World Population to Reach 500 BILLION?!

That would be 500 with nine zeroes. Given that we are at about 7 billion now, this is not completely impossible to visualize. Look around you and consider that for each person you see, there would be 71 more people flocked around them, or about three standard classrooms more for each person in sight. I admit it is a stretch, particularly on a New York or Mexico City street, but I am about it argue that this number is a healthy, reasonable one to aim for. With one caveat.

And the caveat is actually a simple one: Spread this number out over time. Lots of it. For anyone concerned about bringing more people, or souls, to Planet Earth, this should be an appealing idea. It should likewise appeal to anyone who actually likes humanity and would like to see it go on.

What got me thinking about this notion (aside from pondering it in general terms for the past few decades) is an article I linked to recently, regarding a report from the United Nations, which projected that by the end of this century the world population will reach 11 billion.

Biologists and other thinking people well recognize that we are far past the carrying point for sustainability, as things stand now. I forget how many earths it would take to keep up our consumption and pollution rate at what it presently is, never mind if our numbers continue to expand, but that number doesn’t really matter since we only have one earth to work with anyway.

You don’t need David Attenborough or Derrick Jensen or any number of tens of thousands of scientists to point out that we are vastly beyond earth’s carrying capacity for ourselves, and consequently on the verge of extinguishing ourselves, long before the traditional lifetime of a species, about 4 million years. And yet we’ve only been around for 50,000 years, give or take, depending on what you call our species and whom you talk to. That’s mighty pathetic for Homo so-called sapiens, Latin for “wise man.” (I will avoid other names I can think of for our species; they would show up as mostly asterisks, exclamation points, and so on anyway.)

After the link I posted, a thoughtful commenter suggested that we aim for a population of 3 billion. Which of course is a lot better than 11 billion, but it would still be one hell of a lot of us. And, really, just why do we need that? Is there some point we should be aiming for that would make sense for not just ourselves, but other creatures who not only live side by side with us, but who are a part of the web of life that makes our existence possible?

The late, great David Brower suggested that we strive for a planet “graced with human life,” rather than one teeming with it. That idea holds great appeal for me, perhaps because I have always held great respect for nature and marvel more each year at how it works and has worked in creating the web of life we are part of. Anyone paying even a little attention to the things we’re learning about ourselves, about life, and about the universe generally, must surely stand in awe and wonder at the fact that we are even here at all.

I commented in reply to the 3 billion idea that my goal would be for a population of about 500,000 people (hence this article, since I wanted to elaborate). This number seems relatively small, and it is. Yet it would also be a sustainable number, assuming we stopped acting like idiots and behaved as if we really wanted to help each other, instead of, say, blowing each other apart with drones, nukes, or genetic engineering (a short list of possibilities, I realize, but you get the idea).

500 million is the number of people we had around 1,500 A.D. a mere 500 years ago (rounding off a bit, but reasonably close to what I find from various respectable sources, a time not long after the fall of Rome and near the rise of the Roman Catholic Church). At that time, the earth’s resources were relatively intact, as were its ecosystems. Forests rose where deserts now lay barren, oceans were clean, fish populations were alive and well, untold thousands or tens of thousands more species of plants and animals graced the land, air, and water, pollution was virtually unheard of (if the name even existed), skies were clear, you could drink safely out of virtually any stream, lake, or river over most of the world, you could hunt for a living the world over, and so on. Of course there were diseases, wars, man’s inhumanity to man (not to mention women and children), a shorter lifespan due to general lack of knowledge in medicine, political idiocy, and so on. I personally have no desire to be teleported back to that time.

But now, with modern communications, a world knowledge base incalculably larger than it was then, it is not hard to imagine a planet truly “graced with life.” Assuming of course that we are not in an irreversible tailspin from climate change, radiation, or whatever (an assumption we need to make, if we don’t want to simply die of despair).

The pushers of the big numbers and the notion of having as many kids as you possibly can, for no scientifically discernable reason, are the high priests of superstition, also known as religious leaders, who want to propagate their particular faith through numbers. And there are jokers like William Buckley (who wrote “The Population Firecracker,” in response to Dr. Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb”), certifiable loonies such as Ann Coulter and other mouthpieces for “the upper crust,” who for some reason think more money and resource consumption will magically make our lives (or theirs) more worth living. And there are always politicians and economists, two other superstitious breeds, who see all growth as good, in spite of existence on a finite planet.

Yet, I am seriously taking the side of “the big number folks,” though for a different reason and through different means. Namely, that if we could drop the world population to 500,000, preferably by means of birth control, vasectomies, safe and sensible sex–as opposed to the general madness that prevails and permeates most of the world–we just might end up with a sustainable population, one that could live indefinitely here on earth. (This would require a revision of thought for many people, such as the idea that sex is fun in and of itself, and need not be used solely for propagation or expanding markets.)

If humans somehow make it for another million years, then we would indeed have reached the goal I suggested in the title, and have allowed or assisted 500 billion human beings more to come along, stretch their legs, watch the clouds, follow sensible dreams that might even help other humans, possibly colonize Mars (if we still felt the need), ward off incoming comets, and, well, I can’t even begin to imagine the beautiful world we could have, the medicines that might exist, our ability to visit parts of what would be a unfathomably beautiful planet, not fear for our security and so on. Some people might even get to follow their bliss! Imagine that.

Of course there would be unforeseeable problems, and we might eventually make a conscious group decision that the human experiment really isn’t worth it. On the other hand, if we did get that far, we might well improve on the typical species duration and go way past the average four million years. Last I heard, we had something like 3 billion years before the sun expands and consumes earth and everything on it–but if we got even close to that, we could well be headed toward one of those millions or billions of earth-like planets we now believe are out there, right in our own solar system.

Thus it is that I say we need more people, lots and lots more, but we must make a concerted effort to spread them out over time. It isn’t hard either. I had one biological son, for example, and if everyone did just that (or had none, as many people are doing), our species would start plummeting toward that 500,000 mark in relatively short time. I’m not as adept at statistics as I’d like to be, but from what I’ve read, our numbers would start dropping dramatically, and the U.N. would have to do their homework all over again. But that seems a small price to pay for a habitable world that our species could continue on, and perhaps even earn us the title we’ve already given ourselves, Homo sapiens.

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