The only graph that really matters ...

[Smiles]

Malthus got it right (in general, sparing details). We're doomed! And rather soon actually.
Mind you, we are all individually doomed in the existential arena anyway, but this graph points very dramatically to a nasty fate for the whole planet sometime in the next few hundred years, (as long as it doesn't happen By Other Means).

This graph is quite undeniable (unlike climate change which, though quite true, is denied or ignored by billions), irreversible, inevitable, and frankly non-fixable unless horribly draconian stuff is not legislated by governments en masse and in tandem.

Forget natural disasters, depressions, wars, periodic famines in mostly poor countries etc etc etc all those calamity's pale in comparison to the very simple fact that soon there will just too many damn people on this (now) green earth to feed.

This famous (but often ignored) graph only extrapolates out as far as 2025, but it's just a century beyond that when the shit will really start hitting the fan. I have no kids or grand kids but I have loads of friends who do. For them, I think this will a sad and ravaged planet to live on.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v18/sawatdeephotos/pop.jpg

[Sen Yai]

Smiles, I don't think you have interpreted the data in the graph correctly and the future may not be quite as bleak as you think.

I've turned your graph on it's side and stuck a line through the year 2000 to make to easier to see the trend:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v291/SenYai/pop.jpg

It is the rate of increase in population that is alarming and you can see that the world population doubled from 1 to 2 billion between approx 1980 and 2000 (according to your graph) which is a period of just 20 years. But it doubled again from 2 to 4 billion in a very short period around the turn of the century - it's not really possible to scale the time period here because the curve on the graph is so steep.

However, the rate of increase suggested by your graph then slows significantly with the next doubling of the population (from 4 to 8 billion) taking maybe 10 years again. The curve then suggests that the rate of increase slows dramatically and the we could predict that the next doubling of the population (at a point some 15cm /6") to the right will probably never be reached.

Google has a nice tool (powered by stats from the world bank)that allows you to produce comparative graphs for the rate of population increase in various countries of the world. Predictably, the most significant rates of growth are seen in China and India (http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_pop_totl&tdim=true&dl=en&hl=en&q=world+population#met=sp_pop_totl&idim=country:CHN:IND), but a comparison between western European nations and the USA (http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_pop_totl&tdim=true&dl=en&hl=en&q=world+population#met=sp_pop_totl&idim=country:USA:CAN:FRA:DEU:BEL:NLD:GBR) is also interesting.

There are some answers of course:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v291/SenYai/Great.jpg

or

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v291/SenYai/porn.jpg

[Thai Dyed]

you can see that the world population doubled from 1 to 2 billion between approx 1980 and 2000 (according to your graph) which is a period of just 20 years. But it doubled again from 2 to 4 billion in a very short period around the turn of the century

Actually, the world population in 1927 was about 2 billion. By 1974 it was 4 billion. Today it is just short of 7 billion.

Clean water is an enormous problem. The seas are all but fished out. Not to mention the all too frequent occurrence of "Black Swan" events. I think the situation is hopeless and will become worse by leaps and bounds. What? Fifty years? That begins to sound like an eternity. I'd forget about the century long predictions.

I think J. G. Ballard got it right in 1960 when he said: "It┬╣s always been assumed that the evolutionary slope reaches forever upwards, but in fact the peak has already been reached, the pathway now leads downwards to the common biological grave. It┬╣s a despairing and at present unacceptable vision of the future, but it┬╣s the only one." -J. G. Ballard, "The Voices of Time", 1960.

The solution has been with us since the year 1729 when Jonathan Swift wrote his famous essay "A Modest Proposal" http://emotionalliteracyeducation.com/classic_books_online/mdprp10.htm. For those who cannot be bothered to read it here is the essential quote from the piece:

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance
in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year
old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether
stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it
will equally serve in a fricasie, or a ragoust.

What Smiles is telling us with this graph is that humanity has been getting it wrong in recent centuries.
The true villains of our species are, in fact, the likes of Louis Pasteur; Joseph Lister and Alexander Fleming.
Our receivers of Nobel prizes should have been philanthropists like Stalin; Hitler,Mao and great inventors like Mikhail Kalashnikov and Robert Oppenheimer.
Allied planes should not now be bombing Gaddafi or the Taliban but their targets should be the factories of Glaxo, Pfizer, Roche etc.
Let the Israelis and the Arabs fight it out to the last man - there's enough of us already.
Genocide and starvation are the products of natural selection and do-gooders such as M├йdecins Sans Fronti├иres and Bob Geldoff are grossly irresponsible.

Being gay is, in fact, the responsible choice and has little to do with genetics or environment. We queers, poofs and arse-bandits are saving the planet.

[Thai Dyed]

Being gay is, in fact, the responsible choice and has little to do with genetics or environment. We queers, poofs and arse-bandits are saving the planet.

You are absolutely correct Roger. And while I hate to get all religious about it, this is exactly why I joined the Church of Euthanasia years ago.

http://www.churchofeuthanasia.org/

Here is our beloved founder and pastor, Reverend Chrissy Corda:

[attachment=2:28bi31ma]chrissy.jpg[/attachment:28bi31ma][attachment=1:28bi31ma]snuffit1.jpg[/attachment:28bi31ma]

And exactly what you had suggested in your Swift quote, one of my favourite of all church activities, a fetus BBQ:
[attachment=0:28bi31ma]Fetus BBQ.jpg[/attachment:28bi31ma]

I think equally important is how life expectancy has changed in the last 200 years.

