Hi everyone,
An interesting article about the human population numbers.. Is over population the problem or over consumption?
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220905-is-the-world-overpopulated**********
On the uncannily specific date of 15 November 2022, the United Nations has predicted that there will be eight billion humans alive at the same time – up to 800,000 times as many as there were survivors of the Toba catastrophe.
Today, our population is so enormous, with such little genetic diversity – outside Africa – one researcher recently observed it's actually not that surprising that some people look uncannily similar to perfect strangers – there's a limited gene pool that's constantly being recycled and around 370,000 new opportunities (in the form of babies born) for these genetic coincidences to occur each day.
But with humanity's expanding population has come great division. Some view our rising numbers as an unprecedented success story – in fact, there's an emerging school of thought that we actually need more people. In 2018 the tech billionaire Jeff Bezos predicted a future in which our population will reach a new decimal milestone, in the form of a trillion humans scattered across our Solar System – and announced that he's planning ways to achieve it.
Others, meanwhile – including the British broadcaster and natural historian Sir David Attenborough – have labelled our swarming masses a "plague on the Earth". In this view, nearly every environmental problem we're currently facing, from climate change to biodiversity loss, water stresses and conflicts over land, can be traced back to our rampant reproduction over the last few centuries. Back in 1994 – when the global population was a mere 5.5 billion – a team of researchers from Stanford University, in California, calculated that the ideal size of our species would be between 1.5 and 2 billion people.
However, though the degree to which humanity will continue to expand across the planet is still to be decided, some trajectories have already been set. And one is that the human population is likely to continue to grow for some time, regardless of any possible efforts to decrease it.
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Any views?
Sriram
