Fight Aging!

100% agree, overpopulation will not be a problem for us when people are cured of aging. I've seen the calculations before for how many people could comfortably live in America if neccessary.

By the time a growing population even became annoying in some areas, we will have things like the ability to synthetically make food. We will spread out in teh star system if neccessary. Or merge with our machines via uploading farther into the future.

Also, the age in which people get children is adapted to the total life-span, so back in the days when people lived to age 25 they got children at an earlier age than now, and now most are in the interval 20-35. If someone expect to live for 1000 years, he won't at age 30 feel "Ooh, it's getting late, must get a family and kids soon, or it'll be too late!" Rather, people will take their time, knowing that aging won't make it "too late".

In the worst case scenario, we'll simply have to regulate getting children so that it matches the death-rate. That would be somewhat bad, but not nearly as bad as aging and dying. And I very much doubt it will come to that.

FYI: Here is a link to what I wrote on this topic in 1991:

http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/dsp.cgi?msg=398

(The email addresses in that message now are out-of-date, but the concepts expressed still apply.)

The best argument remains, I think, the fact that population grows much faster with the birth rate than with life expectancy.

If this is true, this research to cure ageing. How do they suppose to cure ageing. The only sollution that I can come up with to cure ageing is stem cells. We would have to take stem cells from women that are pregnant. Thereby killing innocent children that are not even born yet.

What incredible lies this article is. Overpopulation is a serious and severe problem. Anybody ever hear of natural resource limits? Gross pollution? Collapsing fisheries? Desertification? Acid rain? Climate change?

No "back of the envelope" calculations are going to honestly assess the present population damage to the environment, which is presently teetering on collapse. Add more humans to the mixture and you have sure-fired recipe for global disaster, which is exactly what you are advocating.

I don't completely understand what you are saying. First you state that Malthus and Malthusian beliefs are wrong. Where is your proof? If they are wrong, why is it still being taught as a fact in college classes? If the population is going to stabilized in developed countries, it does not matter because the undeveloped countries will continue to grow until their capacity is reached, then the developed countries will experience a high rate of immigration. If you extend life expectancy, aren't you just creating an older, more conservative population to drain any financial aid we may have for the elderly today? Many studies say we will run out of petroleum and other valuable resources within the century. What is your back up resource for that? Other than E85, which is not entirely environmentally friendly, nor is it efficient, there are no real solutions. Why hasn't the United States population growth rate decreased like the ones in Europe? How do you explain a worldwide growth rate of 3 people per second? Where is your proof for anything you are saying?

Total BS.

We are *already* resource constrained. Most arable farm land is already under cultivation, world-wide. Availability of fresh water means that little if any new land will be cultivated, ever. The increasing cost of energy is directly driven by increasing demand from an increasingly large and affluent global population competing for a declining resource (mostly petroleum). Pollution has already fouled our air and waterways. Many species are already gone and others are in rapid decline. Fisheries are in decline pretty much everywhere, with many previously popular species of fish already gone from our tables.

In other words, the facts are plain: lots of increasingly wealthy people are doing irreparable harm to our biosphere, and ultimately the price is being paid and will increasingly be paid by us, in the form of lowered quality of life, health problems, higher frequency and severity of weather-related natural disasters, etc.

How can you conceivably reconcile these facts with such drivel about "over-population is a myth"?

Thank you for covering the population myth.
The truth is population is on the verge of imploding.
Birth rates are down, folks are ageing and the attack on our health is working (killing us off).
There is plenty of everything except inteligence.
The freaks that run the world are running scams on us and brain washing us into a scarcity mentality.
Here are some links for you..

root.man peak
http://tinyurl.com/ymcxyg

population impolosion
http://tinyurl.com/2rc5a9

Keep after it!

rm

Yeah, I'd love to live longer, and 'am' practicing calorie restriction (saves on food too, SA :)
But this is pie in the sky. You can't just reorder the entire society and power structure to make this work out. There are things in motion, and the people pushing the levers have a much smaller population in mind, not a larger one. Think around 50mill or less, and you'll get the grim picture. SA has it down. There's finite resource limits we're pushing up against, and even if we had power & metals from Space, we're putting too much heat into the biosphere & destabilizing a lot of delicate weather flows and temperature loops.

If you have a way to convince the world power structures to completely rebuild society, using energy we don't have, and goodwill the West has blown, and rewrite human nature to be peaceful in stead of tribal and xenophobic while you're at it, we're never going to see the 10 billion mark.

And by the time I'm in my 50s, if I live that long, the population of a frigid, wind-blasted Earth will probably be less than 5% of peak.

If we're REALLY, REALLY damn lucky, the newspace folks will manage to establish a toehold in Space, and we won't be doomed to a slow slide back to a future-primitive Stone Age.

I basically favor putting emphasis on life extension, though I'm not too big on Borg-type transhumanism. Nevertheless, the problem of human population increase, and the resulting strain both on planetary resources and social adaptation is real and could well "spoil the party." Right now, it looks like, with or without a globalist conspiracy to reduce the human population, it's going to be a near thing whether sufficient substitutes will be found for petrolem and other vital resources to sustain even the present population.

I'm less concerned about the demographic changes if the life-extension technology does in fact preserve or restore youthful health. Most probably retirement as we know it would be replaced by extended sabbaticals and career changes to avoid psychological burnout. Admittedly, there may be some who, in fact just want to retire and live off their accumulated resources (including pension rights) who would be inhibited from doing so by social guilt absent the "justification" of age-related loss of abilities. But I think that could be managed by encouraging development of "fun" skills that are also socially useful, such as amateur astronomy.

Poorer countries are more likely to be inhabited by large families than those of their wealthier counterparts. Think about it! The more children a poor family has, the more likely that at least one of them will survive and grow up healthy. This is survival-based eugenics that has been brought about via the consequence of poverty-induction policies that have been place for many years. Overpopulation is a myth that has been craftily created by the global elite who see us as nothing but cattle, as their slaves. Our suffering is their religion, and theres more to come!!

Peak oil is a lie. Oil is not a fossil fuel.

Read the evidence and refute it if you can.

http://tinyurl.com/ymcxyg

Overpopulation is a lie.

"Peak oil is a lie. Oil is not a fossil fuel."

The united states peaked and went into decline in the 1970s. Well all over the world are going into decline. Oil is a fossil fuel and those who believe otherwise should short oil right now. I'm long oil and making a killing.

Don't listen to the snake oil salesman telling you that peak oil is not real.

Regardless of how many people the world can contain, aren't there enough of us already?

I climbed the second highest mountain in England, and it was like grand central station.

There are enough of us already, and it seems the ones who are reproducing the most are those who have little or no concern for their environment.

It's fine for those who can afford a massive house out in the country, and send someone out to do their shopping, but there are those of us working hard, and with little wealth who have to witness the destruction first hand.

who is the author of the article?
kindly state it asap...

1) The Earth is Finite. 100 widgets won't fit into a 50-widget bag. 100 cattle can't graze forever in a field that can only sustainably support 50. It's called basic logic folks...

2) Future population estimates aren't the point really - population is already well beyond a sustainable level. Every day 200,000 more people are born than die. That is a whole extra New York City worth of people every couple of months or so. Do you think the 3 Billion people in poverty are that way only because of greed or inefficiency? There is simply not enough food, water, and energy for 6.6 Billion people on this planet. Truth be told, there isn't enough to support even 3 Billion sustainably if they live above 3rd World poverty levels of consumption.

