World population hits 7 billion on Oct. 31, or thereabouts

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Lecks
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31 Oct 2011, 11:51 pm

naturalplastic wrote:
Circle989898 wrote:
Will we celebrate when we hit 6 billion?


Uhhh....

We hit six billion back in 1997. Or thereabouts.

Do you mean "will we celebrate when we hit 8 billion?" and just made a typo?

I think he's reffering to the comments about wanting to reduce global population. So he means when we hit 6 billion again (by population decrease).


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01 Nov 2011, 12:29 am

Lecks wrote:
naturalplastic wrote:
Circle989898 wrote:
Will we celebrate when we hit 6 billion?


Uhhh....

We hit six billion back in 1997. Or thereabouts.

Do you mean "will we celebrate when we hit 8 billion?" and just made a typo?

I think he's reffering to the comments about wanting to reduce global population. So he means when we hit 6 billion again (by population decrease).


I agree...could just be a simple misinterpretation of the statement. It's an interesting thought, though. I wonder how much people would celebrate if our population went down? It probably depends on the circumstances or why there would be a reduction. But if it were causes other than extreme circumstances (e.g. a huge world war), I wonder what people would say?


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01 Nov 2011, 1:54 am

7 billion people...
Image



Basagu
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01 Nov 2011, 5:44 am

Like someone said before, time to colonize space :P


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blunnet
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01 Nov 2011, 5:49 pm

We need a third world war to balance the earth population.



naturalplastic
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01 Nov 2011, 7:27 pm

The population explosion will almost certainly go into reverse- perhaps starting at the end of this centurey- for non violent reasons.

The world will reach a peak around 11 billion mid centurey, and then level off. And then may well start declining.

It takes two parents to have one kid. So if parents average less than two for the whole world the population would start to go down. And you might well have celebrations as we hit the descending bench marks.



ruveyn
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01 Nov 2011, 8:18 pm

Basagu wrote:
Like someone said before, time to colonize space :P



We don't have the technology and there is no place to send very many people.

ruveyn



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01 Nov 2011, 11:07 pm

The population will go up, level off, due to deaths equaling births.

This phase can last for a while, as people die at a younger age.

Right now it is 1 in 50 dying a year, taking a 60 year lifespan, plus other causes.1 in 45 is getting born, which will double the population in fifteen years.

This leads to the overall population getting younger. Half the population fifteen and younger will want all the resources over the next fifteen years. Older people are going to die faster. The under fifteen will double the population quicker, producing half the population under twelve. They will double before twenty-five, leaving half the population under ten, and hardly anyone over thirty.

42 years was a life durning Rome. It was rare to see grandchildren.

The population will stablize for numbers, by becoming younger.

They will not have much time for an education, working life, till they are driven into the ground by the rug rats.

Middle age will be fourteen. This will happen in about thirty years.

7 billion becoming 14, then in less time 28, and with an increased death rate from all causes, about 11 billion who live short lives, produce many children, most of whom die. Those who survive die of old age before thirty.

The Paleolithic was only 40,000 years ago, less in most places, and life was 30 years.

The main difference with the large population, is a death rate between 5 and 10% per year. Most would be children. The current death rate is 2%.

10% would not decrease the population, for almost all are in the childbearing years, unsupervised teens, who would see to keeping the numbers up as the overall age drops. Half the population would be under six.

This will take about fifty years.

Even at a 25% death rate it can continue.

It is not likely that education, technology, or wearing clothes will continue. All effort will be expended to try to stay alive long enough to reproduce.

At some point there will be a population crash, most will die, a few percent will wander, having never learned of this past, but seeing the remains as they hunt rats in what were cities. They in turn will be hunted by dog packs that survived generations without humans.

Mad Max was lucky, humans destroyed the world, leaving just a few humans who still understood technology.

A world of feral children is much worse.



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04 Nov 2011, 12:26 am

Magneto wrote:
This is a cause for celebration, as every birthday is.

We can support many more people than this if we put our resources to it.


Can we? Do we actually have enough resources to provide things like adequate medical care, safe drinking water, etc to everyone? The world has way too many mouths to feed. Think about it, if Somalia, which has one the highest fertility rates in the world, had half the population with the same amount of land, cattle, etc, they have, would there be a famine at all? And if not, isn't the birth rate as much a cause of the famine as war and drought?



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04 Nov 2011, 5:47 am

Esteban wrote:
Magneto wrote:
This is a cause for celebration, as every birthday is.

We can support many more people than this if we put our resources to it.


Can we? Do we actually have enough resources to provide things like adequate medical care, safe drinking water, etc to everyone? The world has way too many mouths to feed. Think about it, if Somalia, which has one the highest fertility rates in the world, had half the population with the same amount of land, cattle, etc, they have, would there be a famine at all? And if not, isn't the birth rate as much a cause of the famine as war and drought?

The reason why Somalia has a famine isn't because that it simply cannot support the population, it is because that it hasn't got the resources and wealth to increase food production.

The real problem that people forget is that during the middle ages Europe's population, the world's population was a fraction of what it was today literally. Yet the reason for the constant famines was because people had a limited ability to create food and preserve it, not limited resources.



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04 Nov 2011, 8:26 am

Gedrene wrote:
Esteban wrote:
Magneto wrote:
This is a cause for celebration, as every birthday is.

We can support many more people than this if we put our resources to it.


