Seven People Are Not Enough

Seven People Are Not Enough Lex Loeb, Yahoo Contributor Network . Seven billion people on earth is actually an amazing success story. It is a story that is being told in the mass media as if it is some kind of secret we need to be ashamed of as human beings. The environmentalist consciousness mixed with Malthusian perceptions is all you can expect to hear or read about. The big message is always the same 7 billion people , a dead canary in a coal mine, unsustainable industry and agriculture, exploitation , exploitation , exploitation of the 'earth's resources' , pollution dire consequences, sustainable world population, environmental degradation. Get it? Yes you have heard it all before . Over and over again like some kind of Stalinist propaganda from bigger wind bags on the TV, on the radio, in cataclysmic movie after cataclysmic movie ad infinitum. The next thing is Chem trail conspiracies because a super secret society of unsavory character international bankers are plotting to end what is commonly called the population bomb. Bomb? The idea that unchecked human population growth is like a bomb going off comes from the infamous Malthus bacterial petri dish where an explosion in the population of bacteria ultimately consumes all the resources in the petri dish and all of the bacteria in the colony parish in one great miniature petri dish size extinction. That is the analogy where the fear of population growth originally comes from. The evidence for the hazards of a population bomb does not come from any real life phenomenology. It is true the population has surged almost to become asymptotic on a world population chart. Looking at the world population chart going back to times when humans were hunter gatherers and numbered less than one million people on earth for millennia very little changes until perhaps the early bronze age and then for roughly 5000 years the population of humans reaches a higher plateau and stays there until Classic Ancient civilizations appear. There maybe ten to fifty million people on earth total for 1500 to 2000 years. It is not until after the industrial revolution begins and before 1900 that the next major surge in human population occurs and that brings the world population up to maybe a billion total world wide up until around 1950 which seems to be a critical point on the chart when population growth just flies off the chart into the stratosphere. It is hardly a population "bomb". It is the amazing success of a natural occurring species to something that had never been done by any species before it. 1950 really is not the critical year for anything it just happens to be the point in time where certain things all came together to allow mankind to become a much more successful species. When you go to one of those charts showing world population growth that present the great surge in population after 1850 and an greater surge after 1950 as if some reason for hysterical fear you have to realize that most of the charts are missing very important dates of things that happened that made all of this population growth possible. 1879 was the year that the first vaccine was discovered. It was discovered not put into widespread use at that date. That date should be pinpointed on every world population chart but is not. The next date is 1926. That is the year that the penicillin world's first antibiotic was discovered. That was not the date were use of antibiotics was commonplace but is has everything to do with the 1950 and after population surge of humans from one to two billion people to seven and counting. Other dates that should be pin pointed on the chart include the Polio vaccine which does seem to correspond to what happens after 1950 in the greatest human surge of population ever. The reality is that science and scientific methodology are 100% responsible for the great surge of populations in the past 200 years. One Vaccine after the next made a huge dent in mortality rates/ infant mortality rates adding the phenomenal advent of antibiotics and you now know why populations have grown as fast as they have. There are other factors of course. The ability to produce clean drinking water preceded vaccines. Most great ancient cities required easy access to clean drinking water and means of disposing of human waste safely in order to exist . That was true on at least 5 continents. It was not just the Malthusian ability to have suitable supplies of food to grow the populations fast like bacteria in a petri dish but it required safe plentiful food and safe plentiful water and safe waste disposal and hygiene. It was not until around 1850 that germ theory really started making sense in scientific communities and was finding applications. Yes there had been biological warfare using infected corpses as projectiles going way back in ancient history particularly when it came to small pox and plague . Vaccines did not come until after 1897 and penicillin until after 1926. World war one was fought without penicillin available. Amazing! It is a great human success story what you see on that population bomb chart the environmental wackos see as unsustainable growth. Actually it is now sustainable growth we had. In the ancient past and prehistoric past we humans had nothing but sustainable misery. Today in the developed parts of the world women tend to have longer longevity than men . Before antibiotics child birth was very dangerous business for women. Women went from life spans a quarter to a third that of men to now exceeding me in the most developed parts of the world Very few women die in child birth compared to the percentages that used to be the norm. Women that survive child birth can repeat the process more often. There are a lot of other variables that have raised human longevity including more plentiful surplus food and less work needed to produce it because of the development of real alternative forms of energy to replace human labor and animal power in the form of alternatives including gasoline, diesel , electricity and water wheel power. It might be easy to plow and harvest wheat with horses but when you bring the grains to the stone grinding mills run by water wheels or windmills there is not enough power to grind all you