Here is a fascinating You Tube clips that makes statistics more than just some dry numbers.
[youtube:13tfzoee]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo[/youtube:13tfzoee]

[thonglor55]

We're doomed! And rather soon actually.And it's not yet April 1. Nice try, Chicken Little.

[Beachlover]

We're doomed! And rather soon actually.
Smiles, why would you care? You'll probably be dead in 20-30 years. :rolling:

[jinks]

You'll probably be dead in 20-30 years. :rolling:

You two might be, I however intend to outlive everybody.

If I get it right there will be no mourners at my burning.

[Thai Dyed]

Here are some more stunning charts, 23 of them, from a financial news source today to add to that of Smiles on population:

http://www.businessinsider.com/human-pr ... 011-3?op=1 (http://www.businessinsider.com/human-progress-charts-2011-3?op=1)

I think that anyone expecting a rosy future, in any way, shape, or form, is out of his fucking mind.

[elephantspike]

There are plenty of resources on the planet to sustain 12 billion people happily. The problem is that the resources are being hoarded by a tiny elite that believe that they own the Earth and that we are breathing "their" air and they want us all to die (and in the meantime pay a substantial portion of our incomes for carbon taxes) . I'm not buying it. Anyone who believes in Population Reduction should step-up and demonstrate their sincerity by killing themselves. I cannot believe how gullible we have become. Now we are begging for world government to cull us like livestock.

Do not despair, haters of humanity and the sheep that follow them, there are plenty of calamities already upon us that will greatly thin our numbers, and unlike The Black Plague, radiation will not produce any future generations that would be immune to its destruction.

God bless and God save Humanity.

And now for a completely contrarian view.

http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/kas/kas_01overpopulation.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAIv15fWfHg&feature=player_embedded

Then there is this opinion:

Sometime late this year a baby will emerge from the womb of its mother, draw its first breath, and announce its arrival into the world with a tiny cry. Thus will Baby Seven Billion be born.
Everyone agrees that Baby Seven Billion's birthday - the day that our planet becomes home to seven billion human beings - marks an important milestone. But is it a milestone on humanity's upward path that we should celebrate, or a warning sign of impending catastrophe?
The prophets of doom and gloom, of population bombs and the baby booms, would have preferred that Baby Seven Billion had never been born.
We at PRI have a different take on the matter. We believe that the birth of Baby Seven Billion is cause for celebration.

Read the whole article here (it's not very long):
http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mos/mos_188sevenbillion.html

[thonglor55]

Lest the usual gang of thonglor55-bashers start their constant cry that I am no more than a light-weight peddling facile one-liners (guilty as charged), I should say that I find it unbelievable that people are still repeating the sort of unscientific extrapolation promoted by Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome - but then I am constantly surprised by the foolishness of the vast majority (and find it a constant source of amusement). For an opposing view, try http://overpopulationisamyth.com/overpo ... -of-a-myth (http://overpopulationisamyth.com/overpopulation-the-making-of-a-myth) and for one of many examples about Ehrlich's discredited ideas then http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/ ... l-warming/ (http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/armageddon-wars-overpopulation-vs-global-warming/)

[Smiles]

" ... Smiles, why would you care? You'll probably be dead in 20-30 years...."
This may well feel like an impossibility (given the source), but one of these days, perhaps 20 or 30 years from now, Beachlover will actually tell me/us something I don't know.
Right now however, the regular infantile twaddle.

[Beachlover]

I think that anyone expecting a rosy future, in any way, shape, or form, is out of his fucking mind.
Thai Dyed... What is up with the psychotic crystal ball?

I mean, how could the future be any better? I don't have to live through a military occupation as one of my grandparents did. I don't have to go to war against communist insurgents as my Dad did. I don't have to live in a shitty little hut sharing one small room with several siblings as my Mum did. I won't have to sell my home to put the kids through university as some of my Aunties/Uncles are having to do now... Life's awesome in this day and age!

[thonglor55]

I don't have to live through a military occupation as one of my grandparents did. I don't have to go to war against communist insurgents as my Dad did. I don't have to live in a shitty little hut sharing one small room with several siblings as my Mum did!There you go, Surfcrest - not Flippino but Vietnamese (as I've been saying for some time)

[elephantspike]

Hey, I have an idea. How about vertical farming? http://www.verticalfarm.com/

How do millions of people live on a 23 square mile chunk of pavement known as Manhattan without having to literally walk over each other all the time? Well, it's because they live and work in tall buildings. Pretty simple. Farming can be done like this too. Just build up. Its better than everyone dying. Worth a try at least.

The producers of these charts about the population to land mass ratio don't even want to consider that though. They just want us to accept that we all must die. That the planet is broken and that it is not the fault of BP or Tepco, but the fault of you and me because we breathe air. Co2 Bad, Radiation, good.

I am not buying it. There ARE solutions, we just need to find them and make them work.

[quiet1]

If I get it right there will be no mourners at my burning.
Some might say you've taken care of that already with your forum moderation efforts. :rolling: