While researching on IVF, I came across sites predicting whats going to happen to the world population levels. Anyways I wanted to get your thoughts about this.

Can the earth sustain eg. 50 billion people, will the population ever get to that size?? Do you think nature will cause a natural disater or medical epidemic that will wipe out heaps of the worlds population.

Predicting the future to an accurate 100% is impossible.

I could just fall over and die before i finish the sentense.
You you could die before you finish reading this sentense.

Getting to 50 Billion? well as much people are born, people are dyieng aswell. I dont know if the death rate is less than the growth rate.

Anyway, yeah, lets just see what happens.
Maybe we need to set up houses on the moon

Before von Haber came up with his ingenius way of catalysing the formation of NH4 during WWII the maximum population the world could support was about 4 billion. Therefore we can see a major barrier to population is agriculture. With fairly rapid changes in climate due in some respects to global warming we are beginning to see some strains - in fact according to one documentary the US recently ran out of food for the first time in decades. Add to that our energy crisis and social changes (50% divorce in Western countries!) and you can clearly see that population growth, certainly proportionally, will probably very much slow over the forseeable future.

Sex Ban?

No need

Modern contraceptives are very effective and still ensure the maximal "experience"

what is your source for this statement. i haven't seen this before

I don't remember I'm sorry - it was a TV documentary. Unfortunately I haven't done geography now for a number of years but you are welcome to research further on this topic. I think it was related to El Nino/Nino effect.

Also global warming and the resultant seal leavel rise will result in large areas of land becoming either deserts or underwater thus putting pressure on existing infrastructure and agricultaral production and the space that is available for populations to inhabit

Fatty, fatty two by four...

Land of the free? Take a look around. More like land of the lard asses, if you ask me. If there's a food shortage, this is the first I've heard of it.

GoSpinBoy

I won't go into the vicious social tiering that rips at the heart of America...I'm sure you understand the poor lack more than food...

But suffice to say that there are very little problems in agriculture now but there are growing signs that this may hold population back (which is the topic).

Fat people in America does not mean there isn't a problem in the world about food shortage. Look at Ethopia and Somalia and various other places in the world. But the point I was trying to make was that the birth rate by far outweighs the death rate, so what will happen to the world population. I read somewhere by 2100 the world population will be close 30 billion. I mean there is not enough resources on this planet to support so much people. And there is continuall shortage of freshwater even here in Australia, our Dams ar about 50% countrywide.

Maybe Im worring to much , were all gonna die anyways lol.

Offtopic*
Reading that article was quite interesting, being fat is not a crime but people who dont even try to lose weight annoys me the most.

Well getting to 50 billion may be a stretch considering

-Asia already has child limitation laws
-War kills many people
-Diseases that are already present

I mean you could just keep going. But I'm not going to be worried about it since I'm 100% sure I won't be a live when we go from our present 6 billion to 50 billion.

As far as i know, the birth rate outnumbers the death rate, so the population is sefinately increasing.

I believe that in the future this planet could sustain 50 billion+ people. The earths ability to sustain its inhabitants has increased with its inhabitants will to prolong life. How many people could the world keep alive 2000 years ago? not as many as it can today. it wasnt physically possible. today it would be impossible to keep 50 billion people alive on this planet. But in the future. I also think that epidemic and natural disasters dont really need to be considered. the plague in the mid 1300s killed huge ammounts of people yet that didnt stop the population that survived from repopulating europe. Today they have far more people than they did back then.

i believe that things will advance just as they have over the past centuries and the world will eventually be able to sustain 50 billion.

I was responding to a previous post by Zoga50 that claimed there was a food shortage in the United States, not comment on the world as a whole.



Wow. That's pretty good. Sounds positively Charles Dickensesque.

I would suggest to you there is more opportunity for upward mobility in the US than anywhere else in the world, your over-the-top hyperbole notwithstanding.

GoSpinBoy

@ GoSpinBoy

Well for all your literature appreciation skills you got my nuances wrong. The documentary said "the US ran out of food" not "there was a food shortage in the US". Do you understand the difference? It doesn't mean your local AMI central (ie McDonald's) is suddenly going to shut its doors it means that the gross volume produced by the US either did not meet the quota of recent years or could not meet demands. Since the US is rich importing foods is not a problem.

That's all there is. It wasn't meant to be a political discussion but since you spasm every time I mention the US it's turned into one.

But other than that I'll debate you any day over the inequalities that exist in the US that is the disgust of the rest of the free world

Even allowing for differences between American English and Australian English, what are you saying when you write "the US ran out of food"?

In my world, running out of something means you don't have any more of it. When I go to my local bar (pub) and they tell me they've run out of Molsen, they're telling me they don't have any (shortage), not that they're importing it from the bar (pub) down the street.

So, no, I guess I don't understand the difference -- at least as you've described it.

All that being said, you're still wrong. According to USDA stats the US is the world's leading exporter of farm products. The narrowing of the US's agriculture trade surplus isn't the result of insufficient domestic production, but sluggish foreign demand from economies (especially Asian) that cannot afford to import as much farm products (including American) .

At the same time, the US economy has chugged along at a relatively healthy clip and the US has continued to snarf down as much cheese as the French can produce.

USDA Linky



Since you've apparently already polled the rest of the free world , I suspect you've already made up your mind, but you might want to review Alan Reynolds' (The Cato Institute) column on US income distribution that appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal.

GoSpinBoy
(Spasm free since 2003)

I'm American and I'm not fat...infact not even close to beign overweight.