I've got an anthology of short science fiction stories, some dating back many years, and one of them is by the esteemed Isaac Asimov.
It's called "The Winnowing". It was written in 1976, and is set in "the future" of the year 2005 when the worlds population has reached 6 billion...so his guess was pretty good there.
It's about how to deal with dramatic food shortages and famine are ravaging the poor countries of the world. A proposal is to add a tailored lipoprotein to the food donations which will cause a painless death over a period of time. The idea from the leaders which was put to the scientist who developed it was to make it appear random, some new disease that had sprung up, wiping out ("winnowing") the surplus population.
He opposed it, and in the end feeds the assembled military and political leaders some refreshments of sandwiches laced with the lipoprotien, including himself.

Here's a Wiki link to the story : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winnowing

The problem is that it is one of those rare stories where "the bad guys" are actually right...if the world situation was a dire as Asimov describes in the story, then something drastic would have to be done, and I'm sorry, but productive and stable populations who have thier shit together should come first at the expense of those who are just hopeless basket cases seemingly forever recieving food aid just to keep them dribbling along.

Playing devils advocate, you could indeed ask "what use are the starving millions in the big scheme of things?".
When the question is asked "Are your well-fed and educated children living in a peaceful western country really worth more than African villagers living in poverty and continual famine and civil war conditions?", I'm sorry, but the answer could well probably be a "yes".
It's almost exactly like the beginning of the movie "Idiocracy" where the well educated and prosperous couple keep putting off having children for sensible reasons, both economic and personal, yet the slack-jawed yokel were breeding like flies and creating more and more of the stupidest and most unproductive kids anyone had ever seen, with eventual demographic effects.

Sometimes you have to add a bit of chlorine to the gene pool...

Alan B wrote:Recently, out of curiosity (and with nothing better to do), I Googled 'world population'.
The results, I found, were rather disturbing and shook me out of my complacency and lack of knowledge on this subject.

[snip]

In 1960 the population was about 3 billion. In 2011 it is about 7 billion - an increase of about 4 billion in 50 years. Since the latest predictions are suggesting an increase (or no decrease) in fertility coupled with a continually increasing population (the predicted decline in the birth rate towards the end of the century will now not happen, it is suggested), I cannot see how the predictions suggest a population of 'only' 10.5 billion in 2099 - that is, 3.5 billion in 90 years...

Any suggestions or comments?

Demographic projections 100 years ahead are likely not very accurate so I would not bother too much with them. Also, as KennyH pointed out, there is a model called Demographic transition - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition - and if such model is close to reality we can see that almost anything is possible, given the right conditions, population decline included.

In other words, nobody knows what is going to be in 2100.

tuco wrote:Demographic projections 100 years ahead are likely not very accurate so I would not bother too much with them. Also, as KennyH pointed out, there is a model called Demographic transition - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition - and if such model is close to reality we can see that almost anything is possible, given the right conditions, population decline included.

In other words, nobody knows what is going to be in 2100.

I would agree - the 'projectionists' have to change their data and revise their projections every so often. The Demographic Transition article was interesting and indicates why the projections are so uncertain. But, reading through the link, I could not see any reference to the effect of religions: both the Catholics and Muslims are pushing for 'unlimited' population growth for their respective beliefs. It almost seems that these beliefs become more of an irrelevance in the face of increasing economic stability and wealth. Even Catholics in wealthier areas now practice contraception against the wishes of their religion.

But I still think that a population of 7 to 10 billion is far too much to maintain the earth as a viable resource for all of us for the future.

Well, it is one of the reasons why such projections cannot be accurate - it is hard to predict what kind of technology, among other things, will be available. While the max number of Earth inhabitants is finite, nobody, to my knowledge, knows it. What is too much and whatnot is not determined mostly, and for the time being, by population, it is determined by technology and .. politics.

We can imagine 1 living in such way it would be too much, and we can also imagine 10 billions living in such way it would not be. So yet again, lets stop worrying about population and lets focus on sustainability.

tuco wrote:Well, it is one of the reasons why such projections cannot be accurate - it is hard to predict what kind of technology, among other things, will be available. While the max number of Earth inhabitants is finite, nobody, to my knowledge, knows it. What is too much and whatnot is not determined mostly, and for the time being, by population, it is determined by technology and .. politics.

