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Valke2
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Nice talking with you. You raised a lot of intereting points. I can sleep easy now.
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stbruno
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russell007
Guest
Just 2.5% of the planet’s water is fresh. Less than 1% is readily available for human consumption because some of the fresh water is stored in the form of ice bergs.
Is this an issue for 6.7 billion people?
Probably so
Heres more to consider the pollution of rivers and lakes reduces accessible freshwater supplies. Each year roughly 450 cubic kilometres of wastewater are discharged into rivers, streams and lakes. To dilute and transport this dirty water before it can be used again, another 6,000 cubic kilometres of clean water are needed - an amount equal to about two-thirds of the world’s total annual useable fresh water runoff.
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Neil_Anthony
Guest
100 billion
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mpi
Guest
It is disgusting to hear Catholics talk about the world being overpopulated. This is the same junk that Malthus spouted 300 years ago. The evidence is in - for thousands of years now the quality of life has gone up as the global population of humans has gone up. Even though science is on the side of those who believe the planet needs more people, what matters is that God is on our side.
Essentially (reverting back to the science) economies of scale that allow for quality of life breakthroughs (e.g car, vaccines, etc) become possible only with larger populations. The only “resource shortage” is people - the more we have the better off we are.
Isn’t funny how science eventually shows what God says is true?
Essentially (reverting back to the science) economies of scale that allow for quality of life breakthroughs (e.g car, vaccines, etc) become possible only with larger populations. The only “resource shortage” is people - the more we have the better off we are.
Isn’t funny how science eventually shows what God says is true?
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Neil_Anthony
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Well lets see, the earth has 148,940,000 km² of land. My apartment is 600 square feet and I fit in it just fine.
lets see… 2.6 square km per square mile… 5280 feet in a mile… 600 square feet is 55 square meters, 18150 people per square kilometer to have each one apartment like mine,
2.7 trillion people can fit on the earth comfortably. More if you build the apartments in two or more story buildings.
lets see… 2.6 square km per square mile… 5280 feet in a mile… 600 square feet is 55 square meters, 18150 people per square kilometer to have each one apartment like mine,
2.7 trillion people can fit on the earth comfortably. More if you build the apartments in two or more story buildings.
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Calliso
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Yes but that doesn;t address availablity of land to grow food or raise food on. Or the availablity of fresh water which is probably even more of a concern. Because like it was pointed out before fresh water is not an unlimited resource in fact it is pretty rare.
And the thing is once the oil really starts to get low/ run out, unless we have a replacement for it things are going to get pretty bad. Basically our whole way of life is made possible by oil.
As for how many people there should be. I really donlt know. At almost 7 billion people well that is a lot of people. And while I think at this time the earth could handle more…if no when the oil runs out…what then? Not to mention I do have to worry about the other inhabitants of the planet. As our population growth has pushed some of them to endangerment or even extinction in one way or another.
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Neil_Anthony
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We could build floating houses on the ocean, and desalinate the water for personal use using solar power.
DOn’t worry about the poor people when we run out of oil. They don’t have cars or anything anyway. They won’t even notice its gone.
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mpi
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I am new to this forum. I assumed everybody was Catholic.Actually, I haven’t seen any Catholics do that in this thread, so you can rest easy.
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RobertLGarrett
Guest
Welcome to CAF. Most people will have their religion listed in their profile, if you click on their name. Some will have N/A…most of the time, they aren’t Catholics, but not always. We are an open forum, so we get a lot of non-Catholics. Some are here because they are curious, some because they enjoy the discourse with Catholics, some because they are trying to convert us, ridicule us, etc.
I think the ones in this thread are of the “enjoy the discourse” type.
BTW…that is not to say that we won’t get a Catholic or two who believes in population control.
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mpi
Guest
It seems as though too many people have learned their economics from the Sierra Club and Paul Ehrlich.
The reality is that three things take place when a resource becomes “depleted”
- Conservation takes place
- People get better at extracting the resource from nature
- Substitutes are found
The market has used these mechanisms successfully throughout history. Doomesday sayers like yourself said about 450 years ago that there would be no trees left soon because they were being used up heating homes and building boats. Soon after that metal boats were invented and coal was used for heating.
