... to think 7 billion people is enough.

[GentlemanGin]

Global population will reach 7 billion this year,

In 1950 it was about 2.3 billion
In 1800 was just 1 billion.

UN projection is 10.1 billion in 2100

Where do we stop ? Or won't we and just descend into conflict as resources disappear ?

Personally I think this is the biggest problem facing humankind yet it's rarely discussed in politics.

The problem in the west is that the birth rate is too low. There are too many dependents per working person. This is going to be a massive problem for china in 20 years too.

And what about our way of life? I believe in western secular democratic liberalism. That will die if we dont reproduce. Where i live, Scotland, there is an underpopulation problem. We have vast swathes of undeveloped land and an abundance of natural resources. Imo, population is a local not a global issue.

Pootles it won't happen like that in Somalia, Ethiopia, etc, their culture is totally different to ours, they just keep having children they can't afford to feed because it is part of their culture to do that. It's only by persuading the prospective parents (not just the women) of the advantage of having two children who survive to adulthood rather than 12, 8 of whom die, that any change will be made.

Empowering women in developing countries to have more control over their reproduction, and ensuring that more of their infants survive to adulthood, would sort the problem.

DC would enthusiastically vote for the Dino option, too .

mumblechum1 I agree something has to change in continents like Africa and Asia, but there is a very large Elephant in the room , contraception.

ragged Yes to dinosaurs, I'd rather get eaten by a dinosaur than die from bird flu.

I know Mumble thats why i said it would just be in the west.

working9while5-
'I think it every time I see that ad that says 8 million children die unnecessarily every year.. I think, well if they didn't, the world would be chaos.'

and you think that a world where 8 million children die every year isn't already in chaos?!

I don't have the answers but if it was your child dying a preventable death you might have a very different perspective.

soz Pootles didn't read it properly

Catastrophe - it's a series about global catastrophes through the earth's history that enabled human life to begin, and ultimately predicts it will end. I didn't make it clear before, but I was talking about meteor type disasters, global warming/super volcanoes etc. Not starvation and wars/genocide which honestly I don't think would make that much of a dent in the world's population. Personally I'm convinced that we - all of us - will get wiped out by some natural disaster, just like the dinosaurs. The only question to me is when, and it could be any day...

we have known this for a long time it is nothing new

did it stop those on here including myself having children no but we are happy to dictate to others how many they should have

Exactly Freudian. We throw away a third of our food, have as many children as we like, and then have the vanity to say that it's Africa and Asia's problem, and that famine and war will sort them out naturally.

In countries where women have the means to control their fertility and where there is state help for people in their old age, most people only choose to have 2 or 3 children. Large families are the exception in the UK and other wealthy countries.

"In countries where women have the means to control their fertility and where there is state help for people in their old age, most people only choose to have 2 or 3 children. Large families are the exception in the UK and other wealthy countries."

That is the key to solving the problem. The birthrate will come down when poor countries become wealthier, their women are empowered and when their citizens have access to education, healthcare and welfare. Will be complex to achieve. Taking an interest in the worlds poor and not just callously assuming nature will sort it out would be a start. I'm disgusted by some of the posts on here.

"Famine is not nice" an understatement rather on a par with "Hitler was a bit of a naughty boy".

Could it be anything to do with cleaner water and other health issues that are addressed more now in undeveloped countries that enable more children to survive to adulthood?

Are there projections for the implications of the Chinese one child policy? As previous posters said, it's going to be kicking in in a couple of decades, plus the preference for boys which skewed the sex balance will also limit the number of potential children going forward.

I'm not suggesting it as a policy that any other country should make, but in theory it should half the population of China eventually surely? Or did it not work like that?

Damn when I opened this I really hoped it was going to say .........for a game of Twister.

But it didn't

I would like to think that by the time we have got to the point of the planet being totally stripped of all resources we'll have gone all star trek and be populating many other planets and have spaceships and crap like that.

Then hopefully when the sun does what suns do (implode, explode, extinguish, blackhole - I dunno) we'll all be living on different planets anyway.

Famine isn?t nice.

That has to be THE biggest understatement I have ever heard.

:o

opps, :o was at friedRice

I think we're doing our bit in this country. A generation of children brought up on fruitshoots and mcdonalds who would rather play on a DS than ride a bike. Who's going to want to shag them?

There are obvious answers.

The developed world - especially the USA - stops consuming too many of the earth's resources per person.

We educate the world's women.

If we just let new imbalance try to solve systemic imbalance we are all fucked.