Overpopulation

When do we admit this is a problem?

2008: 6.7bn folks
2010: 6.9bn folks
2016: 7.4bn folks

That gives a population growth rate of between 1.1% and 1.2%.

So let's run some numbers. (I'm going to use google's growth rate of 1.13%)

2017: 7.48bn
2018: 7.56bn
2019: 7.65bn
2020: 7.74bn
2021: 7.82bn
2022: 7.91bn
2023: 8bn

The UN has long been downplaying this, but it seems they're coming to their senses having recently revised up their estimates (though still come in too low)

I don't see any reason the growth rate is going to slow over the next 2-3 decades. While births may drop off slightly, people in the developing world are living longer.

What solutions are there?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpopulation
merriam-webster.com/dictionary/overpopulation
time.com/3752643/un-water-shortage-2030/
newint.org/blog/majority/2011/06/20/africa-water-privatization/
un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/pdf/fertility/world-fertility-patterns-2015.pdf
technologyreview.com/s/514751/novel-material-shows-promise-for-extracting-uranium-from-seawater/
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

I don't know, as soon as someone makes a proper argument.
You gave some numbers, now give me a reason these numbers should scare me.

Humanity should have been whiped out since its begin.

How about the idea of carrying capacity? There's already starvation and lack of drinking water in parts of asia and africa. And these are the places where most of this growth is happening.

The world doesn't have enough resources to allow everyone to live with western levels of consumption. Not by a long shot. The world could just about sustain all who are on it today if everyone consumed between 1/3 and 1/4 the resources people in the first world do.

Right. There's lack of resources.

Now, what could be the main cause of this… Is it overpopulation….? Nah that's not it… Hmmm….

the places that use the most resources per capita (1st world) have lowest birth rates.
there's already enough food for everyone.
meat farming uses up more energy than human life.
moving infrastructure away from cars, and moving to local agriculture, would greatly reduce energy waste.

As far as you've shown, the planet can sustain 10x the number of people alive now
this is a problem due to distribution, not scarcity. In other words, capitalism.

Physical lack of resources. No amount of blaming porky can change that. Check it out.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity

Because we've also experience population booms in western society back when we were going through the same economic transformations that the third world is today.

The tendency is for the population growth to decrease sharply with development. The annual growth rate of China for example is 0.5%, and has been in steady decline (together with India's and the United State's) since the 90's.

I'm not interested in speculating about how many people the world can carry.


Physical water scarcity. What do?

Water scarcity? Srsly? 80% of the earth's surface is water.

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Its not, fuck off you scaremongering mong.

Yes cause salt water is so damned good for you. Physical water scarcity refers to the depletion of ground-water and aquifers. That's what is highlighted in that image.


Ostrich syndrome in full effect.

Another element of overpopulation, the waste and pollution. Blame capitalism all you like, but the world isn't ready for socialism yet so there IS no alternative as things stand. So the question is how should we act in the current framework? Anyone that wants to cry capitalism and think they've made a point, or even contribution will be ignored.

Oh yeah, I forgot how difficult it is to remove the salt from salt water. No place in the world has such skilled chemists.

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This leads to its own pollution. And moving billions of gallons of water hundreds of thousands of miles inland is a major practical headache.


en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpopulation

Fuggin wikiporky at it again. Best get over there and CTR!

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it wouldn't be a problem were it not for capitalism's gross mismanagement of our resources

How about a dictionary?

merriam-webster.com/dictionary/overpopulation

we're reaching non-argument levels that shouldn't even be possible

OH BOY A DEFINITION EXISTS THAT MUST MEAN WE LIVE IN IT

EXCUSE MY WHILE I TRY TO OVERTHROW THE PATRIARCHY, MATRIARCHY, FASCISM, SLAVERY, COMMUNISM AND FUEDAL SYSTEM THAT WE LIVE UNDER

The situation is as it is. That is there are physical water shortages in the ME and Africa. This was part of the reason for the Syria shit.

Water is already tight in some places. More people = more demand.

How about you find one credible source arguing for infinite growth with finite resources?

time.com/3752643/un-water-shortage-2030/

Lemme guess. The UN are porky shills and their scientists are paid to make this shit up so the UN can bring in water tax? You know what you people are starting to sound like?

Your arguments are shit. Yes we have finite resources (as of yet), but that doesnt automatically mean we have used all of them just because a middle eastern desert is dry, just means 'those' places are overpopulated, but that can be solved with some clever engineering.

Overpopulation is scaremongering. Water hardly disappears, we simply have problems with distribution and are wasteful and inefficient, problems certainly exacerbated if not caused by capitalism.

