In 200 years population grew from 1 bllion to 7 billion. Will we keep growing like this?
Can the world hold that many people? On what does it depend?
Tuesday 15 November 2011
7 Billion: How Did We Get So Big So Fast?
In 200 years population grew from 1 bllion to 7 billion. Will we keep growing like this?
Can the world hold that many people? On what does it depend?
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I was in shock when i first saw this video.While the population keeps growing, we are running out of many of the resources used to sustain this population.They've shrunk, because we've used them up. Sure, trying to wrap one’s mind around a number like 7 billion is pretty daunting. It evokes visions of people crowding every square inch of every continent, with the poor Earth sagging under the weight of all that humanity. The real numbers we should be worried about, however, are a lot smaller, and a lot more significant. They have to do not with how many people there are, but with how much we as a society consume. Because it’s consumption, not the number of people, which dictates how much of the earth is drilled or torn up for minerals or coal. It's how much energy we use and resources we put into our cars, appliances and gizmos that ultimately determines how much pollution we spew into the water and air and onto the land.
ReplyDeleteI’m amazed by how much we’ve grown in only 200 years! This video is quite interesting and thought-provoking indeed. I think that people nowadays are becoming each time more conscious of this ‘problem’ and in some places they are trying to control de fact of families having too many children. For example, not long ago in China they put the one-child policy, which gives economic advantages to those families who only have one kid.
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, in these 200 years, we have developed tremendously in countless ways, and this means that each time we are using more energy in possessions like computers or domestic appliances. This increases the risk of the earth ending up with no resources, as 200 years back we didn’t have the need of using computers (they didn’t exist) or of having domestic appliances.
Personally, I think that the world can perfectly deal with so many people if we know how to take profit correctly of the resources. This is not simple, and on the other hand, too many people if we don’t know how to handle the resources correctly will lead to serious problem like hunger or too much pollution, as only some people will be able to have basic things such as water or food. This is quite worrying, and my opinion is that the future depends absolutely on us. We are the only ones who will decide it.
This video gave me a very visual idea of how fast population is reproducing. It's really jaw-dropping! I had no idea that the rate of reproduction on humans was as fast as multiplying the planet's population by seven (from 1 billon to 7 billion people) in only 207 years! The world can hold way more people than what we are capable of reproducing. However, the real question is; Will there always be enough resources for everyone? Well I guess that if scientists discover ways of storing electrical energy and only using renewable energies everything will be possible. Look at it this way, a very large part of North America is "empty" in relation to Europe and same happens with Africa and Australia. There will always be room for all of the humans on Earth. Crops will be grown extensively rather than intensively, that means there would be less variety of food but a very large quantity of it.
ReplyDeleteThe answer to this problem is undoubtedly found in population policy strategies, as mentioned in the video, with medicine and agricultural improvements emerging at such a fast rate, life expectancy is growing longer and longer, which means more and more people are using up earth’s resources and consequently increasing waste product resulting in a never ending cycle of negative effects such as pollution and global warming. Therefore, what all countries which have birth rates high over death rates should be doing is applying population policy strategies that encourage couples into having only a certain amount of babies, which can be done by many different methods: giving tax breaks to couples having only one child, penalizing couples with more than one child, making education, sanitation and other facilities free to those who only have one child and making them more expensive to those who have more than one etc. As you can see, there are many very easy methods which can be implied to stop and slow down population growth, it is just something countries have to start applying, but of course it is not that simple, because it is up to politicians to implant these strategies and it most cases, these politicians end up being voted out because of general population disagreement.
ReplyDeleteLucas Drobnitzky