A Brief History
On October 31, 2011, a truly spooky fact became known when it was announced by the UN that the population of humans on the Earth had reached seven billion. When the author of this article was born, there were about 2.8 billion people on Earth, which seemed to be plenty!
Digging Deeper
Today, there are over eight billion humans running around our planet, depleting resources and polluting the air, land and water. Heck, why stop with just the Earth? We are also diminishing the ozone layer in the atmosphere and increasing greenhouse gases that create global warming and climate change.
To the casual observer, it would seem there is more than enough space for these masses of people, but careful analysis of ocean fish stocks, natural resources, available usable groundwater in aquifers, and the extreme environmental harm caused by cutting down trees to make buildings and covering the ground with cement and asphalt would say otherwise.
Can we just colonize outer space? Not likely, despite persistent production of science fiction movies and TV series. The problems that need to be solved first are so daunting that the effort may as well be used to ameliorate problems here on Earth.
Question for students (and subscribers) to ponder: How many people are too many?
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Ehrlich, Paul. The Population Bomb. Independently published, 2024.
Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Picador, 2015.
