Milestone day

So if anyone noticed, today was the official "milestone" day where we, as a planet, reached 8 billion.

On the radio they were interviewing some experts on the subject and they all went a bit like this:

Interviewer: Well, 8 billion.   That certainly seems like a lot.  Should we be worried about what that means for all of us on the globe?

Expert: No, everything is fine...provided people stop using fossil fuels next week, don't eat meat, don't have any kids of their own, don't buy cars or houses, and don't contribute in any way to climate change EVERYTHING will be just fine.

Yeah, I'm not at all worried.   We've proven how well we can pull together and address these things in the past.

(and I'll keelhaul the first person that turns this political, don't try me)

At least we can NOT blame the US on this one directly. 

Also in today's news:

link

Don't worry, it'll all work itself out.

QuasiMofo (John Brown) said:

At least we can NOT blame the US on this one directly. 

That's never true.  Anyone can always find a way to blame the US.

I'm not worried.  I'm not sitting in the fire with my cup of coffee saying "This is fine," but doomsayers have been doomsaying for hundreds if not thousands of years.

The planet is fine. Its survived pole reversal, asteroid impacts, ice ages, all kinds of stuff.

People are adaptable. That's why we rule the planet. We aren't the fastest. We can't dive to depths for long, we can't fly. But we adapt. We make cars, and planes, and penicillin.

In reply to Indy - Guy :

Birth rates (in some places) are declining, but people are living a lot longer, so overall population will still be higher than ever.

Well, one in a million people is at the millionth percentile of intelligence so we've now got 8,000 really, really, really smart people available to address our problems.

Added later...

I just realized that Soylent Green was set in 2022; that's fun 

I thought we had reached 8 billion a while back. 

RX Reven' said:

Well, one in a million people is at the millionth percentile of intelligence so we've now got 8,000 really, really, really smart people available to address our problems.

Added later...

I just realized that Soylent Green was set in 2022; that's fun 

Well, that prediction missed its mark. Let's hope everything else does, too. 

Population is actually not a huge deal in terms of climate - population levels and CO2 output can be and in many places have been completely decoupled, and remember that much of the damage was done back when population levels were half or less of what they are today...the degrowth movement ignores those facts so hard it seems intentional.

RX Reven' said:

Well, one in a million people is at the millionth percentile of intelligence so we've now got 8,000 really, really, really smart people available to address our problems.

I think we have a lot more potential Einsteins around than we realize, the trouble is that too many are grinding away at keeping themselves from being homeless and starving instead of working on groundbreaking physics research in their idle time at a cushy patent office job. Remember that Einstein was considered "unemployable"...

GameboyRMH said:

Remember that Einstein was considered "unemployable"...

Remember also that his most significant achievement was to lead humanity to the knowledge to produce the means to easily destroy itself.  Maybe we need to be "grinding away."  It is said that "idle hands are the devil's workshop." 

GameboyRMH said:

Population is actually not a huge deal in terms of climate - population levels and CO2 output can be and in many places have been completely decoupled, and remember that much of the damage was done back when population levels were half or less of what they are today...the degrowth movement ignores those facts so hard it seems intentional.

Very true. Los Angeles is a prime example, there are way more cars today than the 1960s but less polluted.

BUT THE TRAFFIC

The "expert" was saying that most of the next billion growth will be in Africa and India -Pakistan , 

Europe - USA - Japan  will age out ,  South America will only grow a little , 

It's going to be interesting how they plan energy and food for all of them !

In reply to californiamilleghia :

The WHO suggested we eat bugs for protein instead of meat. Batter and deep fry them, I'll eat it.

When LA is turned into a maximum security prison after world war 3, and the plutoxin 7 virus shows up I’ll start to worry. 

Is an open air minimum security prison close enough?  And there was the global virus thing..

I am off to get some chandeliers and a Cadillac...

As my Biochem professor always used to say:  When Earth is done with us, she'll kill us.

My guess is it's likely we'll survive climate change, but probably at less than half of our current population.  The weather extremes alone will take out a handful, the challenges to agriculture will cause pretty wild starvation, and the wildfires and hurricanes will account for the rest.  By then, Teslas will have generated a fully-sentient A.I. and kill the rest. 

(before you all go nuts... I'm kidding)

The more I ponder these ideas the more I realize that Thanos was right.

Not worried about it at all. Globally, over any sensible time scale, and almost any metric the world is getting better.

Graphics from here: https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions-in-5-charts?linkId=62571595

QuasiMofo (John Brown) said:

The more I ponder these ideas the more I realize that Thanos was right.

There are not too many people in the world.

There are too many stupid people in the world.

Thanos's plan doesn't address the real issue.

In reply to Duke :

We build cruise ships then we sink them! NSFW language

One of my favorite Bill Burr bits.

Meh.

There is more empty space on this planet than there is crowded space. A quick Google search shows that at this point, 50% of the Earth's land surface can be considered untouched by humans and only 14% is considered to be inhabited. Another billion or two people isn't going to make that much difference. 

Technology is progressing fast enough to keep everyone fed and humanity is smart enough to adapt to any climate changes that happen. A couple of feet of sea rise and some bad storms won't kill off enough people to slow the rate of increase enough to even be noticeable. Coastal populations will spend the necessary money to protect themselves much as the Netherlands did. 

As for myself, I'm already looking for property farther away from the coast. 

One of the articles I was reading quoted a UN population expert who pointed out that even though we haven't reached peak population for the planet (est sometime between 2060-2090), we have reached peak children already.  Most of the remaining population growth is just straight due to significantly lower intent mortality rates paired with longer life expectancy.

There will never be more children alive at one time than there is right now, which is pretty wild to think about..

Years ago my dad told me the reason there is so much famine in Africa is the do-gooders sent in the cure for a lot of the diseases, the population exploded, but no plan was offered to feed them except shipping in food from the outside to prevent famine.   

Remember the starving Somalis?  That happened because one tribe stole all the shipped in food and let the other tribes starve to death.     The famine relief was shipping in more food.     The Black Hawk down fiasco came about because the US was sent to protect the food distribution.   Clinton decided to expand the mission parameters and disarm the warlords.  Then the Food War turned into a general uprising. 

(Warlords don't have the NRA and go directly to the "from my cold dead hands" approach to prevent confiscation.)   

Appleseed said:

The planet is fine. Its survived pole reversal, asteroid impacts, ice ages, all kinds of stuff.

People are adaptable. That's why we rule the planet. We aren't the fastest. We can't dive to depths for long, we can't fly. But we adapt. We make cars, and planes, and penicillin.

Saw the most recent Veritasium, and with a lot of new observations, there are some solid theories that some of the mass die offs that have happened throughout the history of this plant were caused by super and mega novas.  Where their effects either stripped off the ozone layer for a long time, or irradiated the planet with EM strong enough to kill off most big animals that were above 30ft below sea level.  The asteroid and dinosaurs is pretty well known, but the others are astronomical observations compared and noting some interesting geological data.