rcarter2 : I loved your post man. You're right. Uh, life, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, finds a way. We'll just die off and something else will evolve to take our place by adapting to a polluted, resource depleted earth.

epicamazing
Overpopulation is all ready a problem, however the fact that people are going about it the wrong way is a bigger problem. I would go into it more but it's a touchy subject and I don't want to offend. If you want me to I will but don't say and I won't.

Right now, it is only a moderate problem, but each day, more and more people are born and eventually the resources will not be able to keep up.

Recently, I've studied two different viewpoints on population growth and if it's possible if humans are exceeding the Earth's carrying capacity.

One, from the world economists' standpoint, said that it'll be nearly impossible for overpopulation to happen, and the figures that exist are greatly exaggerated.

But the environmental studies point of view says it's possible, and can happen within the next hundred years, and it's happened before [where the carrying capacity of a certain location was met].

Currently, the world's population sits at over 7 billion people and constantly growing. This number, which was a billion less ten years ago, has been rapidly expanding since the 1950's, when the population was 2.5 billion.

Most of the world's population sits in China, with India's population threatening to overtake the amount. Africa has the third largest population, with the US trailing behind.

What else makes these countries different, besides where their population is? There's a couple of huge factors that make a difference.

A huge factor of population growth is the replacement rate-- the more developed countries, such as the US, Britain, France, etc are seeing a decline in population growth-- the number is falling, not raising.

Many reasons are causing this-- from the education of women, which leads to higher achievement in the workforce, to health education [abortion, early testing, etc] are all causing women to not have as many children they were having in the past-- the rule of thumb is to have a replacement child for both the man and the woman, and that's it.

While that's just replacing two people, it still causes the population to grow, but not as much.

These two people can replace two people in the workforce, but not the other six that retire at the same time. Then, there's the issue the US is facing today-- there's more retired people [withdrawing social security] than there is people in the workforce, because of the population boom felt in the US following the end of WWII.

On the other hand, when the survival of a child is questionable, women tend to have more children, knowing that out of six, only two will survive to adulthood and become functioning members of society.

But this changes as everything is improved across the board-- health, hygiene, medicine, education, along with how more modernized a country becomes.

And now for a very interesting fact-- after the communist take over of China, famine and disease overtook the country. But once the one-child policy was put into place, the country was able to stabilize itself and function. The thought is that during that time period, before the one-child population was put into place, China had reached its carrying capacity and the reactions acted accordingly.

But with technology, the carrying capacity of a given area can be expanded, making it last longer than it normally would have, but this most likely leads to horrible environmental damage.

But the true carrying capacity is when humans are consuming too much of the earth's resources before they can be replaced, which leads to consumerism and the like.

While overpopulation is a problem, the morality of trying to control how many people are born brings up the topic of abortion, which many people are against. Since many controversial factors are involved in how our population grows, as well as the cultural imbalances, we will probably hit the red zone before any large-scale restrictions and security measures are invoked.

Well while I said that over population is all ready a problem, I have now realized that at point of our destruction from over population we, as a species, will come back from the brink if there are enough resources available for even a one or two billion people. The population would drop to half of what we could support, as it would take a while for resources to move, and then the population would slowly rise to something manageable for this world. It would then be something less extreme each time the population rises by too much. But then again by this time there would be a "child rule" (where only a certain amount of children are allowed per couple) to stop a drastic increase in population so you never know, but that's my theory.

Well..overpopulation...wont be a problem....for years. (so we dont have to worry now...maybe years from now, it might be a problem). But other countries...like China, and India...are having this problem right now

It's as simple as this, there are limited resources on this planet. Just like if you put a bowl of dog food into a cage with a thousand dogs, they're going to tear each other apart trying to get to it.

24,000 people die every day from starvation, so as far as I'm concerned it's already a problem(since the allocation of resources is the main issue of overpopulation), people sitting behind keyboards aren't the ones feeling the hurt of it just yet. The less people the better, The more people, the more chaos.

But since there's no practical way to keep people from breeding like roaches, there's not much we can do.

