every 12 years -a billion more people!
The population on the Earth will hit 6.5 billion at 19:16 Eastern Standard Time, Feb. 25, 2006, which is a milestone growth, American science magazine LifeScience said on Feb. 24 on its website, citing a forecast by U.S. Census Bureau.
The Bureau also predicts that the planet's population will exceed seven billion on Oct. 18, 2012.
A report by the administration says that the global population had hit six billion in June 1999, 2.5 times more than that in early 20th century or approximately double that in 1960.
It took only 12 years for the world population to grow from five billion to six billion. Currently, 4.4 babies are born per second on average at an ever startling rate.
1830: 1bn
From 1830 to 1999, the years taken for every one-billion growth are: 100, 30, 15, 12 and 12 respectively (here)
With such huge population growth are we ever going to be able to reduce the number of poor in the World? Are we ever going to be able to survive on the Earth's limited resources? Somehow there is a feeling that even if nuclear war/terrorism/politics or HIV/AIDs/Bird Flu/SARS etc. does not take out humankind, then more and more things will start turning up to take us out... its inevitable, and maybe its just nature balancing things out?
posted by Adam at 4:29 PM
3 Comments:
yeah... I guess that is another reason not to have babies... I made up my mind already, adoption is my alternative... perhaps I can have an AIESEC family :D a kid from every part of the world :D (Asian, African, Latin, European, Arab, etc)
ok, ok, maybe I will have my own... for now, I am not thinking on it.
6:53 PM
Well, in many countries of Western Europe governments are seriously worried about NO population growth, which is the other extreme.
6:56 PM
the answer can be found simply by looking at mathematics and nature: since the agricultural revolution human growth appr. 10.000 years ago, human growth has become exponential. for ~3 million years, "we" had a relatively stable population - in balance with our habitat, just like every other species. but since we took that particular style of agriculture that today is part of every "zivilised" culture (i.e. a kind of cultivation that wages war on every species that competes with us, producing consistent food surpluses, which directly(!) result in population growth), we have lost that balance.
it's a simple mathematical fact that there is NO stable system with exponential growth. look at nature: live comes in cycles. everywhere you find exponential growth, you find death in the end. ...or to put it in more "neutral" words: these systems ultimately fail and stop existing. the growth of viruses in a host organism or the "energy bilance" of nuclear explosions are examples that immediately come to mind. btw: interest-based monetary systems also produce exponentially rising amounts of money (might that be the reason the american FED stopped publishing M3?)...
conclusion:
either we ("we" meaning the "zivilised" part of humankind, in contrast to every remaining tribal culture) change our way of living, or we will go the way every exponential system goes in the end. the amount of time we need to double our numbers steadily decreases; it doesn't need a rocket scientist to figure out that something's wrong here.
urgent reading recommendation:
ishmael, "my ishmael", "beyond civilization", "the story of b" (all by daniel quinn)
8:45 AM
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home