We can imagine 1 living in such way it would be too much, and we can also imagine 10 billions living in such way it would not be. So yet again, lets stop worrying about population and lets focus on sustainability.

Sustainability. Mmmm! Has anyone done the calculations?
Upon Googling 'sustainability and population', I found this series of up-to-date articles here.
I haven't read through all of them yet, but a quick glance suggests that unless we re-evaluate the Earth's resources and take action, we will all be in trouble. But, I sort of guessed that, anyway...

Edit: With regard to religion and population which seemed to be absent from the Demographic Transistion link, I found this.
Where we have:

"The worst problem is to possess
plenty of children with inadequate means."
...The Prophet Muhammad

and

Yet clerics in religiously conservative Pakistan tell the Muslim majority that the Quran instructs women to keep bearing as many babies as possible and say that modern family planning is a Western convention that offends Islam.

Also:

Priest Likens Church Pressure Vs RH Bill to the Inquisition
March 16, 2011 GMA News

In the Phillipines, where Catholic bishops strongly oppose the Reproductive Health (RH) bill, one of the clergy's leading intellectuals says that attempts of some members of the Church to dissuade the public from supporting the bill is "reminiscent of the Inquisition."

and elsewhere in the link it suggests that Catholics in developed countries couldn't give a toss about the Pope's stand on contraception.

I think that eco city ideas are already developed enough to support huge populations sustainably at very high levels of quality of life, but I think we are very addicted to our very polluting and inefficient ways of doing stuff, despite the constant propaganda that the free market automatically makes things efficient - it doesn't, it supports the status quo.

We also have huge institutional pressures from especially catholicism and Islam to ignore these issues. China, India and Brazil are copying the extremely inefficient models of 1950's US, without realising they are not replicable and we can do far better than that.

We really need to be highly educated in ecology and sustainability, and act accordingly. Space won't work - look at Biosphere 2.

The 'eco-city' is one solution, but I can't help thinking that if we had a universal means of population control, e.g controlling fercundity, we wouldn't feel constrained to develop the technology for the eco-city. But the eco-city may be the only solution for some of us, simply because you will never get universal agreement on anything, particularly with the religions poking their noses in.

Ask any economist if never ending growth, that is the kind of political-economy widely accepted today, is possible? Do not ask, because the honest answer is: I dunno.

Since it tends to re-appear again and again, I am forced to repeat again and again, if there would be one person living on Earth and s/he would live like most of us do today, it would take a finite time for the claim: There is too many people! (There is not enough resources!) to be true.

While I do understand there is no clear consensus on population control, unless convinced otherwise, I am led to believe it could be more beneficial, for humans, to control other variables. Then again, I like my tea from Star Trek replicator *shrugs*

tuco wrote:While the max number of Earth inhabitants is finite, nobody, to my knowledge, knows it.

Nobody "knows it" for one simple reason...it's a subject that's taboo. If you mention controlling population numbers or birthrates, you will usually immediately be compared to the problems with Chinas One Child policy, or to Nazis and eugenics. It will never be a serious discussion in the halls of power because it's political suicide...but it should be discussed before it's too late, and uncomfortable areas of questioning followed, such as highly overpopulated (for the ability of the land to support the numbers) countries that just keep on having more and more kids, and keep on being economic shitholes that require ongoing support to just survive in some meagre fashion.
Maybe a form of triage should be looked at, not in the extreme of Asimovs short fiction story, but just have the west shut off all the aid and let nature take it's course. Well, nature helped by their useless corrupt governments, but let's see how much power they have when the money stops pouring in from overseas that they can exploit to keep thier power.

So yet again, lets stop worrying about population and lets focus on sustainability.

You can't...they're linked together firmly. It's no use preaching to poor countries about sustainability and agricultural programs to produce more food, without also telling them to stop having so many children and give a little thought to how many people thier land can sustainably carry.
There are idiots in Australia that call for an open doors immegration policy and for people to have more kids, and that Australia could support a population of 50 million to 100 million...it's called "Big Australia". They even say things like comparing the continental USA to Australia, where the landmass is approximately close in size, and say that America has 300 million-plus people, so why shouldn't we keep expanding to aim for a huge popluation. One small problem with that...they obviously haven't looked at a map of our country and noticed that it's mostly desert in the middle and west, and unliveable swamp and rainforest in the north east, with only a fertile strip down the east coast and around the bottom south east corner. Unless "sustainability" means cutting down all the forests we do have and planting food crops to support the up to 100 million these fools would have us support, there's no way we can have that many people here. Doesn't stop them though.
They seem to see huge human population numbers as something to aim for.

