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Originally Posted by Fammaden Have any overpopulation scares or predictions actually come anywhere close to true? |
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Originally Posted by Soriak  Nope. I don't know about the US, but it's also something used by some fringe anti-immigration groups here. The idea, that there's not enough space/resources to take in more people without everything going to hell.
The argument completely ignores that more people just create more demand, which in turn means more economic activity and hence more jobs. Economic growth has to come from somewhere and it just requires a growing number of people. |
You answered the question wrong, Soriak. No, none of the doomsday scenarios about overpopulation have come true. Things like the Green Revolution helped up the world's food supply enough to stave off what we're seeing today in terms of food prices.
But the predictions of population
growth have more or less always come true, so long as they were reasonable. It's a statistical trivialty to come up with reasonable projections of population growth over the short to mid term. 2050 is only two generations away. I'm sure that if they're saying 9 billion, that means we're going to end up with anywhere from 8-10 billion people.
Population growth has a lot of inertia, and we aren't going to see some sort of demographic miracle where suddenly the world's population plateaus yet the world's economy isn't crushed under the strain of 80% of the population being senior citizens.
So either way really, it's bad news. A: The population goes up by around 50% in the next 40 years while also rapidly developing and increasing consumption per capita, resulting in skyrocketing energy and food prices, possibly wars over resources etc. Or B: Somehow the world population and consumption stagnates whether through war, famine, disaster, or better yet by dictat. Whether the world economy is funked up by the direct cause (asteroid, rapid climate change, whatever) or by the demographic cluster fuck of rapidly stopping child birth and therefore population growth, B doesn't look pretty.
No, I'm not that optimistic for the future. IMO our only real hope is C: a little of option A with a whole fuckload of praying for technology and ingenuity to save our asses before mother earth snuffs us out as a civilization (but not necessarily species). We've managed it before, but I'm beginning to wonder if we're up for the task this time around.