Tom Foreman | Bio
AC360° Correspondent
Usually when I need reliable predictions I look to Ouiija boards, moss on the sides of trees, or Las Vegas odds makers. After all, folks don’t mess around when they have money on the line. But a new prediction from the United Nations caught my eye – they believe the planet’s population, which is currently 6.8 billion souls, may top nine billion by 2050.
I’m not a demographer, but that sounds like a lot.
Let’s do the math. There are roughly 41 years between now and then. Divide the growth of 2.2 billion extra folks by the days and you get about 147,000 babies joining to the family of man every 24 hours. That’s 100 per minute, or 50 since you started reading this.
A researcher I know put it into stark terms for me. Remember the day the tsunami hit in the Indian Ocean and destroyed all those towns and killed all those people? If we accept the more conservative death toll, the world’s population got bigger even on that terrible day.
Nine billion people, standing one of top of each other, would reach 40 percent of the way to Venus. Or something like that. My math is a little hazy, and frankly I think the chance of getting everyone to go along with that plan is slim, but you see my point.
On the other hand, the world is a big place, so does it really matter?
I’m going with yes. Think of all the things we are already competing over and the issues we confront. We are consuming more energy than ever before and struggling to develop enough alternative sources to keep up with the soaring demand. We wonder what we should do with our waste, how to keep our water clean and plentiful, and how to get medical care to people who need it.
We are pushing other species further off their turf as we make way for more houses, more towns, more highways, and more railroads. We are fishing the oceans like there is no tomorrow; tilling, planting, harvesting the land at record levels; and the National Chicken Council says we are already producing nine billion chickens to eat every year. Imagine how many we’ll need down the road – it’s no wonder they’ve chosen to cross it.
And most of the growth is expected in developing countries that are already wiping out their natural resources and destroying their forests and rivers just to keep up.
Simply put, every issue that we are dealing with now could become much more complex if we can’t figure out the population growth puzzle. And you thought the Octomom had problems.
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If we don't find a way to solve the overpopulation problem – nature will.
Not to worry. There will be a world war over resources long before 2050 rolls around. Neither WWI nor WWII came from the bible, nor will WWIII. The earth needs a thinning of population every century or so.
Life is a balance. Population = balance between new life and dying life. If that is such a big concern for us, then why don't we stop being a little selfish to terminate new life, and quit trying to continuously break the life expectancy barrier, adding to our miserable lives !
Also, if they just have 2-3 per couple, that wouldn't be so bad.
When I was styling hair in St. Louis, a nurse came in; she had just help deliver a lady's 20th child. The lady had never been married and all the children had different fathers. Using having children to collect money from the tax-payers.
Fellow bloggers,
The issue at hand indeed deserves much attention. With an ever increasing world population, over-consumption of food and natural resources are obviously inevitable along with the implied risks. However, it is important for us to remain both logical and ethical in our endeavors to conceive solutions to this problem. With that in mind, we must eliminate ANY idea of population control. In fact, that only complicates things further. Instead, why not focus on technology and its apparent capacity to better our lives?
Regrettably, we as a race have been pre-conditioned to accept things for what they are and the fact of the matter is that this phenomenon continues still and has not been challenged enough. When it is, PASSIONATELY, one soon realizes that "overcrowding" is NOT the problem. Lets look past all the BS people.
probably should take a look at the figures from all of the industrialized nations:
all of them are producing fewer babies than what will sustain their current populations and therefor their populations are already shrinking.
9 billion by 2050? Wow, thats a lot of people. Who knows, maybe humanity would have colonizied the moon, and even mars by then. Like Tom Foreman said, the Earth is a big place, but then again, all those humans are going to need food, water, clothing, housing,ect.
Most of us baby boomers will be gone in a few decades. Unless there is another boom of babies I would think our population would decrease. Guess not though.
Tom,
I expect in 41 years most 90 million baby boomers here will be gone and God forbid some pandemic takes more of us out.
So we will have some room to play with !!