The problem with evaluating (over)population is that it can only be derived from sustainability, which is a function with time involved. We can say: If everyone lived like you we would need X planets for example, but we cannot say: Earth will sustain X people in Y years, because we do not know Y.

I agree it is kind of taboo, or rather in democratic societies just unpopular. Unpopular because such societies tend to, at least openly, respect a bill of rights interfering with the kind of population control you mention (China, Nazis). On the other hand, the same societies, ironically with stagnant or negative population growth, have tools to stimulate families and population growth.

It should be discussed, no problem there. If people were as liquid as capital ..

Alan B wrote:The idea of colonising 'outer-space' has been an SF story-line for at least a hundred years. It will not happen unless a new form of lift-off from earth's gravity-well is discovered, something that does not pollute the biosphere nor deplete finite resources. The dreams of SF authors: 'anti-gravity', 'hyperspace', FTL travel et al are just that - dreams of SF authors. Yet some people cling to these ideas as though they will be discovered 'any-time-soon' and we will be 'saved' (from ourselves!).
Would that were so, I would be among the first to apply for a Sol 3 passport...

Until such a method is found we will be stuck on this mud-ball destined to wallow in our own excrement (if the population projections are right) unless we take drastic world-wide action to control our fecundity.

To suggest that colonising space is 'the answer' (attractive as it sounds) is delusional. That can only be 'the answer' if the earth's population is static - that is, the space left by the colonisers will not be filled-up. History tells us otherwise.

Four words:

Carbon nanotubes
Space elevator

Further, if we don't attempt to spread out, we, and all life that arose on this ball of rock are, not to put too fine a point on it, fucked. It isn't a matter of whether this planet will be sterilised of life, it's merely a matter of when. It WILL happen. Sure as eggs is eggs. To suggest otherwise is a fuck of a lot more naïve and delusional than any pipe-dreams about colonising other planets, which are really only pipe-dreams because of the fact that people are wedded to money and think it wasted on such enterprise (despite being perfectly happy to spend it on weapons that we have no intention of using).

Edit: In answer to the OP, there is the concept of saturation to deal with. Resources are limited, and we are getting close to the estimated lower end of the range of the planet's carrying capacity. Indeed, some estimates suggest that we have already passed this point.

Wiki has this to say:

There is wide variability both in the definition and in the proposed size of the Earth's carrying capacity, with estimates ranging from less than 1 to 1000 billion humans (1 trillion).[78] Around two-thirds of the estimates fall in the range of 4 billion to 16 billion (with unspecified standard errors), with a median of about 10 billion.[79]

In a study titled Food, Land, Population and the U.S. Economy, David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell University, and Mario Giampietro, senior researcher at the US National Research Institute on Food and Nutrition (INRAN), estimate the maximum U.S. population for a sustainable economy at 200 million. According to this theory, in order to achieve a sustainable economy and avert disaster, the United States would have to reduce its population by at least one-third, and world population would have to be reduced by two-thirds.[80]

Some groups (for example, the World Wide Fund for Nature[81][82] and Global Footprint Network[83]) have stated that the carrying capacity for the human population has been exceeded as measured using the Ecological Footprint. In 2006, WWF's "Living Planet Report" stated that in order for all humans to live with the current consumption patterns of Europeans, we would be spending three times more than what the planet can renew.[84] Humanity as a whole was using, by 2006, 40 percent more than what Earth can regenerate.[85]

But critics question the simplifications and statistical methods used in calculating Ecological Footprints. Therefore Global Footprint Network and its partner organizations have engaged with national governments and international agencies to test the results - reviews have been produced by France, Germany, the European Commission, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Japan and the United Arab Emirates.[86] Some point out that a more refined method of assessing Ecological Footprint is to designate sustainable versus non-sustainable categories of consumption.[87][88] However, if yield estimates were adjusted for sustainable levels of production, the yield figures would be lower, and hence the overshoot estimated by the Ecological Footprint method even higher.