3) World Grain Ending Stocks are in sharp decline NOW. World Grain Production per person has been in decline for 20 years. World Irrigated Area per person is in sharp decline. Go ahead and do a Google image search - you will find the proof.

4) World fresh water supplies are declining NOW. The Ogallala aquifer that waters much of the American Midwest is declining so rapidly that it will be functionally dry within 40 years. The Aral Sea and Lake Chad are almost all dried up. Rivers from The Colorado in America to the Yellow in China are frequently not even reaching all the way to the sea before they dry up.

4) World Oil Production has peaked (or is within 5% of the peak) and will decline within 10 years. When it does, world food production will decline. Modern agriculture is oil-dependant to the extreme.

5) Oil energy ALONE does the equivalent of 300 man-hours of labor each and every day for every man, woman, and child on the planet. Windmills and solar cells will never do this much total work. When the oil starts to decline, unless we have Nuclear Fusion on line (we are too late) the world will enter a period of global famine and anarchy. (Ever see 'The Road Warrior'?)

6) 'You guys have been wailing your gloom-and-doom scenario for years and you are always wrong - the world is fine.' Let's use that exact same logic on you Christians now: 'You guys keep telling us that Jesus is coming back and we better get ready, but he never shows up - you are wrong.'

JUST BECAUSE SOMETHING HASN'T HAPPENED YET DOESN'T MEAN IT NEVER WILL.

7) Do I have to mention Global Climate Change? If I do, you will probably argue forever about this and overlook my main points - so I won't. But if I DID mention it, one could surely see that carbon emissions come more abundantly from more people.

Imagine that you are an archaologist looking at the remains of an ancient dead civilization. Suppose you find evidence that their religious practices caused them to be unable to adapt to a new threat to their civilization, and so even though the priests offered sacrifices and the people obeyed their leaders, they were eventually swept away by the relentless tide of a danger that they could never truly comprehend within the confines of their religious/cultural mindset.

Is this not what happened to the Aztecs?

Is this not what is happening to US today?

I think that, to cure aging, we are going to need to harvest baby souls. Then, we will give the baby to old people, to stop aging, which causes over population and the pollution of our oceans. We need to think about the future... one day, we will indeed merge with machines like aa2 explains, so we can then go to the "star system" where we will rule the universe and baby souls will live on. How soon can we accomplish this, this "stopping of the aging?" The attack on our health is a conspiracy by our elders, the baby lovers. Overpopulation will cease to exist, and dinosaurs will come back as animals for us to ride in space, close to Saturn.

Jello Mother is right. The baby souls are indeed needed to cure aging. Once aging is cured, overpopulation will no longer be a problem. Our superior health will allow us to experiment with the merging of humans and machines. We will, essentially, become cyborgs. This is already being studied, and I expect to see its effects in my lifetime. We will also be able to bring back the dinosaurs, since the world will no longer be so crowded, and just as we have domesticated cats, dogs, etc., the dinosaurs will be our pets. We will use them for transportation, and we will be able to make them survive in space by turning them into cyborgs as well. Research is already showing that this is possible.
Baby souls are the key. Once we harvest them, the rest will simply fall into place.
PS Where can I get a widget bag? I really need one of those! I can't find them at WalMart!

Supposedly, the comments here undergo a review process before inclusion on the board. It would seem that the standards for inclusion are low indeed.

It may seem humorous to spew tales of pet dinosaurs and such, but perhaps you should stop being clever long enough to see what is before you. I suppose you are a younger person. What I am saying is that you are about to be given a hollowed-out shell of a crappy world as your inheritance. Your parents, grandparents, and their parents basically took whatever they wanted out of a treasure of finite size and have only left you the box the treasure came in. You have been stolen from, but you simply don't know this yet.

You suppose that the world will just be there for you when you are 30 or 40 like it always has been for those before you. It won't. Within 10 years we will not have 24-hour electricity everywhere in America - it will be rationed. We will not be able to drive anywhere we like anymore - gas will be rationed. Food will cost 5-10 times what it does today, and rent/mortagages will go up even though people will have less money than today. Unemployment will be 15-20%, and huge permanent communities of homeless squatters will appear in every major city. Riots will break out. Life will be vicious, dirty, and poor.

All of these problems will force the government to restrict civil liberties and constitutional rights just to maintain control. People will be held without trial, and personal ownership of guns will be outlawed.

The goverment will be forced to put millions of people to work and also to feed them. This will provide the right environment where total Socialism can be implemented in America, destroying our nation. And because we will also be at war constantly to secure dwindling oil reserves, our nation will begin to look outwardly much like a Fascist State.

This is the world we are giving to you. Enjoy. You can't see this coming yet unless you look very hard like I have. This is because our entire economy is dependant upon future growth for current prosperity. Business interests and politicians need to constantly reinforce an image of never-ending growth, or the people will stop investing and spending and the economy will collapse.

Socialism is a stupidly unfair and inefficient system. But Capitalism is like a very perky super-optimistic pep rally held for a football team that may or may not actually be any good. Even though the team may totally suck, the pep squad keeps up the cheer all the same so you won't NOTICE how sucky the team actually is. And because Capitalism requires never-ending growth or it will die, if the team doesn't get better every year (even if times are good) the whole thing will still fall apart.

What we have right now is the end of times when the pep squad can still convince the people that things are still good. Soon, the mounting numbers of fumbles, interceptions, and real crappy play will have the crowd slowly start to boo.

So leaving metaphor-land (since you didn't understand my widget bag metaphor) let me be clear. The problems in the world like higher prices for everything, unemployment, famine, war, and reduced quality of life will start top get dramtically worse during the next few years. People will get really worried. Then, at some point, things will break down suddenly and the new impoverished, starving, anarchic world will emerge.

People will blame this on one thing or another. But there is only 1 real cause of it. OVERPOPULATION - too many people consuming too much stuff too quickly. Locusts.

So why talk about this? I know that most of you will just think I am a kook who thinks the sky is falling. People have said that to me. But I never mentioned the sky. I just said that your life will go on in massively sucky new ways very soon as a logical consequence of some indisputable facts. I don't get any kick out of this nor do I wish to say 'told you so' when it happens. It just seems to me to be the right thing to do to warn people so that they can take steps to make life better when times get tough. Most of you won't. But some of you might.

I just can't believe how unbelievably ignorant the author or this article is.

synthetic food? fine if we run out of resources, (although i can't help but think of Soylent Green).
but why would we run out of resources? oh right, OVERPOPULATION! how long does it take a person to eat 1,000 pounds of food? a long time. but how long does it take a thousand people to eat the same amount of food? not very long at all. we are using up our resources because there are too many people on this planet.

ok, so let's move into space, right? oh sure, as if corrupting one planet isn't enough.... there are too many people taking up too much space, so we're just going to find more space to invade? i'm sorry, but that's completly selfish BS.

and cure aging? it's not something you can cure. it's NATURAL. it's called TIME. you can't change that. as much as america is obsessed with looking young, you simply can't do it forever without seriously screwing with nature. you want to mess up the planet even more?

you know, maybe our world is screwed. just stop and consider everything bad going on on this planet and you'll get what i mean. but i refuse to believe that and i hope you all can have a hopeful attitude about this too. instead of condemning the world we live and and just moving further into space or f-ing with mother nature even more, why don't we try to fix the problem we created? we can't go back in time and change what we did, but we can change our attitudes about our lives today so we can promise this planet and the generations to come a better life.

fun fact: did you know that the people of the world produce enough grains and farm grown food to sustain 9 billion people? nine billion. we have a population of about 6 billion. so why are people starving? meat, among other reasons. an insane percentage of these grains are feed to animals that we breed to kill. fine, right? it's just feeding food to food, so no harm done, no resources lost. WELL, the protein ration of how much you feed an animal to how much you get out of it, on average, is 10 to 1. that means for every 10 protein you feed a cow, you only get 1 back. so why are people starving? we're feeding all our resources to animals we kill for less nutritional value.
you want more resources? stop eating meant. strop buying animal by-products. cut down your portions until you're vegetarian then take the next step to become vegan. it's not as hard as you think.