This could end up becoming a major problem in the future if the population keeps on climbing rapidly, for right now we're just above 7 billion people on this planet and predicting to reach 8 billion sometime later this decade, and might reach 10 billion before 2040, the problem is that food and supplies will become scarce at a point, we can end up going to war for food, so in a way, I think the overpopulating is becoming an issue, although a good thing is that some people are dying off, that's a little good, but the birth/death ratio is nearly 2:1.

Funnily enough, I had a conversation with my good friend T-Dawg about this at school today.

Population has always been growing, and people have always found a way to get over it. I'm not saying there won't be challenges, fights, or even mass numbers of people going hungry while others figure it out, but I have enough faith in humanity to believe it'll be possible- and I don't have much faith in humanity, to be honest.

T-Dawg thinks we should terraform.

I told him several reasons this would not work, using a hypothetical planet with Mars' surface and atmosphere and Earth's size to exemplify my points.

1. Planets inimical to human life are probably so to plant life as well. Plants need nutrients and carbon dioxide, and sunlight. Unless the toxic environment is nutrient-rich (doubt it) and the atmosphere made of carbon dioxide and NOT other toxic chemicals in even the smallest percentage (also doubtful), the plant would die rather quickly.

2. Pumping oxygen and carbon dioxide into a toxic atmosphere will NOT help terraform it. For several reasons, the main two being that when you add something to a solution, you merely dilute it, not expunge the toxic substance, and the second being that the planet might not even be strong enough to hold the atmosphere in place (though we assumed it was the size of Earth, so it should theoretically have the same gravity as it).

3. Sunlight. The planet's location to the sun is important, as we need it to sustain plants and warmth, not to mention normal seasons, time, years, etc.

4. IT WOULD TAKE MILLIONS OF YEARS. Terraforming, if it even works at all, is not a fast process. It'd be GENERATIONS before we finish terraforming a planet enough for just a rat to live in it, much less humans. This, therefore, offers no real, quick solution to overpopulation, as we will STILL be stranded on Earth, floating billions, trillions, if not quadrillions, of dollars to a project that will not help us, but those after us. LONG after us.

It's still a noble cause, hmm? We should care greatly for the people in the future, our own descendents! And yes, we should. But terraforming in the overpopulation context is not a good solution- it's not efficient, with neither resources (plants, air, etc.) nor money, time nor immediate practicality- and therefore is, at the current time, unattractive. But who knows? Maybe in the future they'd develop technology to monumentally speed up this process.

I don't think overpopulation of the earth in general will be the big threat against humanity. It might be too dense in places, and even if the population isn't redistributed, I don't see living resources to be that serious of an issue. We can produce much more food than we currently are, and in a much smaller space, even with our current technology. New materials are developed all the time. We can maintain an artificial atmosphere and purify or recycle other resources for further use. As far as energy goes, the renewable sources might suffice, but with enough population, it's limits will become very apparent (solar is limited by surface area, hydroelectric by how much running water, wind similarly). But that won't be the end, either. Quality of life will drop, but the necessities will be prioritized.

All of that assumes civilization will not continue to expand outward.

There are other factors that will limit our population growth, and those are what worry me the most. First, people stop wanting to have children. This is already happening, and many areas of the world have a declining population because of it. Even those that don't will eventually catch up and begin their decline. However, I don't know if that would be enough to kill us off completely.

*Lagslayer grabs his soapbox* The most likely scenario that would lead to our extinction, I believe, is complete replacement. People will view humans as stupid, and not worth keeping around anymore. They will discard their bodies and minds completely to be "transferred" into a machine. Even with our technology to make our bodies stronger, faster, and smarter, people are afraid to use them (think steroids and chemicals with similar effects, not necessarily the ones we have today). Because at some point, "chemical" became a bad word, and anything with chemicals must be bad (despite all of nature being chemicals). By the time the public has widespread remorse about this decision, it will likely be too late. This is effectively extinction of our species, both culturally and genetically. A disturbing number of people already support this future.