The big problem too is that it isn't a "money" issue, or a "food redistribution" issue. First you have to limit the number of people.
To be brutally realistic, a small desert nation with scant rainfall and a despot in charge who cares more about lining his pockets than feeding his people is hardly going to worry about what advice the international community gives him, and any monetary or food aid given to them is redirected to his cronies. The only thing the government of a country like that will listan to is cutting off the gravy wagon. The only way the people of that country will learn about population is the hard way...cut off the aid, get rid of the cameras, and let it settle to whatever population the land will actually be capable of supporting. Harsh, but otherwise we simply have decade after decade of aid-dependant countries that can't stand on thier own two feet...which is where we are now.

Humans are no different to any other animal, especially when, to use a farming analogy, it comes to the stock you can hold on a given property. It's no use letting your animals keep on breeding when you only have a small hobby farm with limited land area to grow food for them.
How many more decades of soleful pictures of starving people are we going to have to see on TV every night with various organisations begging for aid before someone makes the hard decision that maybe you just can't save everyone, and that for the long term good some short term difficult and unpalatable choices need to be made?

johnbrandt wrote:How many more decades of soleful pictures of starving people are we going to have to see on TV every night with various organisations begging for aid before someone makes the hard decision that maybe you just can't save everyone, and that for the long term good some short term difficult and unpalatable choices need to be made?

In the future we may have to accept we cannot save everyone.

But at the moment there is enough food to feed every living person on the planet. The problem is distribution and the socio-economic make-up of our society.

hackenslash wrote:

Four words:

Carbon nanotubes
Space elevator

Some recent calculations hint at the stresses a space elevator would need to withstand being orders of magnitude larger than earlier assumed, and it is possible no material ever will be sufficiently sturdy.

Edit: In answer to the OP, there is the concept of saturation to deal with. Resources are limited, and we are getting close to the estimated lower end of the range of the planet's carrying capacity. Indeed, some estimates suggest that we have already passed this point.

Island dwarfism might be a partial solution! Altho' we could beat the slow process of becoming island dwarves slowly by genetically engineering ourselves into island dwarves ahead of the time.

In Manalone by Colin Kapp they genetically engineered the world's human population to be smaller in an attempt to avert the eco-crisis. The consequences were not good...

Time for me to fly my pet solution again.

Reverse contraception.

I think the perfect solution to many, if not most, of the worlds ills, would be to reverse contraception methods.

Imagine if everyone was treated at birth to be infertile, lacking in a specific component necessary for fertility. If that component could be provided by a freely available oral ANTI-contraceptive to be taken every day for a month every month one wishes to be fertile, there would be no such thing as an unwanted pregnancy.

No unwanted pregnancy - immediate drop in birth rate, drop in poverty, drop in crime, drop in unwanted marriages, drop in divorces, drop in hunger, increase in education, increased respect for life.

No brainer, the world would be a better place for everyone, and there might be a negative birth rate even in the poorest nations.

zulumoose wrote:Time for me to fly my pet solution again.

Reverse contraception.

I think the perfect solution to many, if not most, of the worlds ills, would be to reverse contraception methods.

Imagine if everyone was treated at birth to be infertile, lacking in a specific component necessary for fertility. If that component could be provided by a freely available oral ANTI-contraceptive to be taken every day for a month every month one wishes to be fertile, there would be no such thing as an unwanted pregnancy.

No unwanted pregnancy - immediate drop in birth rate, drop in poverty, drop in crime, drop in unwanted marriages, drop in divorces, drop in hunger, increase in education, increased respect for life.

No brainer, the world would be a better place for everyone, and there might be a negative birth rate even in the poorest nations.

I mentioned something similar here.

Consider the suggestion as a hypothetical scenario:
1. All women are reversibly infertile.
2. All women will have the freedom to choose when to become fertile 'on demand' by a doctors prescription.
3. No unwanted pregnancies.
4. No abortions except for life-saving reasons or other medical complications or rape.
5. No 'forgetting' to take The Pill 'on the spur of the moment' - and then regretting it afterwards.
6. Freedom to plan a life and career without fear of interruption.
7. Freedom from 'accidental' impregnation by a partner. (It does happen).

The only 'state interference' I can see is if a regime of 'no fourth child' is adopted as a population control measure.