First of all, I agree that aging would help with preventing overpopulation, but I could also say we can not depend on technologies and age extension to completely eliminate this problem.

I am quite divided on this subject, to an extent. But I can say enviromental stress and decline of vital resources is not completely to blame on growing human populations as much as it is on condensed populations in cities, and misuse of land (ex. Amazon land is being used to raise cattles and things for fast food restaurants) which could be used for better purposes.

All in all, large populations is a problem, but it isn't going to be the doom of us all (I assure you there are far more many & larger problems that could be fixed that are destroying this planet).

Also, if overpopulation was the ''root'' of all problems, how would you deal with it anyways? I mean, are you saying its a problem and we're going to need to control it but putting restirctions on birth or by killing innocent peoples? (I strongly believe its a person's natural right to have a child, though).

What are the 'larger' problems that afflict our planet? Climate change, pollution, poverty, war or famine? ALL OF THESE ARE CAUSED PRIMARILY BY OVERPOPULATION.

CO2 emissions are a function of human population. Remember that without industry, we could not support this level of population.

Pollution severity is a function of human population. Same as CO2.

Poverty is caused by resource scarcity, which is caused by overly-numerous and/or overly-dense groups of people all needing the same resources.

War is caused by international tensions resulting from the aformentioned resource scarcity.

Famine is caused by the same factors as poverty.

ALL OF THESE PROBLEMS ARE DRIVEN BY POPULATION.

I don't advocated killing anybody, but we can make changes in the laws and tax codes to make it damn expensive to have more than 2 kids, and offer great incentives to have 1 or zero. Also, what about some simple, effective leadership? People will usually do what is required if you explain what is going on an provide some leadership they respect.

As for the 'right' to have offspring, this is something that needs to change. By you exercising this 'right', you imperil every other person on the planet. Obviously, this 'right' is of little value if exercising it causes suffering for yourself and your children.

The right to reproduce must be restrained within prudent bounds. Humanity is past its childhood phase of careless and thoughtless freedom. Now we must embrace adult realities and restrain ourselves just as a young adult must learn to do. But this is not all bad. Just as an adult who is disciplined can earn far more freedom for himself than a child truly can, we by adopting a more mature attitude about reproducing will find life on this planet becomes more peaceable and free for all.

This guy is really dumb, overpopulation probably won't happen, but this guy is a dumb ass. He has no proof, and he seems pretty sure of his dumbness.

Why are comments here moderated? Obviously they let anybody say anything. Alex's comment is nothing but a moronic personal attack. And Alex does not seem to listen well either.

WE ARE ALREADY OVERPOPULATED.

It is not something that 'might' happen in the future.

Proof? It's all over. But for starters, the reason gasoline is up to $4/gallon is that we are starting to (worldwide) produce less oil than we need. This is because we are running out of oil. And this is because we used it up so quickly. And THIS is because there are too many people here using it.

BTW Alex,

Congratulations on your Bar Mitzvah this past 12th of April. But I'm not sure if your parents David and Karen would approve of you insulting strangers over the internet.

Shalom

Comments are moderated largely for the purpose of eliminating autospam and "anti-aging" junk advertising. Ad hominems directed at me are fair game; directed at other people not so much.

The comments in this post so far serve a very useful illustration of the degree to which common beliefs about overpopulation - and, by extension, fundamental economics - have become quite divorced from objective reality and science. It's much more a matter of self-destuctive myth, and the reactions people always give when their myths are attacked, than debate over facts.

It would seem that it is you who are espousing unscientific and illogical beliefs. Your assertion that the earth can support 'tens of billions' of people fails to take into account several factors:

1) Critical resources of energy and food production are finite and already at near-maximum possible production

2) Quality of life is determined by the proportion of the earth's resources that can be allocated per person. As population increases, this is reduced impoverishing more and more people

3) The greater the population and population density, the more draconian and total the government needs to be in order to preserve order. Therefore, population causes political changes leading to less and less personal freedom

4) Human impact on the environment is proportional to human population. Even if you can feed everybody and give them all energy, the biosphere cannot perpetually accommodate multiple billions of people

5) There is quite simply, no need for all these people to exist. Their existance only provides to dumb brute force than empowers both socialist and capitalist forces which tend to oppose human liberty

6) Assuming we could feed tens of billions of people, we would need to create such an abundance of infrastructure so that we would need to pave over virtually all the open spaces of the world to some degree. Is this the kind of world we wish to live in, a 'Borg' style planet?

It is YOU who is the myth purveyor.

Read the book Collapse. Read about Rawanda. Read about deforestation, and hear the stories about the overfishing of our Oceans.

When you have a globe packed with people, you have very little margin for error.

And the real problem is in the third world. If they all want to start eating tuna for dinner, there will be no tuna left. Or fish for that matter. No forest once they start making wooden beds, tables to eat off... And why shouldnt they have these things.... we do?

Rather, bring population growth down... figure out a good way to reduce 3rd world population growth now - so they're not led to genecide locally, and in time, real conflict on a global scale.

Global Warming is an important subject that needs to be handled for a better future for both the human race and ecologies worldwide.

However, I'll argue lowering population (in either a "hands off" or "hands on" fashion for governments) is not likely to help deal with this issue.

First of all, there is not a correlation between the amount of greenhouse gases and people in a nation. (possible response: What? I thought people contribute to global warming? More people more warming, right?) If having more people was key to increasing global warming gases than China and India would not have produced less greenhouse gases than the USA throughout the 20th century. Each of them had a much greater population than the US and polluted less. Now when China is finally overtaking the USA in terms of emissions. Ask why is it doing so? There has not been a sudden baby boom to ramp up population (the 1 child policy has actually been effective, despite corruption and loopholes, in the overall goal of lowering China's birthrate.) China's emissions rise has occurred alongside a birthrate drop because China is industrializing. China is building 1 new coal power plant per week because new factories are being built and a Chinese consumer class is rising that purchases electronic devices (as well as the SUVs that have finally stopped selling in the USA).

An interesting additional point about China's population control efforts relates to the possibility they helped China become the top emitter of CO2. This is an unusual way of looking at the situation, but if you take the Solow growth model from economics population growth is viewed as having a slowing effect on (at least in the short term) economic development. The wealth that would have otherwise have been spent on raising children could instead be put towards creating new factories and coal power plants (to provide the electricity to run them). As the latter are very much not an alternative source of energy it is possible that the population control policy contributed, in part, to greater pollution in and from China.

It is even possible to have a population shrinkage and an increase in global warming gases-look at Europe with a shrinking population in some nations, they haven't stopped polluting. Many are still better than the USA on an emissions per person basis but their pollution went up despite a shortage of babies in some places.

If you want to handle global warming I would encourage handling the direct sources of emissions. These (especially if you are talking about the carbon that has to be brought up from underground and then put in the air) are the devices we use.

This is why highly developed nations are generally much worse polluters than less developed nations-the latter have less in the way of automobiles or energy requiring devices.

To solve Global Warming (which is going to be with us for many years due to the damage already done) deal with the devices we like to have that add more greenhouse gases to the air. Either make them effectively carbon neutral or see if you can live without them.