Food scarcity would also not be a problem if we didn't waste so much food and if we used arable land more efficiently.

no, but the water shortage is caused by porky. fuck off retard.

then it sounds like the us is doing the right thing by killing africans and middle easterners

Mate have you ever heard of filters? We can filter piss water for god sake and chemical water. Ever heard of water purification plants.

The other issue is time. Those who assume a technological solution seem to be ignoring that Africa has been starving and starved of water for decades and we're nowhere near getting on top of it. Africa is expected to reach 3bn people by 2100. That gives us 80 years to find a way to feed and water 3x the population currently there.

Fucking porky, draining africa's aquifers…

You're going to need a large pipe to move the water inland. And better hope the filter comes with extended warranty.


I've heard of desalination plants for making sea water safe to drink. That what you mean?

Food scarcity is more down to distribution (though desertification and loss of arable land in Africa means they will be forever dependent, which brings its own issues) than physical limits yes. Water not so much.

something something FALC

And the fast majority of advanched country's have that system of pipelines. Its part of the infrastructure, its just like we have electrical infrastructure and a gas infrastructures made out of miles and miles of pipelines and wires.

I mean all water purification plants of inland and outland that supplies the country with clean water.

Pretty much every response ITT.

Direct question goons. How does Africa cope with 2.5bn people by 2050?

Yes they actually fucking do.

newint.org/blog/majority/2011/06/20/africa-water-privatization/

For moving billions of gallons hundreds or thousands of miles?


The only currently deployable tech for large scale making water safe to drink is desalination. This has to be done at the source. This is pretty polluting, especially if ever done on the scale that would be required. Every fix you apply you create another problem.

Niger and South Africa aren't currently experiencing physical shortages.

How does Africa grow food if all the yellow goes red?

Yes, its called an infra structure.

Water in lakes, rivers, mountains and all of that dont exist?

What do you even want btw? Create more save water or something?

These things are drying up in Africa. Already gone in parts.


Pointing out an issue that was til recently downplayed. The issue of overpopualtion will likely not directly kill the planet. But it makes all our current issues worse and at some stage we will need to act to avert mass dying off in parts of the world. I'd favour proactive steps to avoid this. You guys would obviously rather deal with it when it bites.

We gulag half of the world's population

In a manner similar to how they'd supported 2 billion?

What do you think Africa's population is?

And just rolling back to OP for a second.


This is an extra 600million. Or the entirety of Europe then some. Most of this growth will be in areas that cannot currently support themselves. How can you not see the issue here?

Honestly the only solution I can see that doesn't involve loads of deaths is some kind of NWO and population controls. And this ain't going to happen.

How did you manage to look at those UN figures, and miss all the highly prominent projections of slowing fertility?

Most projections have global population growth halting at ~11B by 2100, with the rosiest stopping as soon as 2070 at 9.5B. Only the absolute worst projections posit continued growth beyond 2100. Regionally speaking, growth everywhere other than Asia and Africa is already pretty much flat or negative, so the continuation of any growth in the above figures beyond a 2040-2060 Asian population peak is driven almost entirely by the prediction of unprecedented massive population growth in Africa.

In other words, the future isn't great, but it's almost certainly quite manageable.

Let them all die, Billy. All of them.

your UN median projection is still growing in 2100. And remember these are the revised upwards recent projections. The old projections rarely put the population above 10bn. So they may well be revised upwards again. Especially considering Islam. Islam is spreading, and islam's backwards view of women as baby-factories could well drive growth on for a fair bit longer.


Maybe. Maybe not. Consider the effects of global warming along side it. Manageable my be stretching the word to breaking point.

Overpopulation is only a real problem for us if humans actually distribute resources equally. Humans are evil bastards and communism isn't happening any time soon, so we're fine. There will just be a lot more starvation.

If we force everyone to become a vegan, we can easily put that supply limit food vise up to 13 billion.

The median projection growth is essentially stabilized. And sure, it's true the higher projections might end up being more accurate, but it's undeniable that growth rates have been dropping pretty much everywhere for decades, and will continue to do so:
un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/pdf/fertility/world-fertility-patterns-2015.pdf

Case in point, fertility among Muslims is the highest in the world, but in spite of nationalist posturing on their part it's also experiencing the largest slowdown, especially in the Arab MENA (mideast/north-Africa) region where it has steadily dropped over the last few decades virtually everywhere (aside from a few exceptions, like a recent uptick in Egypt), already sinking below replacement rate in some countries (like Tunisia, Sahara, Iran, Lebanon, Turkey, and UAE). By ~2025, fertility will remain above replacement almost nowhere outside subsaharan Africa.