need as fast as possible as we can do without thinking much about it today, We even have food storage and refrigeration that surely beats salting and drying everything we plan to eat later the old fashioned pre population growth days way of doing things. This article is not the definitive study of how the great population surge happened but it does tell you why it really is a natural phenomenon to be proud of instead of fearful and hysterical about. When you go to look at a world population growth chart or just one for any country up to the present it is very clear that something Amazing has happened in two separate phases one after 1850 and the big one from 1950 on where we see population increasing as a near geometric progression. If it were not for the existence of human mortality it would probably be a true geometric progression. Even though you might think that developed countries should be where most of the population growth happens we find out otherwise on charts the biggest population growth centers are places like Asia which means those parts of the planet were much more developed than they were in ancient and prehistoric times. Countries like India and China have faster growing population dynamics than most western developed countries. Those success rates correspond to the same dates on world population charts. When you go to look at a population chart showing the growth of population over time in a country or for the whole earth you do have to think about plotting the date when vaccines and antibiotics became routinely available and then think about all the rest of things that scientific thinking and applications have done to improve life for the human race virtually everywhere on the planet. The perceived huge population growth bomb has been an amazing human success story. It is harder than you think to extrapolate future populations from the past and recent (since 1950 ) trends. Population might level off or decline for some countries and continue to surge for others or the whole world. You can only guess what the future will look like judging from the past. We humans do not live in an enclosed petri dish with limited resources. Worried about too many people? Maybe you shouldn't. There are as many as ten times as many rats living on earth as people. If you were to count all the rodents on earth it maybe in the trillions not billions. Have you ever seen rats or mice breed? They can have multiple litters in just one year's period of time. What about the number of fish in the seas? Trillions and trillions and trillions. Are you a tree counter? There can be more than 1000 trees per acre or more as saplings . Count the trees you pass for a mile on a car drive or or while riding on a train. It gets to be more than you can count. Human Population is the inverse of the human misery index chart that is one of the greatest reasons to see it as a positive.. The population boom is sort of like a bubble because the head count reveals a vast number of moral units that do not live for ever. Population numbers also tell you something about possible future reduction in numbers. Too many people with not enough food to eat? More people can do more work to farm and harvest resources than too few. Productivity and growth is not something that population necessarily associated with societies with the fastest growing populations. To the contrary populations with lower population growth rates are the ones with the highest productivity gains but not necessarily. Recently China , India and Brazil, countries with higher birth rates have become more productive then they used to be Most productivity gains may come from advances in technology and utilization of technology. Getting more from less and working less to produce more is the goal of productivity gains. Larger younger growth populations tend to be too labor intensive with too much competition for too few jobs which is one reason US productivity and consumption serves as a benefit to higher population growth rate countries. Labor is always going to be comparatively more expensive in low birth rate population growth countries. Natural disasters that cause reductions in population growth such as the plague can cause more problems for countries than high population growth rates do. It is not entirely certain looking at past growth rates to predict that a population of 7 , 9 or 20 billion people is going to replace itself. Some percentage of that population is going to be on the decline because of limited life span and there is ample evidence that technological development of backward countries results in what is usually lower birth rates. Not all of the countries are have growing populations. Italy and Russia may presently be on the decline. Fertility actually suffers in a population when the age of reproduction goes up. In some of the highest population growth countries you find younger people having babies with lower life expectancies. Go off to some of the highest growth rate countries and sexuality begins at a lower age than in developed countries at the same time life expectancies are as much as 70 percent lower.. Some have boys getting married at an average age of 16 , girls at 12 and life expectancy at little more than 30 years. Families tend to have an average of 5 children that survive the risks that lead to high levels of infant mortality in these high population zones. As many as 5 children per couple might not survive as that do survive and that survival rate accounts for the high velocity population gains. Fertility in those countries is much higher and it starts out younger but is much much higher on the human misery index chart. That human misery chart is the one the Eco-Malthusian anti growth people never want to show you. You are not going to see that chart printed in the national geographic magazine slick piece on over 7 billion people earth at the edge of piece. Yes they will show you haunting pictures of starvation in Haiti or Somalia and will show you urban scenes as far as the eye can see in wide angle photographs. The human misery index standouts is not caused necessarily by over population but often is the cause of over population. People moving from rural to urban areas before those areas are developed enough