The number of devices rather than humans is the real problem. You can actually lower the number of humans on the planet and see the number of devices they use rise through greater numbers per person/household. There once was a time when the average US household didn't have 2 or more cars, more than 1 TV and so on.

The greatest irony of all is that the nations where the birthrate is highest are also tend to be those where the emissions per person rate is lowest. Global Warming is mostly caused by us in the developed world who already have low birthrates and high levels of device use.

There is absolutely no guarantee that lowering population levels will reduce global warming. With the possibility that some businesses may try to further mechanize (using devices run on energy from carbon emitting sources) to produce more with fewer workers there is even the theoretical possibility that the emissions problem will become worse.

I would argue that saying the number humans is the problem may sometimes occur from having a bit to much Malthus in one's intellectual diet-and don't forget that history has frequently proven wrong those who come up with ideas based on his theories.

Thanks for reading through the long post and sorry for any typos that I suspect are there.

At the risk of wasting pixel space on those of you who have already swallowed the "what problem? there's no problem!" kool aid....

We’ve already exceeded global carrying capacity. We are now in “overshoot”. (insert image of a car flying smoothly through the air after having been driven off a cliff here)

Global population is nearing 7 billion. Different theorists using different methods seem to end up agreeing that global carrying capacity is probably about 2 billion. (This assumes some level of social justice and a moderate, low by US standards, standard of living. More is possible if you accept a cattle car / Matrix-esque "life".)

In any case, we will get to that much-lower-than-7-billion number the hard way (wars, famine, disease, and their accompanying losses of environmental quality, freedom, and social justice) OR the less hard way (immediately and drastically reducing our population voluntarily). Yes, all of us, yes, everywhere. There is no scenario anywhere in which population growth is a "good thing" long term.

Yes a drop in population would cause problems, but none of those problems are as big as the problems, suffering, and environmental collapse that is certain to occur if we don’t.

It’s too late for any “us” vs “them” arguments or any belief that national boundaries will do much to help anyone in the long run. This is a global issue with local and nation-state consequences. For example, immigration is a consequence of overpopulation, not a cause of it. Likewise, global climate change is not impressed by national boundaries.

One of the key factors in this scenario is also our sense of time. This is a slow motion crash that requires immediate action, a bit like trying to steer a supertanker that's on a crash course by putting in consistent input over a multi year time frame, and the one effective input is for all of us everywhere to stop making babies. The supertanker analogy is also apt because it was the "one time gift" of oil that allowed us to get this far out on a limb, and peak oil has already happened.

No technological / "alternative energy" options have the capacity or can be ramped up fast enough to avoid major global calamity. That isn't to say we shouldn't do them. Aggressively shifting to alternative energy is necessary, just not sufficient. And relocating off world or into some post human mode isn't going to be possible for many, if any and won't help either.

For more comprehensive analysis of all this I suggest

Approaching the Limits (see essay links)
http://www.paulchefurka.ca

Bruce Sundquist on environmental impact of overpopulation
http://home.alltel.net/bsundquist1/

Oil as 'one time gift' that allowed a temporary capacity increase:
The Oil Drum Peak Oil Overview - June 2007
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2693

Bandura etc.
http://growthmadness.org/2008/02/18/impeding-ecological-sustainability-through-selective-moral-disengagement/

Albert Bartlett on the exponential function as it relates to population and oil:
http://c-realm.blogspot.com/2008/12/kmo-interview-with-albert-bartlett.html

...and of course the classic "Overshoot" by William Catton:
http://www.amazon.com/Overshoot-Ecological-Basis-Revolutionary-Change/dp/0252009886

WRONG WRONG WRONG!!!! You guys are so oblivious to everything Overpopulation is REAL! Have you by chance been to the grocery store and noticed that the price of food has gone up.I can't believe this is a real site you all must have a third 21 chromosome i hope you guys starve first!

There is NO OVER POPULATION except in the minds of thoose who have read PAUL EHRLICHES fruadulent book and all those predictions made by EHRLICH none of them ecer happened or ever will happen but the liberal left-wing news media still blabber his idiotic poppycock

A very well manage earth could certainly hold more people, but do we really want to be croweded all the time? To suppress most wild areas ? Is it reallistic when right now with the actual american life style 4 everybody will need about 6 earth just for CO2 management? I think the choice is simple live longer but have less children! They'll be gratefull to land inside a non crowded world! ... Second thing why do you need children for ? For you ?? For them ?? .. Better to make sure the world is a safe place!
---
... "There is NO OVER POPULATION ..." ... so naïve, what about all these exhaust fumes sticking into our lungs ? Would be alright to be 7 billion with a far better life style, but most people who are anti-malthusianist would never give up their cars! Would you? ... and there are no clean cars, this is an illusion!

A perfect world.. Who are these people that will manage this perfect world. Every political system is a compromise so therefore every decision is a compromise.

We will never have a perfect world and that means too many people will always be a problem. Its common sense.

There are too many people already. It wont stop though.

Governments want more money, business wants more money, you and I want more money so therefor we need to populate.. Thats the only reason why we grow the population. Its not because we want more .... It because we all need more.

The system will never be perfect and that will lead to major problems involving more and more people.

Greed equals growth in the population.

Mnay have bought into this population bomb poppycock of PAUL EHRLICH and WORLD WATCH hook,line and sinker

paul Ehrlich is not the first to spread the false roomers of over population its just he gets a bunch of crazies on his side

Hey Malthusians! Your arguments suck. First, isn't there enough energy? Sun gives us in 40 minutes what we currently get in a YEAR from all energy sources. So, the question is to harvest all this energy ASAP. How about solar energy installed power? It doubles every 2 year, just by Moore's law. With current technologies we can get all our energy from Sun already by 2030. And they are improving, and we still have all other energy sources. So "peak oil" is not our issue, it's oil companies' issue (which are already switching to alternative solutions).

Second, what is "the global capacity". The capacity of what? With which technologies? For example, in Stone Age this capacity could not exceed several millions; in Middle Ages China could not get past 100 mln because they regularly died from hunger. The solutions always were technological, and they will be. What is a resource and what is not, is also determined by current technological level. Which is increasingly increased, i. e. acceletating.

Third, which technologies do more harm to the environment per capita? Look back to the Stone Age capacity, Middle Ages capacity... Do you Malthusians know what is the leading source of CO2 in Asia? Cows. And all the low-tech agriculture, low-tech industry. High-tech is not. Which are rapidly becoming clean, but not in a moment.

Fourth, are you Malthusians really ready to start killing people by action (with a gun) or inaction (fighting anti-aging activity). What are you calling for is called CANNIBALISM because you are declaring that some people's very existence is (or can be) a problem. This is simply INHUMAN. A kind of FASCISM.

People can never be a problem by definition. Period. Re-read the Declaration of Human Rights. Each person has a right to live. Period. Not "a right to live to 120 and then must die". Not "a right to live but mustn't use gene therapy", etc. It is our common responsibility to guarantee this right for everyone and for as long as possible. If Earth becomes the limit, the global power must be turned to space. Not closing up and killing others "in the name of nature". This is not human nature. The very human nature is to overcome any "natural" possibilities. We didn't have fire-breathing, but we found how to make fire. We didn't have sharp teeth but invented axes and speares. We didn't have wings, but created airplanes. And we currently don't live past 120, but will find how to. Any attempt to deny humans extend their possibilities is in fact a step back from humanity into the jungle. That's what are you Malthusians calling for - jungle law for all. And we the life extenders are not with you in these attempts. Humanity is meant to be more than smart apes.

