• Question: How could we ever solve the population problem?

    Asked by Supriya to Jackie, Michele, Oliver, Vicky, Yelong on 9 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Vicky Bayliss

      Vicky Bayliss answered on 9 Mar 2015:

      I always think these things will sort themselves out. The world population is growing so fast at the moment because in many countries people often have many children. But that’s only because historically they needed to have many children in order for there to be a good chance that some of them would survive childhood. it used to be the case in this country too, but once survival through childhood became more normal, people just naturally stopped having so many children.

      and of course, at some people we can colonise Mars 😉

    • Photo: Michele Faucci Giannelli

      Michele Faucci Giannelli answered on 11 Mar 2015:

      I am not sure what the problem is. I think is more a problem of optimising resources and their distribution. In principle Earth could probably support twice as many people as there are now if they were not all living like us eating meat and consuming all the oil we use to keep us warm, lighted and moving.
      Let me take a step back. We could be as little as 100k in the whole planet to maintain genetic diversity and keep human kind alive. So what is the best number between 100k and 20B? I am not sure, probably with only 1B people we could all enjoy a lot of resources without exhausting them as we are doing now. I think this is a problem of social engineering where we would also probably maximise the rate of discoveries to keep our race from stagnating.
      Still at some point we will reach a point were people could almost be immortal, at that point there will be even greater problem linked to the renewal of the genetic pool and the need of controlling procreation to keep population stable.
      How to solve all this? Not sure, but for sure you will need all your population on a very high level of education so they would be able to accept any policy which would benefit the group more than the single person.

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