Population Inflation - 12.11.07

Population Inflation - Entry for 12 November 2007

Published first on Multiply

jtnewson wrote today at 12:18 PM - This is a point that must be driven home to every corner of the globe. We are nowhere close to this dream yet many of us can see the end of our civilization already creeping up. At the rate we are killing Planet Earth, only a handful of humans will actually leave and they will die in a generation or two due to the insufficient gene pool.
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I guess a big part of the problem is that ultruism IS an acquired feature of human nature - this dependant on people being exposed young enough to think deeply about the world around them, to be curious, to have idealistic inclinations, to care about life even in the dim distant future, and to see the worth of following the dream of interplanetary travel which, for many people, is a waste of public money when there are so many homeless people and hungry mouths to feed even in wealthy countries.

So it's a perspective thing, perhaps, where the individual is standing now, what kind of environment he/she lives in, what he or she sees in the world around him/her in the every day, how he/she will view the subject.

Fear the thought as we may, for some people life is still short and brutish.

You and I are indeed fortunate that our dreams are so elegantly made that we can wish for the stars and expect the human race to be given them at some future juncture. To not believe in it though, is to lose hope of it.

However, if we look at just one man-made problem - population growth; a planet the size of the Earth, alone, even with all its animal, vegetable and mineral riches, will not be able to support a population increase for ever, the problem will come home to roost one day - probably not in the far dim distant future - and the predictions are kind of dire. [check the pop clocks here: ]

"The world population increased from 3 billion in 1959 to 6 billion by 1999, a doubling that occurred over 40 years. The Census Bureau's latest projections imply that population growth will continue into the 21st century, although more slowly. The world population is projected to grow from 6 billion in 1999 to 9 billion by 2042, an increase of 50 percent that will require 43 years." more

Monthly World Population Figures: here So, it's expected over 77 million children will be born world wide in a 12 month period betwen 1 July 2007 and 1 August 2008.

We have to ask ourselves, are we going to let the bad old standby's of poverty, famine, disease and war deal with the problem of a population blow-out as they have always done when people have failed to?

Or do we as a collective of world peoples have a mixture of some short, some medium and some long term strategies that can help to alleviate the approaching problem and make it manageable, like making contraception freely available everywhere, like the education of people everywhere on the need to limit family size, with the possibility of space travel to other solar systems not being ruled out because it seems like a pipe dream?

Especially since the other things mentioned in the above paragraph also have about them the feel of a pipe dream, in the present.

And I've not even spoken about the damage that is now being and will further be caused to the environment by the population explosion - already on its feet and gathering speed.