to receive them with any hospitality in the most backward countries. The human species seems to have brain of it's own in trying to survive by creating surplus population due to the high rates of mortality. Those populations are most at risk then for catastrophic failure. So there are ways to start discounting some of the high population extrapolations immediately meaning that some high growth population areas are phantom populations not necessarily future populations. Advances like world wide efforts to eradicate polio , availability of antibiotics for humans and their animals, Higher yielding easy to grow crops and possibly a soon to be available vaccine for malaria are going to lead to even higher population growth rates where it seems they are least needed. Not all population growth is in the misery index zones. High populations tend to give mankind special advantages. You often hear that China and India graduate more graduate level students than the US , Europe and Canada do. That is the advantage of faster growth populations. When it comes finding geniuses in a population it may be that you need to search though 100,000 people just to find a mid level genius and search out of one million people to find the next Steve Jobs or the Next Jonas Salk whose vaccine comes on line just after populations surge after 1950 worldwide with the greatest multiplier effects of geometric progression ever. The population surge world wide, or population bomb, if you prefer to pejoritize it really comes down to what just a few geniuses did. Antibiotics starting with penicillin and the Polio vaccine had huge world wide consequences that were great for mankind. It would be stupid and destructive to prevent the new malaria vaccine from coming out and being used because we worry about yet another population surge that might take world populations to 20 million people in just 50 years. Then you look at charts comparing growth in the Chinese population with the one child policy with that in India with free floating birth rates and China seems to surpass India. Life expectancies will definitely rise in the population boom countries making growth rates higher because the misery index has begun to decline. It is not at all certain that any of this is out of balance. Raising the age of marriage in those less developed countries would be one way to slow down birth rates. That could be a cultural variable that is not going to be easily accepted. Technology and science are going to be allowing even greater population growth rates in the near future until the countries mature and develop and then it could reverse. People concerned about too much population growth of people on earth should be packing their bags and going to the high growth areas to help create jobs there because that might be the best way to slow down the growth rate. There is no way to know how much population is going to be too much if ever. What we have is completely unprecedented. Going back 200 years there were no more than1 to 2 billion people on earth. The largest cities on earth used to have no more than a million people. Now 20 to 30 million people in a city is possible. . Lex Loeb Contributor Network . Seven billion people on earth is actually an amazing success story. It is a story that is being told in the mass media as if it is some kind of secret we need to be ashamed of as human beings. The environmentalist consciousness mixed with Malthusian perceptions is all you can expect to hear or read about. The big message is always the same 7 billion people , a dead canary in a coal mine, unsustainable industry and agriculture, exploitation , exploitation , exploitation of the 'earth's resources' , pollution dire consequences, sustainable world population, environmental degradation. Get it? Yes you have heard it all before . Over and over again like some kind of Stalinist propaganda from bigger wind bags on the TV, on the radio, in cataclysmic movie after cataclysmic movie ad infinitum. The next thing is Chem trail conspiracies because a super secret society of unsavory character international bankers are plotting to end what is commonly called the population bomb. Bomb? The idea that unchecked human population growth is like a bomb going off comes from the infamous Malthus bacterial petri dish where an explosion in the population of bacteria ultimately consumes all the resources in the petri dish and all of the bacteria in the colony parish in one great miniature petri dish size extinction. That is the analogy where the fear of population growth originally comes from.The evidence for the hazards of a population bomb does not come from any real life phenomenology. It is true the population has surged almost to become asymptotic on a world population chart. Looking at the world population chart going back to times when humans were hunter gatherers and numbered less than one million people on earth for millennia very little changes until perhaps the early bronze age and then for roughly 5000 years the population of humans reaches a higher plateau and stays there until Classic Ancient civilizations appear. There maybe ten to fifty million people on earth total for 1500 to 2000 years. It is not until after the industrial revolution begins and before 1900 that the next major surge in human population occurs and that brings the world population up to maybe a billion total world wide up until around 1950 which seems to be a critical point on the chart when population growth just flies off the chart into the stratosphere. It is hardly a population "bomb". It is the amazing success of a natural occurring species to something that had never been done by any species before it. 1950 really is not the critical year for anything it just happens to be the point in time where certain things all came together to allow mankind to become a much more successful species. When you go to one of those charts showing world population growth that present the great surge in population after 1850 and an greater surge after 1950 as if some reason for hysterical fear you have to realize that most of the charts are missing very important dates of things that happened that made all of this population growth possible. 