Meant to post this as second pic instead of double-posting the first

Are you just itching to discuss genocide or something? You've got problems, friend.

Mammals living like insects smh tbh

I'm a bit surprised Oceania is so high.

Global warming will surely hinder that growth rate on sinking islands.

The idea isn't so much committing Malthusian genocide, as it is attempting to prevent mass famine.

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no really?

Hahahaha the overpopulation meme.

This meme stems from the MARKUT ECUHNOMECS brand of indoctrination taught at econ schools.
In their apology of capitalism they pull a monk trick and invert the cause-effect relationship.

IF there were segments of population for whose basic needs the resources were not allocated then, that would mean the market is not perfect, ERGO since the market IS perfect ( a self evident truth) these segments of population are the problem and should not be.

For we know that, as our trustful ideologues taught us in the midst of glorious feudalism, that, if reason/fact challenges dogma then reason/facts must be wrong.

Plants do not actually require 800-1000 W/m^2 of sunlight. They need less, and when you get to absorption maximums of chlorophyll, that requires even less power.

Effective LED diodes can supply this light.

Electricity is to be made from nuclear fission, no worries, the 1/3 efficiency of steam turbines is a drop in the bucket compared to the energy density of fissile materials.

Hydroponics, artificial soil. All that ripe for vertical farming.

tl;dr: we already have ways to feed everyone, no matter the population

The world was ready for socialism in the period of primitive communism. After all they were producing for the need and want, not for the profit. And everything was communally owned, there was no private property.

The key word is we. As long as capitalism exists, the ordinary citizen like you or me is powerless to do anything. Even if the vast majority of population agrees on something, if the ruling class has opposite viewpoint, the ruling class will do regardless of the ordinary people, unless what they do might endanger their position.

Socialism is a way to give actual power to the people, not to the selected few.

increase productivity?

seriously, for feodal mode of production 1 biilion was overpoputation

population in relation to productive forces is what matters

Posadism will fix it.

The amount of effort needed to achieve that level of efficiency is vastly in excess of that needed to simply make people keep it in their pants. The problem isn't the difficulty of enforcing sustainably healthy population homeostasis, or the difficulty of supporting a quarter trillion people. It's the political difficulty of doing anything in a deliberate and adequate fashion, instead of doing nothing useful until the last moment, panicking, and helplessly watching a humanitarian catastrophe unfold in slow motion.

Even though you could live like a sardine, why would you want to?

Solutions include making sure porky isnt getting fat off the labour of "outsourced" labor*.
Solutions include cutting back pretenses of ethics and regulation from science all the while restricting open scientific inquiry in the name of present feelings. Science is not "the answer to everything" and no one should say so. However only through science can technology be advanced for the benefit of all without reducing us to either military takeover or capitalist takeover. Science finds out why cheetahs have spots. Military takeover finds out how to use spots to slaughter unsuspecting 'enemies'. Science finds out how to make plants grow better and die less. Capitalist takeover finds out how to make plants grow quickly with the least cost to the porky owning the estate all while resulting in nutritionally inferior products - which doesnt matter if it is made to not matter.


*(outsourced to whom? From where? the workers for 5 dollars a day in cambodia arent exactly benefitting from this except in the way that the alternative is getting colonized by china)

Sounds like CAPITALISM is messing up again!

overpopulation isn't a threat. The modern populations become the less they reproduce. Eventually the population will stabilize.

The population is projected to level off at 9 billion, 12 billion is the highest estimate. Birth rates have been dropping like crazy world wide, our population is only going up because of momentum.

We have no problem growing enough food for all of us, and there is still a fuckton of space left on the planet. Overpopulation is a liberal lie to excuse all the hunger and poverty in the world and blame it on the lack of resources, rather than it's distribution, and hand wave away the fact that Capitalism requires desperate poverty.

Population growth doesn't work like that. Eventually it reaches an equilibrium. Just look at the western population growth today, and the industrializing countries are getting closer to that.

Also, those numbers are misleading. There aren't enough to make any reliable model the future growth. Besides, even if you took that at face value and did the math, the population growth is decelerating:
2008-2010: 0.2/2 = 0.1bn per year
2010-2016: 0.5/6 = 0.83bn per year

Should be 0.083bn per year for the last one.

This is correct, though. The finitude of the key energy resource that makes everything else possible - fossil fuel.
not when China and India and everyone else for that matter wants the same standard of living of the well-to-do middle-class American.