By the time the 20/30 year olds will have reached my age (75), the world population may have reached 8-9 billion. I think it would do no harm for these younsters to carry-out a thought experiment to 'guess' at what the living conditions would be like in 40-50 years time with unbridled population growth - assuming, of course, that the population has not been catastophically reduced due to a new plague/virus strain (which would spread like wild-fire with the 'instant' travel between overcrowded population centres).

I would add that in the light of the information in this thread the population may well exceed the now conservative, I feel, 8-9 billion in about 50 years time. In my OP I mention two figures: actual 4 billion increase over 50 years (1960-2011) and a projected figure of 3.5 billion over 90 years (2010- 2099). One represents 80 million per year and the other works out to about 40 million per year. If the future growth rate is to be similar to the 50 year figure given, then over 90 years the population could be as high as 14.2 billion... Alarmist perhaps, but then no one knows the answer. The 'projectionists' don't since all of their forcasts are based on assumptions, only some of which may turn out to 'true'.

If the only answer, in the long term, is the bio-engineering of our species as suggested above by zulumoose and myself, then so be it. Any ethical objections pale into insignificance when considering the survival of the Human Race and the habitat on which it depends.

Any space exploration will only serve to spread our seed, with great difficulty, to environments that are hostile to life (as we know it, Jim). Such eploration will have absolutely no effect on population stability, or reduction, on planet Earth unless the control of fercundity is biologically engineered and goes hand-in-hand with space exploration. If we engineer, or find, a suitable 'space' habitat, then we will proceed to fill it up with our own kind to the best of our ability: the explorers themselves will reproduce. We certainly won't begin transporting Earth's surplus population - Earth can sort it own problems out...

As I said ealier, perhaps we should find something to 'put in the water'...

Edit. Too many hyphens.

Zwaarddijk wrote:Some recent calculations hint at the stresses a space elevator would need to withstand being orders of magnitude larger than earlier assumed, and it is possible no material ever will be sufficiently sturdy.

Do you have a citation for this? I'd be very interested.

Zwaarddijk wrote:Some recent calculations hint at the stresses a space elevator would need to withstand being orders of magnitude larger than earlier assumed, and it is possible no material ever will be sufficiently sturdy.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky will turning in his grave...

zulumoose wrote:Time for me to fly my pet solution again.

Reverse contraception.

I think the perfect solution to many, if not most, of the worlds ills, would be to reverse contraception methods.

Imagine if everyone was treated at birth to be infertile, lacking in a specific component necessary for fertility. If that component could be provided by a freely available oral ANTI-contraceptive to be taken every day for a month every month one wishes to be fertile, there would be no such thing as an unwanted pregnancy.

No unwanted pregnancy - immediate drop in birth rate, drop in poverty, drop in crime, drop in unwanted marriages, drop in divorces, drop in hunger, increase in education, increased respect for life.

No brainer, the world would be a better place for everyone, and there might be a negative birth rate even in the poorest nations.

Very interesting idea! The problem is that, in poor overpopulated countries around the world, the Catholic church got there first and preached and brainwashed and convinced people who already have large families (to provide a workforce and also for the pragmatic reason that they know many kids won't make it to adulthood), and told them to have even more kids.

MacIver wrote:In the future we may have to accept we cannot save everyone.

But at the moment there is enough food to feed every living person on the planet. The problem is distribution and the socio-economic make-up of our society.

It isn't "our" society that is the problem...it's countries run by leaders and groups who syphon off all the aid money and food for themselves, or who distribute it to those who they choose, as we are seeing at the moment in some areas in Africa. There could be no solution to this than to completely reorganise the way the world works and change entire societies perceptions of what's fair and proper. I believe I've mentioned a bloke I used to work with who was from Robert Mugabes Wonderland, and in his rural village they saw it as perfectly normal that "the big monkey gets all the coconuts", and rather than rise up against the boss man and his cronies, they would just see it as "normal" and even applaud him for being such a strong leader, as thier children starved.

There's no easy answers to it...there are some awkward and unpalatable solutions, but they won't be done either, so the problem will just keep rolling on, and I expect my grandkids will be getting asked for donations at school the same as I was in the early seventies when they handed around envelopes for donations to "the starving children" in Ethiopia and other countries there.