1879 was the year that the first vaccine was discovered. It was discovered not put into widespread use at that date. That date should be pinpointed on every world population chart but is not. The next date is 1926. That is the year that the penicillin world's first antibiotic was discovered. That was not the date were use of antibiotics was commonplace but is has everything to do with the 1950 and after population surge of humans from one to two billion people to seven and counting. Other dates that should be pin pointed on the chart include the Polio vaccine which does seem to correspond to what happens after 1950 in the greatest human surge of population ever. The reality is that science and scientific methodology are 100% responsible for the great surge of populations in the past 200 years. One Vaccine after the next made a huge dent in mortality rates/ infant mortality rates adding the phenomenal advent of antibiotics and you now know why populations have grown as fast as they have. There are other factors of course. The ability to produce clean drinking water preceded vaccines. Most great ancient cities required easy access to clean drinking water and means of disposing of human waste safely in order to exist . That was true on at least 5 continents. It was not just the Malthusian ability to have suitable supplies of food to grow the populations fast like bacteria in a petri dish but it required safe plentiful food and safe plentiful water and safe waste disposal and hygiene. It was not until around 1850 that germ theory really started making sense in scientific communities and was finding applications. Yes there had been biological warfare using infected corpses as projectiles going way back in ancient history particularly when it came to small pox and plague . Vaccines did not come until after 1897 and penicillin until after 1926. World war one was fought without penicillin available. Amazing! It is a great human success story what you see on that population bomb chart the environmental wackos see as unsustainable growth. Actually it is now sustainable growth we had. In the ancient past and prehistoric past we humans had nothing but sustainable misery. Today in the developed parts of the world women tend to have longer longevity than men . Before antibiotics child birth was very dangerous business for women. Women went from life spans a quarter to a third that of men to now exceeding me in the most developed parts of the world Very few women die in child birth compared to the percentages that used to be the norm. Women that survive child birth can repeat the process more often. There are a lot of other variables that have raised human longevity including more plentiful surplus food and less work needed to produce it because of the development of real alternative forms of energy to replace human labor and animal power in the form of alternatives including gasoline, diesel , electricity and water wheel power. It might be easy to plow and harvest wheat with horses but when you bring the grains to the stone grinding mills run by water wheels or windmills there is not enough power to grind all you need as fast as possible as we can do without thinking much about it today, We even have food storage and refrigeration that surely beats salting and drying everything we plan to eat later the old fashioned pre population growth days way of doing things. This article is not the definitive study of how the great population surge happened but it does tell you why it really is a natural phenomenon to be proud of instead of fearful and hysterical about. When you go to look at a world population growth chart or just one for any country up to the present it is very clear that something Amazing has happened in two separate phases one after 1850 and the big one from 1950 on where we see population increasing as a near geometric progression. If it were not for the existence of human mortality it would probably be a true geometric progression. Even though you might think that developed countries should be where most of the population growth happens we find out otherwise on charts the biggest population growth centers are places like Asia which means those parts of the planet were much more developed than they were in ancient and prehistoric times. Countries like India and China have faster growing population dynamics than most western developed countries. Those success rates correspond to the same dates on world population charts. When you go to look at a population chart showing the growth of population over time in a country or for the whole earth you do have to think about plotting the date when vaccines and antibiotics became routinely available and then think about all the rest of things that scientific thinking and applications have done to improve life for the human race virtually everywhere on the planet. The perceived huge population growth bomb has been an amazing human success story. It is harder than you think to extrapolate future populations from the past and recent (since 1950 ) trends. Population might level off or decline for some countries and continue to surge for others or the whole world. You can only guess what the future will look like judging from the past. We humans do not live in an enclosed petri dish with limited resources. Worried about too many people? Maybe you shouldn't. There are as many as ten times as many rats living on earth as people. If you were to count all the rodents on earth it maybe in the trillions not billions. Have you ever seen rats or mice breed? They can have multiple litters in just one year's period of time. What about the number of fish in the seas? Trillions and trillions and trillions. Are you a tree counter? There can be more than 1000 trees per acre or more as saplings . Count the trees you pass for a mile on a car drive or or while riding on a train. It gets to be more than you can count. Human Population is the inverse of the human misery index chart that is one of the greatest reasons to see it as a positive.. The population boom is sort of like a bubble because the head count reveals a vast number of moral units that do not live for ever. Population numbers also tell you something about possible future reduction in numbers. Too many people with not enough food to