It may be comforting to some to say that overpopulation is a lie--without confronting the evidence. I have read the nonsense that all the people in the world would fit into Texas or Montana. BUT there is not enough arable land or fresh water to feed them. It is rather difficult to grow food on the ice of Antartica, the sand of the Sahara or the rocks of the Himalayas. Arable land per person is now estimated to be under a half acre per person and is dwindling as people build their houses and factories on arable land. Climate change is human caused to a large degree. For people who want the truth check out the sites at http://overpopulation.org and the science fiction/non-fiction free ebooks at http://andgulliverreturns.info

The only way out of our declining environment crisis is to stop our predilection to overpopulate. We have only ourselves to blame. I made this short stop motion video to emphasize the point. ----
Overpopulation survivability ----
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwYcpudpgNI ----
Thank you, ----
Robert Evan Howard ----
aclepd.com -----
aclepd@aclepd.com

You all do know that because of wars and new viruses like the pig flu or the bird flu, people will keep dying despite all the growth rate? This way, even though people live longer, it will just take longer for the previous generation to die out. When they do everything will be all right.

What? That's stupid. Of course growing population is gonna be a problem! How can you dismiss it like that? What if we don't find the technology to "synthetically make food" and spread out through space? Resources are running out already and the rate at which the human population is growing is increasing so rapidly it's more stupid than you lot saying it's not a problem.

I think some here are guilty of being absolutist, saying either population is something we don’t have to worry about at all, or that it will literally be the end of the world. IMO, increasing population will be an issue, but not as worrisome a one as some here seem to think. (or, strangely, seem to hope)

We can speculate about the future, but let’s look at what we already know, the past. For thousands of years people like Malthus have predicted a pop growth apocalypse. They have always been proven wrong. In fact, relative to the total world pop size, there isn’t a larger percentage of the world’s pop starving now than there was centuries ago. (possibly less?) Also, the more wealthy (ie consuming more resources) a group of people get, the less children they tend to have. I’d refer you to this, IMO, balanced Nature article on the issue: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v418/n6898/full/nature01013.html

That said, it’s also true that during the time pop has increased, we have done significant damage to the environment. In the near-term, that is likely to increase, and that‘s tragic. Although, eventually I think technology will solve these environmental issues, though it may take some time. There are already proposals of ways to reverse global warming, and bioengineer organisms to take out existing pollution. Also, meat can already be grown in labs, and salt water can already be made into fresh water, they’re just both too expensive at this point. And another green revolution should be doable with genetic engineering advancing as it is.

Mercifully, denying people anti-aging treatments is not what most here are advocating. Doing so would IMO be the very definition of evil. It would be no different than withholding cancer meds from people who need them. Cancer and aging are both equally natural (and intimately related, as aging causes most cancer), and without “unnatural” treatments, most of us would not live to middle-age. Not to mention the fact it would be nearly impossible to enact or enforce limits on lifespan. (If Medicare payments alone drop old people will vote you out of office, so what would they do if you tried to steal their life-extension medicine?)

So what should we do then? We should pursue aggressive birth control and conservation policies. (subsidies for sustainable tech, taxes for things that aren‘t energy efficient, free contraceptives everywhere, etc) And everyone should do their part, drive a Prius, not get McMansions, etc.

Of course, it’s possible I could be wrong. But what if I am? What’s the worst case scenario? I think we’ve already seen it. A few individual countries have reached too high a level of population. If that happens worldwide, nations will enact things like China’s one child policy. I’m no fan of such a policy, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world. (and it worked)

In closing, I don’t think it’s realistic to say increasing population won’t be an issue at all, but humans always adapt, as we always have. If you asked person century ago if they wanted to live in a world of 6.5 billion people, they’d probably say no, but you don’t see anyone killing themselves or not having any kids today because the world pop is 6.5 billion. We got used to it, and we’ll do the same in the future.

Goodness gracious, this is nonsense. You are naive. Apparently, you have never visited some of the largest cities in the world, nor have you visited some place such as Japan which is (mostly) an extremely crowded stressful place to live. I don't know where you live, but you wouldn't be saying these sorts of things unless you had been around the world and experienced what it is like to live in a filthy crowded impersonal noisy city such as Cairo, Jakarta, Bangkok, Bombay, Kathmandu, Tokyo, Mexico City etc. Get real!

Wow you try to sound smart, but you sound sooooo stupid. Almost the majority of the scientific community agrees that overpopulation is one of our BIGGEST threats. I don't think you quite understand how quickly our population worldwide is growing and it has a snowball effect, as the population goes up, so does the rate and speed in which those numbers will keep shooting up. Not to mention in the industrialized nations as living quality goes up so does the demand on resources. The amount of food and energy we waste is insane and it is only going to get worse as we add billions more to this planet over time. And stop talking like we will find a cure to aging and we will be able to live 500 hundred years longer people, I mean come on.. science is great, but it doesn't make us Gods. Not to mention population is the reason we have so many problems regarding our environment in this day and age to begin with. So STFU it is definitely a problem and it will only get worse, wait and see. BUUUUUTTTT i'm sure before it gets to a critical point we will have super city like colonies on mars and stuff!!!! And I can become a jedi!! PLEAAASSEEE.

I suggest that it would be far more logical to sustain the population we have now until we have everything we need to sustain a larger population. I think it's a bad idea to just give the go ahead on the baby machine until the babies have cribs to lie in.

Also, try sitting in a crowded place, like a very very busy department store for a few hours, and then realize that living in a densely populated city, like I have in Germany, means that you are subjected to five times that noise level even at night. That can psychologically drive you crazy. Have you ever crossed the street with one hundred people pushing in the opposite direction? This is already the case in many places. Now blow that number up to a few thousand, considering I'm sure we won't be able to make enough cars for a billions of people.

Yes, I agree that it would be possible to do what the poster was suggesting, namely 50 percent of the country being left for rural parks and farms. However, we do not have the essential knowledge to complete such a project. We do not have the organization necessary to complete such a project. We do not have the resources to complete such a project.
Also, if for example one essential species of animal becomes extinct during this progress, for example the honey bee, we would all die within, as Albert Einstein suggested, four years.
Also, how could you keep the masses of people under control? If a few million people throw a riot, it's nothing compared to a billion people throwing a riot. Also, try cramming a billion criminals into a jail, good luck with that.
Economically, sustaining such a big population would not work. We already can't deal with issues such as health care and homelessness, and those issues are just the tip of the ice-burg.
How would you keep 100 billion people employed, or lets just say, how do the 50 billion working people support the 50 billion on income assistance?
How do you catch a criminal that disappears into a crowd of a few hundred thousand?
How do you stop the urban/suburban area, which covers have the country, from turning into a toxic nightmare. Also, with all the concrete alone, there would be no more winter because the ground could no longer absorb heat and the heat would stay in the air, making it, say, and average of 60 degrees in the daytime and -2 degrees at night.
I'm not completely saying that your argument doesn't work.

ANYWAY I THINK ONLY SOMEONE WITH NO IMAGINATION WOULD THINK THAT THIS IS A GOOD IDEA. JUST SOME QUICK LAZY BRAINSTORMING ALREADY CREATES A NIGHTMARE WORLD. WE'RE A GOOD SPECIES, WE'RE JUST NOT READY FOR THIS YET.