You're right, Tom, we do have too many people putting too big of a strain on our planet's resources. One scientist in the climate change area, Dr. Lovelock of the United Kingdom, predicts that given the potential warming up of the planet, the decrease in food production, and the decrease in a fresh water supply that we will fight over natural resources and that the limited resources will winnow out the population drastically. He predicts that by the year 2100 our world population will have fallen from the project 9 billion to possibly 1 billion. If he's right then the planet won't stay crowded. However the livable portions of the planet may stay just as crowded.
I like your 9 billion person stack – I would hate to be that last person to have to climb to the top of the heap to stand on the shoulders of the next to last person. That climb would really be a long one.
The only answer is to stop breeding, but who's honestly going to do that? Everybody I know thinks its their right to bang out 2 or 3 kids. Its probably too far gone by now anyhow.
Like a bacterial growth curve, humans have had a lag phase, are currently in, or at the top of, a phase of exponential growth, and will head towards a dying out phase as we use up all resources. Wow, and somehow we thought having a big brain would change our destiny. Epic FAIL !!!
I believe this is a sign of the world getting healthier if the world population is getting bigger I believe people need to spread out more in this global world there is no need for people to be crushed on top of each other . Has the world grows this should be a bigger wake up call to why we need to continue to strive to make the world go green. The solution to this is to come together and as part of fixing the economy the rich may not be as rich but we should make more tax reason and provide more help to people who live in impoverished conditions. Groups like Habitat for Humanity are great for fighting these issues. In closing I am surprised to know worlds getting bigger with all that is going on right now.
Hi, Tom!
Good afternoon!
I tried to imagine the world 41 years from now. Wow! That difficult exercise!
I will be in 76 years ...
But how would the world be? And how I wish the world to me and my friends?
Better quality of life, world peace, less violence, less people stressed, less depressed people, more friends, more respect with people, more respect with the planet, more care and attention from people ...
If we succeed in these things, I would be a mature lady very happy !
It is so over-populated!!!!! With women being allowed to continuing having children and the the government paying them to have children, what can we expect?????
How about the country overseas, where the government paid the people were paid to have children, then it all fell apart and the children were left to fend for themselves.
Pedophiles were taking advantage of their problem.
How mean !!!!!!!! I say help for one child, after that you are on your own. Father's must be just as responsible as the mothers.
You have got that right. Even if everyone in the USA reduces their energy consumption by 30% over the next 40 years (not likely given all the new toys we have every day) the "family of man" will need more energy than we use today. Where is all that energy going to come from?
I think the number was something like 15TW about 2000 and the projection is 60+TW by 2100. That is a lot more oil/coal/gas/wind/water/etc to develop.
Let it snow, or let it rain,
Prediction for Wall street sometime hard, however, there are looser and winner. People right now think twice before get baby, because of the economy turmoil, so it is hard to predict the growth rate.
Please send my regard to Mr. Roland Martin.
Thanks anyway and have a lovely day.
Anderson,
I understand, and agree that the earth's population is staggering. Many criticize China, and their methods to control their own population as unethical. We all have to consider, now, the devastating effects of over population, many of the examples you have already mentioned. Still, as with human nature, we have a tendency to realize too late down the line, the damages we cause the planet, when it reaches our own back yard. The human animal is the most dangerous threat to civilization. In the immediate future...we will start seeing the effects of over production, over pollution, and over population reach our front porches. There will not be a need for a war on terror, but there will be a new war, and that will be for water. You should look into it Anderson, it has already begun.
Maybe we can start more wars to get the killing under way.
Great article – very well put.... Now what do we do? Stop people from having babies?
Tom, If you read Revelation when judgement falls 1/4 of the earths population will be killed then 1/3rd of what is left – when we reach 7 billion people do the math on that one. scary.
Tom,
We are definitely over populating this earth and totally annihilating our natural resources because of it. It's scary to think what will happen when there isn't enough to go around for us all! But really what can we do to stop it short of making laws on how many kids people can have per family?
Cindy..Ga.
This is why birth control and abortion need to be supported freely and without charge by all governments in the world. And nobody should ever be having 14 children unless they are damned sure they're going to be rich enough that they can take care of them without government help.
Its not about "morally acceptable", its about having the space and resources to take care of us all.