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Hello everyone :) This is my first thread on SB

With the advent of medicine and other marvels of modern day science and engineering (are those the same?) The global population has risen exponettially and continues to rise at an accelerating rate.
We know the planet has limited resources that are depleting as more people are born. It has become apparent that we may eventually (if we havnt already have) OVERpopulate the planet :(
ie beyond the available resources needed to support the human race :(
Also with pollution which I think is connected with overpopulation, the world may never fully recover for other creatures :(

It is for this reason, that we must disscus ways of curbing the ptoblems of overpopulation before it is to late (if it isnt already) personally i lean towards a form of population management on a global scale ( alas this idea is currently infeassible given the complexity of politics, culture, and economics )…….:(

What are your thoughts (if you have any:) ) on stopping this possible catastophy should I be right

Dont be afraid to share ANY of your ideas no matter how strange, brilliant or inhumane they may sound to some <3

All I know is, A LOT of people arguing against gay marriage were allegedly worried that there weren't ENOUGH babies, for some weird reason.

(Well that, and the fact that there seems to be a correlation between poorer countries and higher numbers of children per household.)

Doubtful. Human beings kinda have this ability to increase our living space. Whether it be through new farming techniques, new ways of gathering energy, or finding new resources, we don't show signs of losing livable space. I wager that by the time we get to that point we'll probably be colonizing space.

Not to mention we're nowhere near closing to taking up too much of the space on land. If all the people on earth were standing shoulder to shoulder it would probably take up an area the size of Los Angeles.

I firmly believe the use of genetic engineering to increase crop yield is the best answer, at least when it comes to food. I don't see any method to regulate births and population worldwide happening anytime soon, so the best thing to do is try to increase supply the essential needs, which genetic engineering of crops is the most realistic answer to in the food department, as it neatly solves the "growing more food with the same space" problem, is already being worked on and will help pay for itself, since an increase in product is an increase in revenue.

When it comes to water, I don't really have a clear solution in mind, but something that harvests fresh water from glaciers or making the conversion of salt water to fresh water cheap enough to do widespread. The problem is that this costs money to do, and would help those with the least amount of money to fund this, basically meaning it has to rely on a government budget (it's own hurtle) or the kindness of our fellow man (Pfffffft…..)

Energy is another issue, we already need a renewable energy source, but it might not be reliable or plentiful enough to support ten billion people. Right now, I think using multiple sources of energy (Solar, wind, tidal, geothermal etc.) would be best.

Pollution I feel is less an "overpopulation" problem and more a "current technology" problem. Out current technology produces a lot of waste while not offering ways to destroy it or reuse it all. Recycling materials we can is a good solution, but for those materials that can't be recycled, when/if we ever build that space elevator, launching it into the sun might be a viable option. (I'm not joking either, there are already plans to do this with nuclear waste)

Overpopulation is a problem, but it's a problem that can be fixed without having to resort to mass genocide or dystonian birth control, although some sort of birth regulation could be useful in a more connected society. If we ever get to the point of colonizing space, we would then have new real-estate to move a portion of the population to.

Edit: @Triple Running out of living space was never part of the overpopulation debate, running out of crop space is.

I doubt there would be a overpopulation in general, but insight it could be a problem in third world countries because of birthrate problems.

Yes that is true. In my highschool years I learnt that the high birth rate in LEDCs as they are called is usually a combination of reduced access to contraceptives, cultural beliefs ( in my home country it is believed that a man having more chilfren is a sign of virility), and other socio-economic factors i cannot remeber right now. Sorry :(

>human ecology thread

Overpopulation is the symptom. Resource management is the disease and the cure. Why is overpopulation only a symptom? Who has the most children? It's third world populations. Their birth rates are high because their survival rate is low, but as the first world offers aid and technology more of their babies are surviving into adulthood. This was true of all people before modern medicine, of course. Now the birth rate in first world countries is so low it's a concern for some people, but we have other things to do besides give birth, and adoption is getting more popular. When we do choose to have a family, we usually have 1 or 2. Having 3 or 4 kids is becoming rarer and rarer where it used to be extremely commonplace just forty years ago. So as the world continues to modernize, it's reasonable to think that the third world will stop having so many children and our population will stabilize. We're not a inevitably crashing J-curve but an S that has yet to level off.

We don't need to be fleeing to space, we need to be investing in this planet. The population will crash if we lose vital resources like freshwater and a consistent energy source. We also need to more wisely invest in our wildlife management. We're spending billions of dollars every year to force Pandas to fuck each other, an uberspecific niche species that was literally never meant to stand the test of time, whose only ecological purpose in life is to spread eucalyptus (which is a role played by many species), we're spending billions of dollars trying to force these things to remain in existence while we spare a measly three million dollars towards discovering what's behind the massive honeybee population dieoff and restoring those populations. You know, bees, they're solely responsible for pollinating the handful of crops that feed 90% of the world. It's cool though, Panda bears attract a lot more tourism and money for the government than bees. :|

{ When it comes to water, I don’t really have a clear solution in mind, but something that harvests fresh water from glaciers }

You mean like global warming?