Fossil Fuels stopped making everything else possible when the electric grid went up. Nuclear power could last us 1000 years, surely long enough to build the Dyson Sphere.


What do you think the average American has that cannot be distributed to everyone in the world? Gasoline is the only thing I can think of, and that can be solved by nuclear power and electric cars.

Stop reading Salon and think outside the box liberal shill.

yes
no

Not to get into nuclear being a colossally phoney con game from ERoEI & RoI perspectives, on top of needlessly dangerous and a dead giveaway in leftist circles of its proponents originating as lapsed lolberts, but the easiest way out of increasing demands for living standards worldwide isn't supply.

It's conservation, due to the astonishing inefficiency of typical energy use. Simple conservation measures such as architectural insulation, geothermal heat pumps, centralized lighting, combined cycle, grid storage, HVDC transmission, telecommuting, home delivery, electric drive, rail transport, and ocean turbosails would slash most types of energy consumption by 80-90% little or no change in quality of life.

Similar levels of sheer wastefulness hold for most other crucial resources such as water, food, and lumber.

We need way more people than that you fucking tard, how the fuck else are we supposed to get off of this rock and diversify, if one thing goes wrong with all of us here we are fucked

the best "solution" is that you fucking kill yourself, that sentiment has never been more applicable, he who lives in a glass house should shit in the basement, etc, p.p.

We need more people, way more fucking people, and they need to have a high standard of living and balanced lives so that they can get all the shit done that we need to do in the endless uphill battle against extinction

you cant conserve your way to the stars. There is no reason to not be efficient, but if you think that is some kind of prospect for the future when humanity will inevitably start to grow exponentially, then you are being willfully delusional.

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Oh, absolutely, but there's a massive and fundamental difference between lifting billions out of neofeudal squalor into mundane 21st century lifestyles, and boldly going where no man has gone before.

One won't require much more energy, nor new types of resources, but also won't offer any additional revenue beyond more sophisticated human capital. The other will (probably) require phenomenal amounts of energy and strange new resources, but grant access to nigh-infinite quantities of natural resources.

Expecting we will find a way to colonize the galaxy if we just had 3 billion more people is like saying you should buy 100 lottery tickets because your chances of winning are much higher.

Get back to me when we have a thriving colony on Mars and you might have a point.

Stupidest shit i've heard all day

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Then you're missing the point. Water and 'luxury' foods, luxury consumer goods. The demand for all of these will increase as India and China develop.

Nuclear is fine. Thorium even better. You're right about the costs though. You don't honestly expect the developing world to forgo the luxuries we've taken for granted do you? So since they won't, nuclear is the best option.

plz be trolling.

If not, how do you expect to get of this rock if we spend half our global resources annually trying to feed and house the millions of displaced and starving?


Killing myself makes no difference. Not having kids does.

Yeah xd this way we'll beat idpol in no time comrade

Leftism is hereditary?

Most thorium is so diffuse that usable reserves are about the same as uranium. Nuclear reserves as a whole are uselessly small without breeding whatever fuel into plutonium, which is both illegal worldwide under modern anti-proliferation treaties for obvious reasons, and too experimental to have ever been used for commercial power generation.


If you were just laughing at VHEM retardation, rather than interpreting it as sane advocation of homeostatic reproduction, all's forgiven.

No but it can be taught you retard

There's a ton of uranium in the seas. essentially a limitless supply. Given desalination is going to become more and more necessary, we may as well grab the big atoms while we're at it.

That's what university is for.

One injection of leftism at uni obviously wasnt enough in the past, its not enough now.

Almost all the right wing people I know have right wing/neo-con parents, I don't see how it doesn't work the other way around as well

There is also a great deal of uranium in granite, and yet, it too is not concentrated enough to extract/process/form/load without spending far more energy than could be generated from it in a conventional reactor.

This is where science comes in.


technologyreview.com/s/514751/novel-material-shows-promise-for-extracting-uranium-from-seawater/

KANE LIVES.

Why
Why

Space might be cool?

As somewhere becomes more industrialized, populations boom. When it reaches developed status, population growth shrinks and eventually declines. Reproduction is directly correlated with wealth, health, and education. Many places in Asia have either already reached the peak (SK, Japan, many places in China) or are slowly getting there. Africa is getting better, especially now that China is investing since they want Africa to become the new China so China can become the new US. Sorry Holla Forums, unless you consider the abstract model of population growth a person with heritage, the Jews aren't behind this one.

lol