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World Population Hits 7 Billion

This is The End

Penultimate Amazing
This is The End
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Today (Oct. 31 2011) is the honorary day at least...

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-seven-billionth-baby-20111031,0,455314.story

Though it's impossible to say exactly when it will happen, demographers have chosen the date to mark the milestone. Humanity remains on a steep growth curve.

It took only a dozen years for humanity to add another billion people to the planet, reaching the milestone of 7 billion Monday — give or take a few months.

Demographers at the United Nations Population Division set Oct. 31, 2011, as the "symbolic" date for hitting 7 billion, while acknowledging that it's impossible to know for sure the specific time or day

<snip>

The U.N.'s best estimate is that population will march past 9.3 billion by 2050 and exceed 10.1 billion by the end of the century. It could be far more, if birthrates do not continue to drop as they have in the last half-century.

<snip>

The buildup to Monday's milestone has briefly turned up the flame on long-simmering debates about growth on a finite planet.

<snip>
Click to expand...

More articles (lots of interesting angles):

http://news.google.com/news/story?pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&topic=h&ncl=dIqUDR7VR92ljWM0PhunseH8YKI4M

This thread will probably have some discussion about the part I bolded.

Humans need food, shelter, and water. Which one of the three would run out first if population increased rapidly?

I assume food, then water, then shelter? Unless we don't keep up on water purification and transport technology, then maybe water first...
 
I recall a Rolling Stones song with the lyric "Let's drink to the three thousand million", and that was in the late 60's. A scary thought.
 
I mentioned this to my girlfriend, and she responded, "Yeah, you didn't know that? The seven billionth person was a girl born in the Philippines earlier today".

Huh?

So I did a quick Google search, and sure enough, the Philippines announced the arrival of the symbolic 'seven billionth baby'; she was the first baby born (shortly after midnight) in the Philippines on Dec. 31.
 
Wolfman said:
I mentioned this to my girlfriend, and she responded, "Yeah, you didn't know that? The seven billionth person was a girl born in the Philippines earlier today".

Huh?

So I did a quick Google search, and sure enough, the Philippines announced the arrival of the symbolic 'seven billionth baby'; she was the first baby born (shortly after midnight) in the Philippines on Dec. 31.
Click to expand...

Oct. 31 I presume. Like the OP said, we don't really know exactly when the seven billionth person will arrive. I wonder how big the error bars are anyway. Is it 7 billion +/- 1 million, 10 million, 100 million? I would guess that the estimates are pretty rough for the less developed countries. Then there's the undocumented immigrants too.

But who cares about that, right?

In the year I was born, 1970, the population was 3.7 billion. Hasn't quite doubled in 40 years. I think that growth trends are starting to slow down. Would like them to slow down even more though and for population to actually begin to shrink again. No I don't want humans to go extinct, but I think it would be better in the long run if there were somewhat fewer of us.

Somewhere between the green and the yellow line would be good:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World-Population-1800-2100.png
 
It's annoying how so much media is baselessly regurgitating the overpopulation myth from the 1970s.
 
ROAR! I can't wait for there to be 9 billion people, but I'll unfortunately have to wait 40 years for this :(. Just let everyone know the rate of population growth is actually slowing down quite a bit. By 2050 the only place with lots of population growth with be Sub-Saharan Africa for the most part.
 
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Tsukasa Buddha said:
It's annoying how so much media is baselessly regurgitating the overpopulation myth from the 1970s.
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Um, if you’re referring to the not enough living space thing that people often regurgitate then I agree. But if you are referring to things such as food and water shortages then I disagree.
 
GlennB said:
I recall a Rolling Stones song with the lyric "Let's drink to the three thousand million", and that was in the late 60's. A scary thought.
Click to expand...


I've been reading science fiction for years and have read a lot of stuff from the early part of the 20th century in which the premise for terrible problems and social changes would be because the population was over 4 billion or even 6 billion!! (Probably something like a doubling and tripling of the population at the time the stories were written).
 
Darat said:
I've been reading science fiction for years and have read a lot of stuff from the early part of the 20th century in which the premise for terrible problems and social changes would be because the population was over 4 billion or even 6 billion!! (Probably something like a doubling and tripling of the population at the time the stories were written).
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Well it has much less to do with the number of people and more do with food and water supplies. And right now, a fair amount of food and water systems are being contaminated or over stretched. Perhaps if we could make more efficient use of these systems we could support perhaps double of what we even have now.
 
Darat said:
I've been reading science fiction for years and have read a lot of stuff from the early part of the 20th century in which the premise for terrible problems and social changes would be because the population was over 4 billion or even 6 billion!! (Probably something like a doubling and tripling of the population at the time the stories were written).
Click to expand...

But we have to remember they were also extrapolating pollution and food issues. With the food issues we definitely got lucky, and the pollution problems took a lot of determined effort over the second half of the century to turn around
 
Wolfman said:
I mentioned this to my girlfriend, and she responded, "Yeah, you didn't know that? The seven billionth person was a girl born in the Philippines earlier today".

Huh?

So I did a quick Google search, and sure enough, the Philippines announced the arrival of the symbolic 'seven billionth baby'; she was the first baby born (shortly after midnight) in the Philippines on Dec. 31.
Click to expand...

The seven billionth baby was also born in India, apparently. Seems an oddly popular thing to lay claim to. Especially given that, as noted in the article uk_dave linked, it probably hasn't actually happened yet.
 
I really feel I ought to apologize. It's only 6,999,999,999. I raised both hands when they were counting in Hong Kong this morning. Sorry little baby in the Philippines and little baby in India. The new title goes to a kid in Muscat.
 
Darat said:
I've been reading science fiction for years and have read a lot of stuff from the early part of the 20th century in which the premise for terrible problems and social changes would be because the population was over 4 billion or even 6 billion!! (Probably something like a doubling and tripling of the population at the time the stories were written).
Click to expand...

And would you say there have been no changes due to the continuing increase?
Good or bad?
 
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