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Before anybody jumps in and thinks I am some sort of a racist or bigot of some kind I am not condoning, recommending or otherwise supporting any sort of population limitation or control. This thread is being started as it was suggested as a topic for discussion when this blog was initially created.
Going back about 10,000 years, when the human race first started to move away from a pure subsistence and roaming existence, to a society that was generally fixed in location and cultivated crops, the global population was around 5 million. For the population to double back then it took around 2,000 years. By the year 1 AD the population had increased to around 200 million and was doubling roughly every 1,200 years. By the end of the 20th century the population had reached 6 billion and unless something happens will double in a little over 200 years.
Since we live on a very finite rock called Earth, with finite resources, we can clearly not expect the rapidly increasing growth in population to continue, without some dramatic changes taking place. Many believe that the world is already way over populated and that trying to house, feed, clothe and supply the energy needs is already overtaxing the planets resources. Of the more than 6 billion people on Earth a relatively small minority are responsible for the majority of the consumptions of the finite resources and energy. If the standard of living of all is to be raised to that of the few that are fortunate enough to live in the developed nations, the impact on the planet would most likely be catastrophic and we would quickly deplete the remaining reserves of minerals, fuels etcetera.
Clearly we can't continue the way we are with an accelerating population growth as well as increasing rate individuals are consuming energy and resources without something drastic happening. To date this series has looked at either ways of reducing our energy requirements or being more frugal with what we have. However another solution would be to control and or reduce the population to a level that the planet could safely support.
The Peoples Republic of China has for some time had a policy of one child per family that was introduced in an attempt to curb population growth. However, it has had some fairly unanticipated effects particularly in farming communities where there is a need for young male children to carry on running the farms. Authorities ultimately had to severely limit the use and access to pre natal ultrasound scans as people were using it to selectively abort female fetuses. It has also led to births not being reported and bogus information being supplied to census takers. As a result the program has not been implemented equally and due to the bogus information collected during censuses there is no way to know with any certainty what the actual population is.
Over the period that humans have been the predominant species on earth nature has intervened in various ways to reduce the population both on a local and global basis. There is a long list of catastrophic events that have severely limited the growth of the human population. However, the most devastating of these events must be the pandemics that have ravaged the population several times since records were first kept.
The first recorded outbreak of bubonic plague started in Egypt in 541 AD and ran pretty much unchecked across the known world for over 200 years. At the height it was reportedly killing 10,000 people a day in Constantinople and by the time it eventually subsided it may have killed between 50% and 60% of the population of the known world.
One of the main limiting factors in the control of pandemics has been the relatively short incubation period of most diseases coupled with the slow transport and lack of mobility of the population in general. Prior to WWI most people never traveled more than a few kilometres from their homes. This, coupled with diseases that only took several days to demonstrate symptoms, meant that the spread of disease was severely limited. However, with the introduction of mass migration and the advances in transport that came about leading up to and during WWI people could travel fairly large distances before becoming symptomatic. The outbreak of Spanish Influenza in 1918 to 1919 is believed to have been spread throughout the world by troops returning home after WWI. While it was only a short lived pandemic compared to others in history, estimates at the time put the global death toll between 40 and 50 million people. However, more recent estimates put the death toll at somewhere between 50 and 100 million making it the most deadly of all pandemic events to date.
With the advances in technology during and since WWII it is now possible for a carrier to be anywhere on earth within 24 hours making the control and limitation of the spread of diseases like the Spanish Influenza almost impossible. Health organizations around the world are extremely concerned with the Avian Influenza H5N1 virus. Currently the H5N1 virus can only be transmitted to humans by birds. While migratory birds have the potential to spread the virus throughout the world its spread amongst humans is severely limited. However, if the H5N1 virus were to co-infect somebody or something that was also infected with an influenza virus that can be spread by human to human contact, the results could very well be a variant of the H5N1 virus that can be directly transmitted between humans. If this were to happen the results could well be a pandemic that makes the Spanish Influenza outbreak of 1918-1919 look like a head cold.
You can read more from the following links:
As usual this raises a myriad of questions, many of which are ethical and highly emotive. Firstly does anybody have the right to do as the Chinese Government has and force people to have fewer children? If we do not find some way to curb our ever accelerating population growth then there is a good chance that nature will step in and do it for us, but in a far less palatable way. Can we therefore afford not to act and find some way to stem the growth in human population and at least limit it to something like the current population? If everybody were to have a standard of living that was comparable to that of the richer and more developed countries of the western world how many people could the planet realistically support? Can we ever expect to develop sustainable technologies that can feed, cloth and supply energy to the current population let alone an ever increasing population?
It is definitely a very curly subject and unfortunately the only answers that currently seem to be possible are all less than desirable.
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Re: Future Energy Sources 5.0 Reduction of Energy Demand Through Population Limi