Actual climate scientists that aren't government alarmists consider both the benefits and detriments to the Earth's climate increase when looking for ways to adapt to it, and "unlocking" all of the freshwater currently stored in glaciers is one of those benefits. There are a lot of ecological benefits to a warming climate, pretty much every species of plant and animal does better in the warmth.

My only peeve is the issue with space colonization because of the ENORMOUSE capita required to esablish even a basic off world habitat. I do fear other problems pertaining to the political strain a large population may have on a government. (Sorry i know thats to ambiguous) what bothers me are issues like employment and job oppurtunities as less spaces in employment are available especially in semi or unskilled employment positions.

Which the advent of machjnery to do all the hesvy lifting, mechanization might reduce some of the populations employment opputunities. I believe education is the modt important step in solving this problem. The world must know of the issues we are facing. I think that a form of managment is still need though this is not possible especially in Less Economically Develped Countries which have some of the highest birth rates and many cultural barriers like religion preventing effective cintraception and biryh control

The global population has risen exponettially and continues to rise at an accelerating rate.

It actually has a lot more to do with poor education and agrarian economies, than with technology or medicine. Farming societies need all the help they can get as poor African and Asian farmers can't afford advanced machinery and so must rely on their children to help carry the burden. The same was true for pretty much every country. Once income levels reached a certain point, the need for workers decreased as machinery replaced manual labor.

A lack of education means not only are most families stuck in poverty and subsistence farming, but are unaware of contraceptives and proper family planning and organization.

i lean towards a form of population management on a global scale

Sounds dystopian. And that's a basic issue when discussing overpopulation. It's the elephant in the room. Just what measures will be imposed and how far will they go? Simple education and contecpetive initiatives? Have strict government policy like China? Wouldn't such a thing violate a couple's right to privacy and freedom to decide one of the basic and fundamental natural processes?

The simplistic answer is to increase education and economic opportunity in the third world. You get rid of whole countries consumed in poverty and subsistence farming and you'll get rid of overpopulation.

I heard japan's population was acctually aging. This makes much more sense now. Managing the resources and how they are used can play a part in stability of the human population. I did learn about the 5 stages of population growth in school but the 3rd world current situation made me pessimistic. This is why education is so important in this issue.

To me it looks like politicians and uneducated activists are standing in the way of productive allocation of resources. So before any real physical change can occur, well need to dispel this harmful misinformation. This would have to be directed at the public since the politicians have already made up their minds about this issue.

@Lisa

When we do choose to have a family, we usually have 1 or 2. Having 3 or 4 kids is becoming rarer and rarer where it used to be extremely commonplace just forty years ago. So as the world continues to modernize, it’s reasonable to think that the third world will stop having so many children and our population will stabilize.

Birthrates are only half the problem. Medicine making us last longer (it's already theorized that the first person to live to 150 has already been born) is also a contribution. Population increase is Birthrates – Deathrates and if Deathrates continue to drop, merely having one child per couple will not auto solve the problem.

You mean like global warming?

Maybe something that doesn't defaulty dump all that freshwater into the oceans?

There are a lot of ecological benefits to a warming climate, pretty much every species of plant and animal does better in the warmth

…I'm not even touching this…

Forgive me. I did not intend for it to sound dystopian. Any ways, lisa has changed my ideas drastically to the same as yours. (Shes better read on the subject )

{ Maybe something that doesn’t defaulty dump all that freshwater into the oceans? }

Wat? Why do you think every glacier dumps into the ocean?

{ …I’m not even touching this… }

What, basic biology? It's a fifth grade fact that life thrives in warm climates, or do you think every major evolutionary explosion in history has happened during an ice age???

{ Population increase is Birthrates – Deathrates and if Deathrates continue to drop, merely having one child per couple will not auto solve the problem. }

I don't think we're going to be living to 300 any time soon, and if we were able to then history shows we'd have an extremely low birth rate (even more so if we're still only biologically able to have them for the first 40 years of life safely). At less than one kid per couple, with all the women choosing not to have children nowadays, the planet can support all of us with wisely managed resources. We're not at all running out of physical space, even agricultural space now that we're figuring out how to go up instead of out.

This is the same company that uses industrial scale solar powered algae growing to create a cheap, efficient biofuel.

Hans Rosling does a TED talk about how lifting the world out of poverty could practically stop population growth by 2050. I think there were boxes in it. I don't remember what it's called.

What, basic biology? It’s a fifth grade fact that life thrives in warm climates, or do you think every major evolutionary explosion in history has happened during an ice age???

In the long term, it would be good for many species. In the short term, not so much, since it would drastically effect the species that have already adapted to their current climate and need to change. Which is the major concern for us hummens.

Humans/mammals adapt to climate change most easily. Some shade or some huddling together, we do okay. Birds too, for the most part. There are representations of all animals classes that can adapt and will evolve into new species and sub-species more adapted to the new climate. That's literally how the planet has worked for millions of years. Elephants are just warm weather mammoths (more specifically, Asian elephants are warm weather mammoths, African elephants are a more recent offshoot that wouldn't have evolved at all if the climate hadn't started to warm, and those small forest elephants are even more recent offshoots from the African elephant that wouldn't have evolved if it hadn't gotten inefficient to be so big, and the even MORE recent pygmy morph of the forest elephant!), etc etc.

