Earth Now Has 8 Billion Humans. This Man Wishes There Were None. Can Technology Save Us And What It Does Not Say
One thing that has not yet been said about our relationship with technology is that it does not seem to have any problem reconciling itself to the idea of the human race disappearing.
I can think of no other instance in human history where we have a culture who believe that we’re destined to be wiped out, yet where the population of the planet has risen to the point where we have to start worrying about global warming.
The idea that the world population will fall over the next 100 years is as old as civilisation itself, not to mention the ancient wisdom of the Aztecs; the world is flat!
If the world continues to grow and evolve it will inevitably run out of resources like land, mineral deposits, natural gas, oil, wood and water. And it is a fact that in a finite planet like ours, the only sustainable solution is to keep the populations of all the nations of the world on the planet at a minimum.
We have managed to avoid such a fate for the most part, and in the last few decades, though there have been some signs of trouble in the form of terrorism and radicalisation, the world population has risen by over 4 billion since the dawn of recorded history.
In fact, over the last 100 years, the human population has grown by over 300%. Of course, the decline of the Roman Empire from the middle ages wasn’t because it was falling apart, it just wasn’t doing what it originally intended either.
According to the United Nations population agency, the world population has risen from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 5.2 billion in 2017, though the actual rise over the past decade is more like 4.5 billion.
In the space of just a few decades we have added a quarter of the world’s population.
And while our technological achievements are impressive, one thing we can perhaps take for granted and be pleased with is that we all have the same human instinct, the desire to pass away and spread our genes. As is now