Back when PAUL EHRLICH wrote his book THE POPULATION BOMB he was making all sorts of rediculous predictions and none of them has ever or will ever occure maybe ehrlich and his fellow over populationists should report to the disintagtation booth for imediate termination

While I have absolutely no doubt that regenerative medicine will eventually enable vastly extended life spans the total naivety of the population argument is akin to thinking with your big toe. The earth is already under considerable population stress mostly caused by the amount that we consume and pollute. No doubt if we all lived in a small box and eat one bowl of rice a day the planet could easily accomodate a lot more people than are currently here. However if we continue to consume even at the same average rate as at present - then total collapse of human supporting enviromental systems is inevitable. It may well be true that as people become wealthier they breed less but that is not the only relevant issue. As people become wealthier they consume and pollute more - (much more in fact - the poor consume and pollute at very minimal rates - their fault is that they just reproduce a lot) though usually the rich try to transfer their pollution to places where poor people live. The kind of world that aims to give humans immortality will be a world very heavy on consumption and pollution.

Your argument demonstrate the most massive optimism and niavety bias. However this is common amomgst top experts in science fields. They are usually so in love with their work and beliefs (and their ego in some cases) that they have significant unwarranted faith in their field of science and in technology and over simplify or even refuse to rationally consider relevant objections (assimilation bias). However that does not really excuse the ludicrous argument that overpopulation is not an issue. That really is just plain stupidity and denial of the obvious

Even IF the population grows significantly, most likely new science and technology will be developed to accommodate more humans. This has been happening for centuries, and technology's capabilities relative to the amount of potential damage done will only improve in the future.

And even if damage to Earth DOES continue at increasingly faster rate, leaving people to die who could be kept alive is morally wrong. Therefore overpopulation cannot be used as an argument to extend lifespan. In fact, nothing can in a humane society. If damage runs out of control, a change in lifestyle, birth control or emigration are required.

When considering the question of overpopulation verses life extension, it seems many fail to take into account the mindset of human beings living extended lives. It is very probable that life extension will actually reduce population. To understand this we must try to imagine the mind state and lifestyle of a future human being that has unlimited lifespan. Imagine that it is you. And you have a lifespan of around ten thousand years. You are also living in a world that is no longer breeding focused, as today's world is. There are many things to keep you occupied and fulfilled other than family life. Now the question I will ask you is: "when are you (if at all) going to have children?". The answer of a person today, that lives till 80, and of a woman is only able to have children till around 40, would say in the first third of their life, by necessity. But if you are going to live beyond ten thousand years, and be fertile all that time, your answer would not be the same. It might again be in the first third of your life, but that would be in three thousand years time! Already we see men and women delaying having children until the very last possible time. This delaying urge, will only be extended as our life term increases. It is entirely within logic, and is most logical, that radical life extension will produce a large decrease in population as people decide to delay having children indefinitely.
Along with this delay, it follows that the family unit, and also, man women relationships will move away from the present state which is driven by necessary breeding and expansive capitalism, both of which will no longer be necessary or possible in the future.
Of course I am aware that if human beings live indefinitely, and do not have children, technically there will be no decrease in population. But this is not taking into account, death by accident, which will reduce the population if no children are being produced. Of course, when nano technology is combined into our cells, they could redesign cells to be resistant to damage from most or all accidents and thus we would become almost immortal. Then, faced with the prospect of living indefinitely, with an expanded consciousness (via technology and using our brain fully[i.e. using the right brain more]) so we are not forced through boredom to have children, how would we then answer that question, "when will we have children".

This is one of the most uninformed aricles i have read in years.
I see some of the comments left actually agree with this idiotic statement, and some have the intellegence to know that overpopulation is the main cause of our planets problems.
The human race will be the cause of its own downfall, it is already happening, world hunger is becoming more and more of a problem.
Global warming is all due to us, not because of earths natural cycle.
More and more species are becoming extinct because of us.
Earth can only sustain so much life, and the dreamers among you that think we will soon be moving to another planet to go F that up as well, WAKE UP! That won't be happening in your lifetime maybe not even your childrens lifetime.
Instead of partaking in such ridiculous debates such as this one, we should rather be working on a sollution to the problems we are facing as a species today.

Remember M.I.B. when the big cockroach alien said "You Are The Parasites Of Your Planet".
I am inclined to think he was right.

I guess the question is, at what point is it over-population?

Aubrey de Grey himself is on record as saying that it is likely that future anti-aging interventions will be coupled with sterilizing the subject as a condition to receiving the treatment. To quote him, "It will be a world without children."

The writer of the above article uses sophistic reasoning to arrive at a false conclusion. The fact of the matter is this: currently 100,000 people die daily from old age, and if that number is cut down to near zero (presumably there will always some who will refuse the treatments), we will have a problem very quickly. Yes, people have fewer children in wealthy first world nations. But most people still desire now, and will still desire after aging is defeated, to have at least a single child.

Women seem to be genetically programmed to desire to become a mother, and many feel a full life is impossible without doing so. Currently, a birth rate of one child per couple would lead to a steadily decreasing population. *HOWEVER*, that's not true if *no one* dies from aging. And it is this simple truth that unveils the false premise upon which this article is based.

I expect the author purposefully pulled the wool over the eyes of the gullible. I get the motivation for this sort of propaganda. A lot of people would be enraged at the idea of tying age reversal interventions to a loss of fertility; bad publicity for this organization if it were to honestly address this issue.

But ultimately, those who desire to stay on an ageless planet Earth will (for the most part; perhaps there'd be a lottery for those desiring to reproduce to replace population lost to other causes) have to surrender their ability to have children (with the caveat that I assume in the distant future we'll be able to colonize other planets and such a restriction wouldn't apply initially to newly colonized worlds).

If overpopulation is such an issue, it's time for WAR. Let's kill each other until there's only an "adequate amount" of individuals left so that people can climb mountains and be alone.... Are you people retarded???!!! Babies are born everyday, people die everyday - if you believe in the basics of what's taught in college it's simple evolution! We're evolving and changing the world with us - so what? If you're that concerned that our planet will die soon, figure out a way to cultivate life on another planet and quit whining about it. Life comes once, when you're dead, you're dead and why should it matter if you left the world a better place or not when thousands of years later we may not even be the same species or better yet, we'll all be dead. Why does it matter??? We're all going to die one way or another - the existence of man is futile or destination predeteremined - 200,000 are born into this world and from that very instance begin to die. Overpopulation is not the issue. Our expansion into space should be your main focus and domination over any other species.

Bottom line, most demographers now agree that in just a few decades the world's pop will peak at 7.5 - 9.5 billion people, then fall for a very long time, even if life expectancy continues to rise. (according to the UN's population report, among many others) In any case, humans always adapt.

Btw, is funny to note that most of those commentators who don't like Reason's article are foaming at the mouth angrily and shouting ad hom attacks while at the same time claiming to be the more rational ones. (typical of Malthusians in my experience)

I'm sorry to say this and it's not a personal attack on many of the people commenting here but many of the comments are ignorant and probably from the lack of attention to science and math. No doubt the result of the public education system in the U.S. I hope when people live to 1000 they'll take the time to learn math and science.

By the way, are you worried we don't have enough energy as some people stated?
Nuclear power can provide more than enough for every person on earth.

I must say that overpopulation is a BIG problem. Some people may not like to blame themselves or others, but we are humans. It's time we take responsibility for our actions! People create aerosols and other harmful products which contain Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). These products are destroying the ozone layers that protect our own homes!!!! Think about, we MUST find a sustitute, and Quick.

Thank You,
Jennyfer M. 14 years old!!

You are an idiot. Overpopulation is a very much alive and increasingly huge problem. Once the global situation gets worse you'll see how wrong you are.