Can we? Do we actually have enough resources to provide things like adequate medical care, safe drinking water, etc to everyone? The world has way too many mouths to feed. Think about it, if Somalia, which has one the highest fertility rates in the world, had half the population with the same amount of land, cattle, etc, they have, would there be a famine at all? And if not, isn't the birth rate as much a cause of the famine as war and drought?

The reason why Somalia has a famine isn't because that it simply cannot support the population, it is because that it hasn't got the resources and wealth to increase food production.


Same difference. That's why I wrote 'same amount of cattle, land,' just add 'technology and know-how' to the list. The point is, if they had had a near-replacement birth rate for the past few decades, they'd have the resources to feed everyone, even with the drought, technological backwardness, etc. And Somalia is just an extreme case, with families having to decide which of their children has a shot at survival and which will die, in less extreme situation it's things like which child will get to go to school. Drought, etc is beyond the parents' control; breeding like rabbits is not.



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04 Nov 2011, 8:49 am

Esteban wrote:
Gedrene wrote:
Esteban wrote:
Magneto wrote:
This is a cause for celebration, as every birthday is.

We can support many more people than this if we put our resources to it.


Can we? Do we actually have enough resources to provide things like adequate medical care, safe drinking water, etc to everyone? The world has way too many mouths to feed. Think about it, if Somalia, which has one the highest fertility rates in the world, had half the population with the same amount of land, cattle, etc, they have, would there be a famine at all? And if not, isn't the birth rate as much a cause of the famine as war and drought?

The reason why Somalia has a famine isn't because that it simply cannot support the population, it is because that it hasn't got the resources and wealth to increase food production.


Same difference. That's why I wrote 'same amount of cattle, land,' just add 'technology and know-how' to the list. The point is, if they had had a near-replacement birth rate for the past few decades, they'd have the resources to feed everyone, even with the drought, technological backwardness, etc. And Somalia is just an extreme case, with families having to decide which of their children has a shot at survival and which will die, in less extreme situation it's things like which child will get to go to school. Drought, etc is beyond the parents' control; breeding like rabbits is not.

You were equating the inability to produce the resources required with absolute carrying capacity. These aren't the same things. If somalia had actually undergone a green revolution like in mexico they would have had no drought. Also drought is not beyond people's control. Irrigation can bring crops to the desert. We can deal with drought.



Esteban
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04 Nov 2011, 9:02 am

Mexico has a much lower birth rate than Somalia and that has been the case for a long time, and has thus been able to avoid famine for decades, though not severe malnutrition in some places. Irrigating the desert costs money that Somalia doesn't have, and would be unnecessary if they had fewer mouths to feed. Even if they did have a green revolution, at the rate the population is growing (and the birth rate is so high that despite the high death rate and emigration it's one of the fastest-growing populations in the world), it'd just be a matter of time before it outgrows the country's capacity to feed it.



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04 Nov 2011, 2:16 pm

Esteban wrote:
Mexico has a much lower birth rate than Somalia and that has been the case for a long time, and has thus been able to avoid famine for decades, though not severe malnutrition in some places. Irrigating the desert costs money that Somalia doesn't have, and would be unnecessary if they had fewer mouths to feed. Even if they did have a green revolution, at the rate the population is growing (and the birth rate is so high that despite the high death rate and emigration it's one of the fastest-growing populations in the world), it'd just be a matter of time before it outgrows the country's capacity to feed it.

And I again say that this is a false idea because you are trying to equate capacity to produce according to existing resources with absolute ability to produce resources.
Mexico's and Somalia's relative birth rate have got nothing to do with Somalia's inability to produce enough food. The problem is wealth and technology. Technology I am sure would be able to massively increase the amount of food available on the planet according to the natural resources that exist within it. In Somalia's case the scarcity of food producing technology is also a large factor.



techn0teen
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04 Nov 2011, 6:17 pm

blunnet wrote:
We need a third world war to balance the earth population.


I wish we didn't but all the clues are pointing in this direction; a third wide scale war. Because war is a form of population control.

Growing food is reliant on technologies that use non-renewable sources of fuel. Since they are non-renewable, there is no way to generate more. We have a finite set and that is it. This means that when these energy sources are strained, like oil or coal, it will cause a decrease in food production. This is make people nuts and kill each other. Scarcity creates violence.

If our planet had only 3 billion people, we could easily avoid this but since we have over 7 billion, it is harder to be flexible with resources.



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04 Nov 2011, 7:39 pm

War does not work. WWII killed 50,000,000, but the world population never dipped. It only slowed the rate of increase, and was expensive, and blew up some nice stuff.

Korea, 10,000 rounds of everything, bombs, navel guns, down to pistols, for every wound, then only a third fatal.

Swords and spears are at least reusable.

the New Model is Warlordism. Take over an area, kill a lot, enslave the rest. It drives the breeders and surplus population onto your neighbors land, and weakens them.

African countries are being partitioned. Somalia belongs to Warlords. It has not been one country in a while.

This recent age of Kingdoms, Governments, was shortlived. They claimed more than they could hold, as the Colonial Era showed.

Russia could not hold the USSR together.

The Eurozone is coming apart.

They gave part of Serbia to Albanians.

What is the right size for a country?

France with Algeria, Viet Nam, West Africa, fell apart. Each of the parts is better off.

Africa is breaking down on Tribal lines, Sub Tribes, Language Groups. Just like it always was.

The British Empire.

No one group ever controlled Afganistan. The Tribal Areas of Pakistan were never under Government control.

It is the nature of all people to want to control themselves, and a few who want to conquer the world.

All Empires fall.