SEVEN BILLION? I'm Not Worried

Last week Earth reached seven billion occupants, its highest total yet. I recall in middle school being told this forecast in an ominous tone which very much communicated “you are doomed.” How could the world possibly support seven billion people? Surely we will all starve, or choke in smog, or at least fowl up the lines at the grocery store.

1955: The horniest year in all of human history

There are two reasons you don’t need to be worried. The first is that we’re past the hump on population booms. Actually 1955 or thereabouts is the most fertile year in human history; couples of today are either less horny or less averse to birth control. Because human beings mature slower than dogs or goldfish we don’t actually see the affects of peak-horniness until several decades down the line (as we are now). Your great-grandchildren will not live in a planet of 12 billion people. They will probably live with about ten billion, perhaps less.

To have a stabile population a country needs a growth rate of 2.3 children per family; much of the world, including China, Europe and the United States, is below this threshold. Were it not for immigration, America would be on the decline. If you live in a place with internet access, chances are good that the number of babies born per family will drop over the next several decades, so overpopulation won’t actually occur. Conversely, countries with giant families tend to encourage fecundity because they alternately need the help for less productive subsistence farming, or because the childhood mortality rate is so high that, sadly, they must hedge their bets. If the developing world develops, it will drop in numbers as well. If it doesn’t, remember that it’s still a lot cheaper to build a desalinization plant than to invade Canada.

The other thing to consider is technology. Looking forward, we’re good at extrapolating calamities by magnifying our own problems in terms of future population. But we lack the ability to forsee solutions to them. Scott Adams presents a helpful excercise. Paraphrased, he notes that if you told someone in 1850 that New York City would have well over six million inhabitants in 2011, the person would scarcely believe you. Six million?! Think of how many horses a city of that size would include! Think of all the horse poop! To accommodate five million horses, the Big Apple would effectively be a gigantic manure mill, and everyone would have to walk around on stilts just to breath.

If you’re a recovering Amish and unfamiliar with New York, you’ll be happy to know that horses aren’t a problem. We use subways, buses and elevators, allowing an exponentially larger population to live in small spaces than was practically possible in 1850. Horses are used by cliché honeymooners in Central Park, but they will be boiled down for glue as soon as we figure out a way to make segways Victorian and romantic.

You can see the same thing in a variety of fields. In 1870 it took nearly eighty percent of our population to produce sufficient food for everyone. In 2011 it’s less than three percent. A lot of the problems we “foresee” in the future are mirages. We will innovate our way out of problems before we arrive at them. So you can rest a little easier knowing that food production, green technology and utterly unforeseen developments may well outpace Malthusian calamities.

Of course, there may be totally unforeseen game changers as well.

It’s not inconcievable that science could cure aging in the next fifty years. Futurist Ray Kurzweil is convinced that by mid-century biological engineering, nanotechnology and mind-machine interface will mean effective immortality. In other words, if you can survive until 2035, you can live indefinitely from there.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BUYbEgOZt4[/youtube]

Pair this science fiction scenario with the fact that Baby Boomers are about to fall apart and they’ve got money. A lot of cash is about to be funneled into artificial hip and prostate rejuvination technology. You’d be silly to think anti-aging research and development isn’t going to benefit.

Aside from basic maintenance and upkeep, we may very well figure out how to stop aging altogether. For the first time in human history we know what actually causes aging. Basically your chromosomes have little doodads at the end called “telomeres” which protect them from unraveling. Each time your cells divide the telomeres shorten, leaving your chromosomes more and more vulnerable. They’re why all life has a built-in expiration date. If we can figure out how to stop telomere degradation, we cure aging.

Let’s go with Kurzweil’s timeline and say in 2035 scientists can do exactly that. And let’s say that a decade later it’s reasonably affordable; about on par with getting an online associate’s degree. Thereafter global population growth would remain explosive, because most prosperous societies would only experience death by accident or jealous lover.

Good luck finding a job, grand kids. Most Baby Boomers who make it to 2035 will stay retired, of course, because they will have lucked out with Social Security. But eventually the size of that behemoth voting demographic will comparatively dwindle and their retirement packages will be redacted, or my generation will grow tired of paying Social Security contributions for two hundred years and kill all of our elders with pitchforks. If you’re born in 2100, you’re screwed. Nobody is retiring, so all job vacancies have to be created fresh. We could have two or three generations living with their parents, never having worked. The whole planet would function like inner city Detroit.

See what I’m doing there? I’m projecting one factor (nobody dying) without any others. Which is why ultimately such predictions fail. If by 2050 we can cure aging, by 2100 everyone might be downloading their brains onto the latest Apple product and selling their bodies as scraps to Purina. Or maybe we’ll shrink ourselves to two feet tall. Or successfully invade another planet. Who knows?

Our species’ capacity to fix things and make cool gadgets is very nearly on par with our propensity for killing each other and screwing things up. And technology doesn’t progress in a linear line, it progresses exponentially. The next fifty years are going to be some of the most amazing, mind-blowing decades in all of human history, and I’m excited to be around for it. Another couple billion people won’t derail the operation.