For one, 25% of Earth's surface is land. 11% of this land is arable. Due to human exploitation, much of this land is no longer arable. The resources we consume in HUGE amounts are nonrenewable, and we will run out. Supply of iron and gold will be depleted in 10-25 years for example, and others are on their way.

Fossil fuel consumption and a number of other things increase pollution. So we're killing our home planet, too. Garrett Hardin said it right in his article "Tragedy of the Commons." People pollute without much care because we're self-interested. To survive SUSTAINABLY we need to partially give up the right to breed.

Burning possfil fuels releases carbon in the air, which contributes to the greenhouse effect and speeds up global warming. This disruption in the carbon cycle happens simueltaneously with the cutting down of vast numbers of trees, which we depend on for oxygen. Other human activity depletes the ozone layer, which shields us from the Sun's electromagnetic rays. If we don't collapse due to overpopulation, we'll collapse due to destruction of the environment.

Once population gets REALLY out of control, epidemics will break out everywhere. There will be mass shortages of food, resources, and basic needs, and the death toll will include millions. War can possibly develop, and the world will become a global arena following the motto "survival of the fittest; every man for himself."

Because so many countries aren't modernized like the U.S. and E.U., such as African and Middle Eastern, and Asian countries, they won't have the technological abilities we do. It will be even worse for them.

You should, no, you NEED to check out the pictures on this site:
http://www.bspcn.com/2009/07/16/the-29-saddest-pictures-in-the-world/
A lot of them show the horrendous results of overpopulation.

Also, it is scientifically PROVEN (and it's common sense) that every species has a carrying capacity, which the population it can sustain in the LONG-TERM. You have to think about surviving, but surviving within your means so future generations can also survive.

You also should take a look at history besides nature. History repeats itself. We keep pushing the envelope, but it's going to tear and give us a paper cut one day.

Humans are a corrupt species, if you think about it. We kill the planet that houses us and all the other species on it, and don't give a crap. We kill biodiversity. We basically are a mega invasive species nightmare of doom.

Living on Earth in the next 50 years is going to be interesting. It's going to be an era of transition. We're either putting up a fight that will go down in history, or WE will be going down in history. It's inevitable. Just wait and see.

Hey, Konstantin.

#1. Nuclear power. Sure, nuclear power can do that. But you are missing two extremely important issues with nuclear power: (1) how unstable and dangerous it can be, and (2) the waste it produces, which is more pollution.

#2. Living to be 1,000 years old? LOL. How delusional. The only way we are going to live longer is if we can genetically modify our telomeres, which consist of a non-coding sequence of nucleotides/genes. They are at the end of our chromosomes and hold pairs together. Each time cells replicate, the telomeres of the chromosomes get smaller and smaller. Death happens when there is not more telomeres left, and the DNA unwinds. The body ceases to function, etc. etc. etc.. Scientists have managed to increase lifespan in animals like mice, but it didn't make a HUGE difference like you're implying. There is NO WAY we will EVER reach to live for 1,000 years.

And if people live to be 1,000 (which can't happen), imagine how many problems that would cause. There'd be even more people to contribute to pollution and many other things. Come on, screw your thinking cap on and listen to the common sense yelling in the back of your mind.

Also, lease don't make assumptions and over-generalize about Americans. Our public education system has its issues, and there are dumb people, but EVERY country has that. I'm an American (damn proud of it!), only 16, and just completely owned your comment using science.

The amount of ignorance in both the original article and the responses to it is appalling. Overpopulation is indeed a grave problem for humanity, and blind techno-optimism where you simply wave a wand and give a link to the X-prize pretending you've come up with some sophisticated solution is nothing but amateurish fantasy.

However, being a frequent follower of advances made in longevity science (while also being an ardent environmentalist), I can say with a great degree of certainty that human lifespan can and will be greatly prolonged, and perhaps the aging process completely reversed in the coming decades and I strongly support all efforts to do this. The question of overpopulation and resource consumption will have to dealt with by addressing the issue of birthrates. Namely, how many additional people are we going to continue to allow to come into the world? Saying that we have an overpopulation problem is NOT a valid objection of age reversal or life extension. Longer lifespans are not what cause overpopulation, it is unsustainable birthrates that do.

So yes, we will need to address overpopulation, but we will do it by restricting birthrates. You have absolutely no fucking right to tell someone else that they have to die so that you or some bitch from Afghanistan can continue rearing out 8 children and living off welfare. My right to live and to continue existing outweighs any so called "reproductive rights" that the pro-natalist crowd laments about.

Mark my words, you have NO right to tell living, breathing, conscious, sentient human beings that currently exist to drop dead so they can "make way" for new generations that do not even exist yet and haven't been conceived of. That is fucking sick and immoral. Yes, we have an overpopulation problem, so the answer is to stop fucking breeding so much, perhaps even a 1-child policy. The answer is NOT to tell people to lay down and die or deny them the privilege of future medical advancements.

If you're serious about overpopulation, do the world a favor, and limit yourself to one child, or better yet, have no children at all as I have decided for myself. If you don't, then you are a hypocrite and have absolutely no ground to stand on in your vain "criticisms" of life extension from a sustainability point of view.

I hope this clears up some of the mindless bullshit that has been propagated in the last 50 or so responses to this article. I'll be sure to check this page frequently starting from now on to monitor any more emotionally charged outbursts and buffoonery that may arise here and will be sure to repudiate it.

Looks like someone skipped highschool biology, or failed it.

Ignorance is our only enemy.

"Looks like someone skipped highschool biology, or failed it.

Ignorance is our only enemy."

Ad hominem attacks are not a valid form of argumentation. Try to be a little more specific.

If the basic needs cannot be met for a population of 7 billion presently, why would one expect otherwise for an even larger population?

@efib123

You are correct that the basic needs for a population of 7 billion are not currently met (depending on how one defines basic needs). But one must ask themselves what exactly is the solution to this? Is the problem of overpopulation going to go away if we simply allow people to die of old age, or is the population going to continue to skyrocket because the number of births continues to outpace the number of deaths (which is the REAL cause of overpopulation, people that are already alive are not what is CAUSING overpopulation).

Are people more likely to voluntarily restrict their own birthrates if they have open ended indefinite youth ahead of them or are they more likely to breed when the reaper is waiting for them out of an instinct to continue to pass on their own genes?

Take a look at some of the attitudes present when it comes to the issue of catastrophic climate change or peak oil. "I'll be dead before we reap the consequences." But what if you won't be dead? What if people could live long enough to face the consequences of centuries of cumulative neglect with regard to resource management and environmental contamination? Would people not become more conscious of their own activities if those activities posed an existentialist risk to humanity (and by extension, to themselves)?

Why on earth would I, if I am educated and aware of scarcity of resources and impending calamities consciously choose to have lots of children (or for that matter, why on earth would I allow anyone else to breed uncontrollably instead of doing whatever I can to stop them)?

The point is, if we have centuries, if not millenia to look forward to for an average lifetime, we are much more likely to address the problem of overpopulation rather than the course we've been going at over the past century.

We have not yet cured aging, and yet despite not having done so, population continued to skyrocket over recent decades. Clearly, the problem is not the fact that we don't have a high enough deathrate, but that we have excessive birthrates, which is the ROOT of the problem. To pretend that by allowed countless millions to continue to suffer from the debilitating ravages of aging that we are going to somehow solve the overpopulation problem is nothing more than wishful thinking. If you want to solve the overpopulation problem, you need to address the root cause. Birthrates.