So yeah idk if that tangent actually made it clear, but we're already seeing warm-weather adaptations in a lot of species. We'll lose a large amount to the climate, just as has happened every other time the planet has flipped from tropical to ice age to tropical over and over, but we'll gain new ones. We'll even adapt ourselves, if we don't think the beginning of our adaptation is a deformity or disease and try to "correct" it….

My concern was more over our agricultural crops then ourselves. Farming nowadays has been set up so that certain crops are only grown in certain areas to have the highest yields, and rapid climate change could be catastrophic to that.

Certain crops are grown in areas where they have absolute shit yield. Like asparagus in Peru. You know. The fuckin desert. Where we grow the most thirsty vegetable in agriculture.

It's essential to start farming more logically, and if that means we have to move production of certain crops from some countries to others we need to bite the bullet and do it, economies be damned for the moment. Natural resource globalization could be a thing, but it's a thing we're gonna have to decide within the next 50 years. We could put aside fresh produce and freshwater and certain staple crops as things to be considered economically and instead trade them freely across the globe, and I think we have to in order to support the global population if we're even going to start talking about bringing the world out of poverty. We'd have to change how we eat but in a good way, we'd be eating way more exotic fruits and veggies that we're not used to getting here because it would be too inefficient to ship in small quantities. We already grow more than we can eat anyway, but it gets wasted and thrown away for the smallest imperfection when it's looked at as a product for profit.

Global warming might force relocation of some groups of people. Water may not be enough for third world countries. Oil might no longer exist but I don't think that will be a problem. To control birthrates we might need some sort of law like China's. I think space colonization could solve all these problems but at the same time it could cause some sort of collapse in society.
Overall it is very likely we won't live when this problem gets worse. This overpopulation thing might begin towards the end of the century or the next one so meanwhile… we should enjoy this life we have.

@Henry
. . . . . . Do you have any fucking idea how expensive it is to spend people into space much less colonize it?

Any effort to manage overpopulation has to have two components-at least, in order for it to be socially acceptable.

The first is to reduce birth rates. Providing education programs for women has historically been the best way to do this, and absolutely nobody in the field of global development tries to refute that. Now, strictly from an energy standpoint, the global population is too high to not reduce the planet's natural capital over time. Short of technological breakthroughs that are undefinable and uncertain, population has to decline. The current economic structure can't cope with this, but it will have to be reformed because, in the next 150 years, population growth will need to reverse. Societies need to build the infrastructure to assist the elderly, because the population will age and this is already happening worldwide. Cities will need to contract, and the welfare state will probably be the system in which this occurs. While Asia and Africa are continuing to expand rapidly, their growth spurts will end and, one way or another, the global population will contract.

The second is the implementation of green technology. Now, new technology is invented every day, and more is sure to come, but any serious effort to reduce human impact on the environment will incorporate existing technology to do so and, yes, it exists. Reducing human impact is not technology difficult. It doesn't need fuel cells, or geoengineering or any other fictitious nonsense; green agricultural practices, green building practices and everything else is already completely doable. Some of it would even be economically feasible in a free market. Sometimes the challenge is social stigma or preference. Sometimes its the lack of proper economic incentives. Sometimes there are genuine economic obstacles, but they can be overcome with enough political will.

"Providing education programs for women…"
Excuse me. That's pretty sexist and misoginist. To produce a baby you need a man and a woman. Women are not babies machineguns by their own. It's quite more like the opposite. One male can impregnate multiple females at once, while a female can give a birth to one or fewest children only every nine months, if that's her only occupation.
Both genders need to be educated.
We also need to spread the awarness that being an adult without children doesn't make you less valuable as a person. Babies are not a trophy to the power of your genitalia.

Excuse me. That’s pretty sexist and misoginist.
No, it isn't.

To produce a baby you need a man and a woman. Women are not babies machineguns by their own. It’s quite more like the opposite. One male can impregnate multiple females at once, while a female can give a birth to one or fewest children only every nine months, if that’s her only occupation.
That has nothing to do with what I said. Women are not baby machine guns, but access to education among women is correlated with lower fertility rates. The same does not hold true for men. That women can give birth to many children over the course of their lifetime if it is their only occupation is the entire point. When women don't have access to education – which is generally the case in countries that have the highest ratio of birth rates to death rates – they don't really have alternatives. I have never heard of anybody finding this concept "sexist", not even the ecofeminists.

Both genders need to be educated.
This isn't a practical observation. Obviously it's a good thing, but male access to education has no bearing on population growth unless you're talking strictly about education on family planning, which is a very different kind of program than what I'm talking about. Nobody in the field of global development denies the efficacy of education programs that target women that normally lack access to education, even if there are other possible objections to such programs.

We also need to spread the awarness that being an adult without children doesn’t make you less valuable as a person.

Spreading cultural values doesn't work. Cultural values change as the circumstances of the populations holding them change, not because they were told that they were wrong.

Babies are not a trophy to the power of your genitalia.
???