You can always use a simplistic analysis to say that the world will be without some critical resource in the near future. This analysis always becomes bunk if the 3 mechanisms mentioned above are not considered. They have, after all, been saying that we have 20 years of oil left for 100 years now…
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apromisemade
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You pose an interesting question. Perhaps you are indirectly asking how many of us should there be in order for everyone to live well and for us to have some sort of a balance with the natural world? There were several people in the past who predicted by the year blank the world would run out of food. But all those projected times have passed and the population is not in decline for lack of food (or at least it doesn’t seem to be). The problem as far as quality of life is not amount but distribution. There is enough actual food in the world for everyone to have more than enough, it is just concentrated in certain areas.
As far as enviormental impact, in terms of individual countries it is not so much a question populations as resource access. Despite the lack of proper pollution control and waste management in such a country, a person living in a rural villiage in Peru has far less impact on the enviorment than a person living in an American suburb.
I think though, that we can all agree the population is a little out of hand. I read somewhere that the Vatican did in fact acknowledge this. Proper education and adaquate healthcare actually has been proven to reduce the birthrate. When people begin to focus on quality rather than quantity, they tend to have fewer children.
As far as enviormental impact, in terms of individual countries it is not so much a question populations as resource access. Despite the lack of proper pollution control and waste management in such a country, a person living in a rural villiage in Peru has far less impact on the enviorment than a person living in an American suburb.
I think though, that we can all agree the population is a little out of hand. I read somewhere that the Vatican did in fact acknowledge this. Proper education and adaquate healthcare actually has been proven to reduce the birthrate. When people begin to focus on quality rather than quantity, they tend to have fewer children.
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CWBetts
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The real problem lies in the population and urbanization rates around the gobe. In recently industrialized societies, birth rates remain high, and the poverty in the rural areas are causing mass migrations to the cities, and the fastest growing cities (Like Jakarta, Indonesia and Kinshasha, DRC) are growing faster than the cities can keep up with, resulting in overcrowding, runaway unemployment, and endemic poverty. However in the post-industrial societies, birth rates are much lower, even to the point of not even producing enough children to maintain current population levels. Population control is really not something to be worried about. Caertain areas are overpopulated, but as they become more industrialized, birht rates should decrease, and I believe that at some point we may actually see the population of the earth start to decrese overall, and not simply be a regional penomenon.
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Gamera
Guest
Do you know why the global population has doubled since 1960? Not because of the number of babies being born, but because lifespans have dramatically increased. With lifespans and birthrates what they are now, the earth’s population will max out at about 10 billion in mid-century, then plummet back down again.
This planet can support far more people than it now has. Lack of proper food and water distribution is our fault, not an inherent problem in the environment.
Yes, the situation of “starving people” is a serious problem, and we solve it by eliminating the “starving” part, not by eliminating the “people” part!
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mpi
Guest
Saying that resource shortages are bad because people died on Easter Island is like saying capitalism is bad because companies go out of business. The only way to ensure that no isolated society dies off is global totalitarianism and the only way to make sure that no company goes out of business is to have a communist government. In a free society however, isolated groups may be founded - and then may die off, just as companies may be freely founded and then go out of business.
It was precisely the lack of humanity (i.e. isolation from other populations) that caused Easter Island to die off. It is the networking of many people and populations that allows the synergies of economies of scale.
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Valke2
Guest
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That’s the oddest statement I ever heard. IN the last 100 years we have irrevocably used about 40-50% of the planet’s natural resources, not including oil and coal. However, even if I thought abortion was the best moral choice a person could ever make, I don’t believe it would address the proeblem of overpopulation. The solution needs to focus on cleaner renewable energy and a vastly more efficienct use of the resources we have left.
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Valke2
Guest
Now that’s solid science
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Valke2
Guest
I can agree with you on one thing. You CAN always use a simplisitic analysis to say that the world will be without some critical resource in the near future. Why could be more simplistic then to say "don’t worry. when oil runs out we find something else?
Or to say “the coral reefs will come back”, or “the ice will return” or "we will invent better ways to feed everyone.
But since we both agree that something will be done, why not agree that we need to do it now? While we still have some forest, some glacial/artic ice, some biodiversity, and some wetlands?
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