Our population is growing at 2.5 people per second. That is 150 people per minute, 9000 people per hour, 216000 people per day, 1512000 per week, and 78624000 per year. Don't even get me started on Leap Year. Anyway, that is a LOT of increase in our population. We have less than 2 people dying a second, and 4 babies being born each second. This is what led to the 2.5 population growth per second. That is why I didn't say the number of people being added to the world every second, because if I said that it the growth would have been 4 people per second.
Our growth is exponential. It took us about 50000 years to go from one human to one billion. However, we grew the other 6 billion in about 2 centuries. We hit 7 billion people around 2011 or 2012, its a little hard to calculate when there are SO MANY PEOPLE ON THE PLANET, and we hit 1 billion at around 1804. The cause of this sudden population boom was the Industrial Revolution, which is the main cause of all of humanities successes in the last 200 years, but also the cause of many destructive human made forces. It allowed us to use new technologies to provide people with more "stuff", more jobs, and more food using a lot less land and manpower. It produced more jobs because of the large amount of new industries that were being built, even though they all used less manpower. Our rate of increase is beginning to lower, which is good, but it isn't lowering by much.
At the rate we are going we are going to reach 10 to 11 billion people by 2050, which is a growth of about 3 to 4 billion people in 35 years.The most populous countries are China at 1.4 billion people, India at 1.3 billion people, United States of America at 325 million people, Indonesia at 256 million people, Brazil at 204 million people, Pakistan at 188 million people, Nigeria at 184 million people, Bangladesh at 161 million people, Russia at 142 million people, and Japan at 127 million people.
This brings up several problems that I will go into more detail on in my next post. First, is sustainability, there is no doubt in my mind that we could produce food for 10 to 11 billion people at 2050, I am just worried it will completely destroy what is left of the environment at that point. Second, the amount of power we will need to supply people with power, which can be done, but again will destroy the environment. Next is the water supply going dry. There are several others that but that is for another time.
The worst part about the growth is, the growth is happening in the wrong places. The population is growing in places that can barely support themselves let alone a population boom. These places include many parts of both Africa and India. They are growing because medicine is improving, so more babies are surviving past infancy, but there is less contraception. This means same amount of babies with less casualties, which leads to a giant rise in temperature.
Here is a link to the population clock which contains other information on the growth of our population if you are interested. http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ .
There will be other posts on this topic soon based on the problems that come with overpopulation and possible solutions. Some solutions may be a bit controversial, obvious, or far fetched, but they are still ideas. If you have any ideas I would love to hear them in the comments. Follow on twitter at Planet Earth and visit the Facebook page at Let's Give The World A Chance.
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