eat? More people can do more work to farm and harvest resources than too few. Productivity and growth is not something that population necessarily associated with societies with the fastest growing populations. To the contrary populations with lower population growth rates are the ones with the highest productivity gains but not necessarily. Recently China , India and Brazil, countries with higher birth rates have become more productive then they used to be Most productivity gains may come from advances in technology and utilization of technology. Getting more from less and working less to produce more is the goal of productivity gains. Larger younger growth populations tend to be too labor intensive with too much competition for too few jobs which is one reason US productivity and consumption serves as a benefit to higher population growth rate countries. Labor is always going to be comparatively more expensive in low birth rate population growth countries. Natural disasters that cause reductions in population growth such as the plague can cause more problems for countries than high population growth rates do. It is not entirely certain looking at past growth rates to predict that a population of 7 , 9 or 20 billion people is going to replace itself. Some percentage of that population is going to be on the decline because of limited life span and there is ample evidence that technological development of backward countries results in what is usually lower birth rates. Not all of the countries are have growing populations. Italy and Russia may presently be on the decline. Fertility actually suffers in a population when the age of reproduction goes up. In some of the highest population growth countries you find younger people having babies with lower life expectancies. Go off to some of the highest growth rate countries and sexuality begins at a lower age than in developed countries at the same time life expectancies are as much as 70 percent lower.. Some have boys getting married at an average age of 16 , girls at 12 and life expectancy at little more than 30 years. Families tend to have an average of 5 children that survive the risks that lead to high levels of infant mortality in these high population zones. As many as 5 children per couple might not survive as that do survive and that survival rate accounts for the high velocity population gains. Fertility in those countries is much higher and it starts out younger but is much much higher on the human misery index chart. That human misery chart is the one the Eco-Malthusian anti growth people never want to show you. You are not going to see that chart printed in the national geographic magazine slick piece on over 7 billion people earth at the edge of piece. Yes they will show you haunting pictures of starvation in Haiti or Somalia and will show you urban scenes as far as the eye can see in wide angle photographs. The human misery index standouts is not caused necessarily by over population but often is the cause of over population. People moving from rural to urban areas before those areas are developed enough to receive them with any hospitality in the most backward countries. The human species seems to have brain of it's own in trying to survive by creating surplus population due to the high rates of mortality. Those populations are most at risk then for catastrophic failure. So there are ways to start discounting some of the high population extrapolations immediately meaning that some high growth population areas are phantom populations not necessarily future populations. Advances like world wide efforts to eradicate polio , availability of antibiotics for humans and their animals, Higher yielding easy to grow crops and possibly a soon to be available vaccine for malaria are going to lead to even higher population growth rates where it seems they are least needed. Not all population growth is in the misery index zones. High populations tend to give mankind special advantages. You often hear that China and India graduate more graduate level students than the US , Europe and Canada do. That is the advantage of faster growth populations. When it comes finding geniuses in a population it may be that you need to search though 100,000 people just to find a mid level genius and search out of one million people to find the next Steve Jobs or the Next Jonas Salk whose vaccine comes on line just after populations surge after 1950 worldwide with the greatest multiplier effects of geometric progression ever. The population surge world wide, or population bomb, if you prefer to pejoritize it really comes down to what just a few geniuses did. Antibiotics starting with penicillin and the Polio vaccine had huge world wide consequences that were great for mankind. It would be stupid and destructive to prevent the new malaria vaccine from coming out and being used because we worry about yet another population surge that might take world populations to 20 million people in just 50 years. Then you look at charts comparing growth in the Chinese population with the one child policy with that in India with free floating birth rates and China seems to surpass India. Life expectancies will definitely rise in the population boom countries making growth rates higher because the misery index has begun to decline. It is not at all certain that any of this is out of balance. Raising the age of marriage in those less developed countries would be one way to slow down birth rates. That could be a cultural variable that is not going to be easily accepted. Technology and science are going to be allowing even greater population growth rates in the near future until the countries mature and develop and then it could reverse. People concerned about too much population growth of people on earth should be packing their bags and going to the high growth areas to help create jobs there because that might be the best way to slow down the growth rate. There is no way to know how much population is going to be too much if ever. What we have is completely unprecedented. Going back 200 years there were no more than1 to 2 billion people on earth. The largest cities on earth used to have no more than a million people. Now 20 to 30 million people in a city is possible. .