How many of you readers believe there might be an over population problem?

Question

The planet Earth is only so big.
Roughly 8000 miles in Diameter, 200 million sq. mi. total surface area 60 M sq. mi. land. That is about 100 people / sq. mi. of land

I have seen very nice farm land eaten up by suburbia.

The more people there are the more competition for the Earths limited resources.

There are several times in the past that the planet showed that there was a limit to what it could produce and if this was exceded there would be dire consequences. 1 example id Easter island where the poplation eventually colapsed due to it exceding what the island could provide.
There are many other examples where over population and mismanagement of the natural resources caused desertification & population colapse or war.

Many vocal religious (anticontraception / antiabortion) believe there is more than enough space for all.
If you are one of these people please explain where the food will be grown when farm land becomes suburbia to house all the extra people.

I'd continue but ..

Answer 1

Yes but there is no good solution right.

Answer 2

"...I have seen very nice farm land eaten up by suburbia..." I'm only commenting on this line 'cause it's so true. We go back to where we used to farm & there's these huge mansions all over it & some fancy shopping plazas, it's crazy.

But, agriculture is looking up. Even though Walmart & Friends keep taking our land, farmers are now able to produce more on what land they have. There's a lot of technology out there developing ways for farmers to grow more on less.

On another note....there's this place called Siberia, and even though it's really cold, it's pretty empty, so if we get desperate, we can put people there!

Answer 3

Do you have any idea how big a square mile really is?

heres some interesting facts...
If the entire population of the world were put into the land area of Texas, each person would have an area equal to the floor space of a typical U.S. home and the population density of Texas would be about the same as Paris, France.

The world's better farms have tripled their crop yields in the past 30 years.

Despite continuing warnings of impending worldwide famine, since 1961 the population of the world has almost doubled, while food production has more than doubled -- resulting in food production rising by 20 percent per capita since then.

if the arable non-tropical land in the less developed nations of Africa, Asia and South America were farmed more efficiently:
With yields less than one-half the present average per acre in the U.S. cornbelt, they could produce enough to feed a world population of 18 billion people.

Answer 4

Not everything is so simple...

First of all, if there is an overpopulation problem, it must be most apparent not in the North American suburbia, but in third-world supercities such as Sao Paulo or Kolkatta. So far, people do not run away from it; in fact, they run toward it by leaving villages and moving into cities. So urban overpopulation, as bad as it may be, is perceived as an attractive alternative to rural poverty...

Second, your argument that there is a finite amount of food the planet can provide is faulty, because you explicitly assume that physical capital available to agriculture is fixed. For a long time (until about 1750), it was an accurate assumption, but not anymore. Machinery, chemicals, and new crops allow to increase yields to levels that exceed those that existed 100 years ago by a factor of 10. Hydroponic agriculture could provide another tenfold increase, but at the current level of land prices it is not feasible, except in some special circumstances (such as pre-1990 Japan with its sky-high land prices).

Third, there is absolutely no reason to believe that population growth will continue forever. Population growth is decreasing worldwide (read up on demographic transition); in many countries (from poor Russia to rich Germany and Japan) it has actually reversed. Overall, there are reasons to believe that the world's population will stabilize at 12-15 billion around 2100...

Fourth, there absolutely no evidence to support your claim that overpopulation causes war. Paul Collier from the World Bank studied incidence of war in the post-WWII period and concluded that statistically significant determinants of war are exports of primary commodities, existence of rich diaspora, and ethnic dominance (situation when one ethnic group is large enough to dominate, yet not large enough to make exploitation of minorities pointless). Population growth is only important when it is combined with declining incomes and low percentage of teenage boys attending school...

Finally, Julian Simon once made a seemingly simple, but very powerful argument. Suppose that natural resources are indeed becoming more scarce over time. If that were the case, prices of natural resources must increase faster than wages; labor in this case would be relatively abundant, so there wouldn't be any upward pressure on its price, except perhaps inflation. In reality, the opposite is observed; over the long periods of time, prices of natural resources increase more slowly than wages; in other words, the resource that is becoming more scarce over time is not land and minerals, but human lifetime...

Answer 5

i think your question is one of the rare few that are worthy of this yahoo service....first yes i think that we can only support so many people on this planent. I don't htink that we have quite gotten there yet but i think we are on the way. Every population has its limits do to the resources that the earth can provide. I think that we just haven't hit that population limit for earth quite yet. When we do then we will truly know that there are limits. NOt to mention the strain that all these poeople can put on the atmosphers and the earth itself.. just look at the dust bowl for instance...proof that if you mess with an scosystem nature can and will bear consequence....i wander what the max population will be fort this planet...

Answer 6

I agree totally. Our earth is overpopulated and is only getting worse. Our great-grandkids will have to live in an oxygenated bubble to survive. People need to quit popping out the babies left and right. Don't get me wrong, I have 2 little girls, but I am not going to have 6 kids like some people do because I love this earth and want to help protect it. Surburbia is a HUGE problem where I am from....I was taking a walk earlier and was walking on a sidewalk next to a Super Menards where I once walked through a cornfield just a few years earlier. Sad!

Answer 7

inhabitants growth has and could proceed to plateau. it won't almost attain the levels initially predicted, almost continuously via fact the levels have been exaggerated for result, and in area via fact the plateau result is unexpected and ought to not be predicted. We use in user-friendly terms a very tiny proportion of the international's land mass. needless to say greater area could be made with the aid of national making plans boards which might unavoidably be created if the subject grew to alter into an. we are greater resilient than the diverse alarmists sense. supply and demand additionally dictated that we are going to locate the thank you to offer what the populations call for. there is greater beneficial than adequate land on which to produce, and technologies will create the flexibility to fertilize barren soil if mandatory. I even have got here upon for my area that i come across the flexibility to fulfill my desires while i'm positioned under pressure, and that's an anlogy for populations that are in simple terms a fragmented organism. The inhabitants "subject," as a thank you to communicate, is an invention of misanthropes, that's a approach or the different meant to make people sense guilt for being alive. additionally ostensibly requested to cajole peoples to not procreate (that's laughibly unrealistic), or a minimum of to fill them with sufficient worry to fulfill the scientifically "greater knowlegde" proclaimers' desire for validation and a few agency of their misery. even as populations do substitute into complicated in nature, humanity has shown itself wildly self-regulatory in its behavior, a minimum of the place an prepared equipment of government is able to adapt unabated.

Answer 8

... if you look deep enough behind the scenes to who is really pulling the strings in the world you are going to find that the "elite" DO think there is a population problem, and if you follow up and look around you long enough its starts becoming eerily obvious that they might have long term plans for "population reduction" ... some of the conspiracy theorists say they have uncovered evidence of a global elite plan to reduce population by 80% and to concentrate the remainder of the population in "compact" cities ... conspiracy? lets hope so.

Answer 9

From El Nina to droughts,hm!? and now suburbia strecthes outward! Pretty soon the vermin will have all the varmints chasing them across your lawn! Oh,My...Oh,uh, pest control, animal control,somebody help!! there is an otter in my Pool! and a pack of wolves trying to catch it!

Answer 10

There are many overpopulated areas and countries in the world.But look in this country alone as to how much vast undeveloped land there is in the mid to outwest...literally millions amd milions of acres. Technology exists today to slowly develope in those places. But along the northeastern coast, it is densely overpopulated.

Answer 11

MIght? Might? 7 billion people and counting, famine, extinction of species, collapsing ecosystems, water shortages, global warming, dying oceans, overburdened welfare systems, epidemic disease...even your 'vocal religious' types can't possibly be that clueless, no matter what they say...