population (or even the stronger corollary, that locovorism is ever beneficial)
Some of those are contentious areas, matters of continuing study. Some are probably hyperbole, and we'd likely agree on more moderate formulations. Some I'm pretty firmly convinced are incorrect. Even if they were all just mildly suspect, though, it's a lot of shaky steps for me to take all at once. So I remain cautiously optimistic, skeptical that food insecurity due to Borlaug's methods and oil shocks will have any meaningful impact for the next fiftyish years. I guess there's some chance, just seems exceedingly unlikely to me.
That said, I think you laid out your criticism of his methods in a clear and concise way, and while I disagree with some of the premises, they're not radically unreasonable or anything, I can see how one would stand by that conclusion. Have an upvote for a well formulated dissenting view, something we should all encourage whenever possible.
We've been saved by falling reproduction rates. First world countries have around 2 children per couple. If growth stayed exponential, then no amount of increasing crop yields would help. Exponential growth is a terrifying thing. After a few generations there would be more humans than could fit on the surface of the Earth.
I'm not part of your downvote brigade, but I don't think letting people die of cancer is the solution. Aside from the very salient fact that there's usually suffering involved, I believe we have a responsibility to one another to advocate opportunities for full, rich lives.
Your comment is also unfeeling (as you suspected), especially in the context of this thread. I think that if you or a loved one were dying of cancer, it's unlikely that your overwhelming emotion would be gratitude that you/he/she are doing your/his/her part to help with the overpopulation problem. That may, in fact, be one point that's earning you the downvotes.
Would a subsequent increase in the population present challenges? Perhaps. But, there are other, more humane ways to deal with the problem than just letting people die of cancer. I mean, where does the logic end? Should we let known carcinogens stay in the food supply? Encourage people to smoke again?
And, the issues you cited (housing, jobs, pensions) are all fixable immediately. That is, we are not suffering from a lack of wealth or resources in these regards, but rather the distribution thereof. So, you happened to pick some really bad examples that nod to implications of economic injustice. That may be another point that is earning you downvotes.
What that doesn't show very well is that the growth rate is dropping fast. It doesn't show this because the year over year growth rate is already small: 1.1% per year between 2000-2005 according to the UN. As such it's a horribly misleading graph.
UN projects the population to peak in 2075, at a bit over 9 billion, with yearly growth rates having dropped to 0.33% in 2050 based on current trends. Post 2075 they project a population drop as many more countries will have dropped below "maintenance" birth rates, like large parts of Europe.
Hypotheses and projections are constantly refined. But in comparison to estimates on things like coal or climate, the population growth models are almost trivially simple, and while the numbers are adjusted up and down regularly to account for actual data, all data we have show the population growth consistently slowing down.
For starters, one of the things that make the population models straightforward compared to a lot of other things we might try to model, is that we can compare countries, and as it happens there are patterns that have consistently applied to countries as they develop, and that we have detailed data on: As life expectancy increases, growth rates drop to near or below maintenance rates.
Unless the remaining countries with rapid growth are somehow drastically different, it would take massive, earth-shattering changes for the population growth not to stop. It's not realistically a question of if it stops, but when and how high the peak will be, and how much the population will fall back afterwards before growth resumes (the expectation is that it will fall back because we get a "bulge" similar to what we're seeing these days due to the baby-boomer generation, and eventually the people in that bulge will start to die off).
Even many developing countries have long ago entered into the phase where it is not birth rates that is the cause of ongoing growth, but improving life expectancy, which means that their growth will eventually stop.
And with countries like China heading rapidly towards contraction as early as 2030 (with net growth now down to around 1/3 of its peak in the mid 80's, driven by a fertility rate far below maintenance), even the remaining high growth countries would have to dramaticall raise their population growth if we are to continue seeing overall growth.
- The growth rate is slowing. The growth in absolute terms is still sufficient to make the line look near linear when you look at it over such a long time span, especially given that life expectancy is also increasing almost everywhere (see my last point below).
- The growth rate is fairly low. E.g. around 2005, the growth rate was about 1.1%, and the decline is slow (e.g. it's projected to get to around 0.33% or so around middle of the century), so seeing the change on a graph that plots billions of people against a period of decades gets tricky.
- There are large temporal distortions due to changes in life expectancy, and the size of generations. To give an extreme example: Consider if a population to begin with was static - births and deaths were perfectly matched. Now consider if this population stopped having children, yet at the same time, everyone started living 40 years longer. In this (totally impossible of course) scenario, it would take 40 years from the birthrate collapsed until the population size would start dropping. While something that extremely obviously would not happen, less extreme variations are. E.g. some areas of China has a birth rate of well below 1 child per woman, and the country as a whole is well below 2, while you need somewat more than 2 to maintain a population (to account for men + people who never procreate), but the population is still increasing because population is still young on average due to the massive population growth in the 50's and 60's coupled with rapidly increasing life expectancy.
This last point means that we're still seeing a combination of the effect of birth rates going as far back as at least 1950's and all increases in life expectancy since, that correctly reflects current growth, but gives us a very distorted idea of where the population size is headed.
I looked at your graph, and I was wondering about that too. I'm no expert, but consider this.
Population growth is usually expected to be exponential. The fact that the graph looks linear we could interpret as a positive sign.
Also, if we check out the Earth's growth rate [1], the percentages have indeed slowed down. The left part (1965 - 1970) peaking at 2.10% looks like Generation X, the children of the baby boomers. The latest datum at 2012 returns 1.15%, and is still trending slightly negative.
The growth rate charts become more interesting as you isolate specific regions and countries. Sub-Saharan is the only region which is mostly trending positive [2]. Japan has received some press in recent years because its growth rate has actually crossed the x-axis[3] .
You have awful situational awareness and empathy skills. This is not the time nor place. Unfortunately, people tried to politely inform you, but you kept at your personal rant.
Many of us in the sidelines have survived cancer, have cancer, or have close family dying of cancer. There is a time and place for personal soapboxes. This is not it. Have some compassion.
This report presents a main scenario with a peak of 9.22 billion in 2075, followed by a drop and slow resumption of growth towards 8.97 billion by 2300. It references older UN projections that indicates a range from 7.4 billion to 10.6 billion for 2050 depending on scenario.
This current report assumes 8.9 billion for 2050, and projects annual increases in population sizes down to 0.33% in 2045-2050, vs. 1.22% in 2000-2005
This comes as more and more countries sees rapid decline in birth rates equivalent to those that the developed world has already seen.
Particularly look at pages 6-8 in the report, where you can get an idea what we would expect to see if cancer was "cured": Life expectancy and fertility mirror each other closely. As we live longer, we put off having children, have fewer children, or opt not to have children at all.
Even if we were to cure all forms of cancer, people would continue to die of other causes eventually. At most a cure would lead the population size to level out at a somewhat higher level because we might have children proportionally earlier in a life span so generations would overlap more. But we have to deal with these population numbers without a cure for cancer too, to deal with the bulge around the peak population sizes expected.
While pension-age might be a problem, if people remain healthier longer there's little reason not to increase the pension age, as some countries have already started doing.
Technological progress is outpacing population growth (especially in first world countries where the population is actually stable.) We will likely get to a technological singularity before we run into serious resource problems. I hope we can keep as many living people alive until then as possible.
Earth is full. Our population has doubled in the short time I've been alive. Doesn't that scare the shit out of anyone else?
Imagine what would happen if you suddenly cured all forms of cancer. People would live even longer. Population would shoot up. Lack of housing, lack of jobs. More pensioners...
edit: Downvote brigade... why am I wrong? What's going to save us from our own 'success'? How many more billion people can the planet take?