It is simply untenable and incoherent to continue to peddle the idea that millions/billions of people have to needlessly die (and make way for millions more) in order to prevent a catastrophe that will kill millions/bilions of people.

We may eventually end up with a population of 9-10 billion by the time aging is put under medical control and possibly more than that. There is a great deal of debate as to what the actual long term carrying capacity of the earth is to allow for humanity to live comfortably. It could be more than 10 billion, or it could be as little as 2 billion, or it could be a dynamic figure that could change depending on the policies and decisions implemented by humanity.

Now lets take a look at a scenario. Lets say that you are correct and that the carrying capacity of the earth is indeed lower than the population is today. Well, the end result could turn out to be a world of haves and have nots. One where a certain portion of humanity has endless youth and a comfortable standard of living while the rest do not. Even if this turns out to be the case (and I do not think it will), I would argue that EVEN THEN, it is BETTER than the current state of affairs where 100,000+ people DAILY die of the ravages and debilitations of aging.

I suggest you seriously think this over. Does the fact that millions of people are hungry and without drinking water justify the existence of millions more suffering and dying because of the ravages of aging? No, it does not. The experience of aging is not intrinsically any less horrific than starvation, famine or drought.

This article's view that the planet could hold many billions of more people might be true. There are many places on Earth that could hold many more millions of people, like the Sahara Desert and Antartica, as an example, but there is one reason (one obvious reason) no one lives in these places, no one ever has, and that is because of a lack of resources. One day we may have technology to build cities there, but not yet. Also, every person on the planet doesn't just take up space. We all must consume resources to live. We all must have food, water and shelter, and jobs if you're talking about developed nations. If we have too many humans and basically consume the planet, many people are going to be without these resources, and many people would be without a job, which would lead to increased poverty.

It's foolish to think we will come up with technological solutions when overpopulation becomes a problem (like sending ourselves to Mars, new forms of energy, etc).

The biggest mistake made in humanity was when we switched from hunter gatherer lifestyle toan agricultural lifestyle. This caused the huge boom in overpopulation.

There's no turning back now... and actually this would be actually OK is the majority of human being focused on solving crucial problems and producing THICK value. But no, look at all the resources spent on Wall Street, creating useless businesses, Angry Birds, Facebook, etc.

For a problem with such a huge magnitude, with just < 1% of ppl focusing on solving them, sorry but that's not enough.

Paul Ehrlich made all these doomsay predictions and not one of them ever has happened or ever will happen yet the liberal leftists news media are alwaying blabbering his poppycock. His POPULATIONN BOMB was a big dud

In Vitro meat is real actual meat that is grown using cloning in petri dishes, using the In Vitro process 1 cow can produce over 3 billion pounds of meat. A few years ago PETA was offering a $1 million prize to the first company who can mass produce it, it hasnt been able to be mass produced yet but its speculated it will be within 3-5 years and that will eliminate world hunger. Exxon Mobil invested $300 million dollars into biofuel recently, they are funding Dr. Craig Venter's research into biofuel, Dr. Venter is the man who sequenced the human genome using the shotgun method and finished the same time, except much cheaper, than the human genome project, and in 2010 his team created the first synthetic lifeform, Mycoplasma Labortorium, also known as Synthia. If you compare the landmass of cities to the landmass of everywhere there are no cities, that is a lot more land that there isnt cities on, besides, we dont have the technology yet to live n even 75% of the planet, we only inhabit a quarter of it, but the Venus Project has designs for self sufficient cities that can be constructed in the sea, if Jacque Fresco's dream is ever achieved than we wouldnt have to worry about overpopulation, starvation, or environmental damage for at least a food hundred years or more and we will have an even better plan of action by then. In the past 100 years we have advanced 5000 years technologically, experts such as Ray Kurzweil predict that in the next 100 years it will be closer to 20000 years of progress since technology progresses exponentially, as in not only is it getting faster but its getting faster faster, if you want proof compare the past 30 years with the 30 years before it, next year we will have augmented reality glasses, its Google's Project Glass, even 30 years ago most of the things we have today were pure science fiction, and most things that were science fiction over the past 100 years are increasingly becoming science fact. To all the people who have been posting for the past few years, shame on you for not doing ANY research to support your cases, most of what i said has been known for years.

"Solution To The World's Problems"
1900- 1.6 Billion People,
2012- 7.0 Billion People,
112 years- 5.4 Billion People,
Solution- Stop Creating Children,
The life you save just might be the one you don't create.

effective sex education which includes psychological/social readiness skills
needs to begin in earnest in our public school system, starting in the 5th grade and progressively graduating as children grow and mature. This is nature.
We need to honor our seperation of church and state constitution. We have allowed religion to displace reason and common sense in our governance. school boards have hijacked sex education and collectively we all pay the price.
Pregnancy prevention should be free and freely available. A major public relations campaign will happen, showing the scientific correlation between over-population and planet distress. In the meantime, how am I being unkind
and uncaring,in my own personal life?

You know, this article is so wrong it's as wrong as this (satirical) video. This video is making fun of the people who don't believe in evolution, but it's just as valid to make fun of the whole "Population is Not an Issue" comment that this article tries to press as fact. Phew, what a mess we have due to lack of education, and well, reason. Texas GOP is against higher learning skills too. Go figure! This is who we're dealing with folks! Can't try to argue with faithful people who feel it's ALL GOOD because, well frankly I can't think of a valid reason they have...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QBv2CFTSWU

I would like to point out that the reason our bodies age is due to the fact that we breathe oxygen. Also, we still cannot fully understand the human brain, and unlike all of our other organs, there is no way to replace the human brain once it has deteriorated. And this thing with synthesized foods created from nothing? Has anyone done any outside reading beyond this? We know for a fact that these synthesized and processed foods are far worse for our bodies than previously thought and its the reason why we are seeing increases in obesity, diabetes, heart failure, and so many other diseases. We humans are just another species on this planet and we must obey the laws of nature just like every other animal. To think that we are better or above these laws is the reason our species to go extinct.

Whoever wrote this article must still be in grade school.

A quote worth considering on the matter

“There is room in the world, no doubt, and even in old countries, for a great increase in population, supposing the arts of life to go on improving, and capital to increase. But even if innocuous, I confess I see very little reason for desiring it. The density of population necessary to enable mankind to obtain, in the greatest degree, all the advantages both of cooperation and of social intercourse, has, in all the most populous countries, been attained. A population, may be too crowded, though all be amply supplied with food and raiment. It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated, is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character, and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without. Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man’s use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger but not a better or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it.”
John Stuart Mill
1806 – 1873

Wow, the ignorance of the person writing this article really pisses me off.

This article is funny. "Overpopulation will never be a problem". Ha, good one!

It seems to me that if indefinite lifespans were achieved, people would vastly change their attitudes on many of the world's problems.

Looking at today's world on February 2, 2015, we consider a long life to be about 100 years. I know that I cannot predict the future, but I am going to present the pessimistic view that everything will stay the same. Continuing today's trend forward, assuming life extension will never happen, I would expect to become a centenarian on April 3, 2094 and kick the bucket shortly after. I could say that I lived "a full 100 year life" as we know it today, February 2, 2015

Unfortunately, time is linear, and this presents me with a very short window of thinking. 100 years, in the grand scheme of things, is a blink of an eye. Any world problem that is going to occur after the year 2094 will happen after I am dead. Any world problem occurring after the year 2194 will occur after all my great grandchildren are dead (assuming that they are born when I am 100 and that they live to be 100 as well). Because of this limited 100 year life fact, I would reproduce fruitfully and encourage my children to do the same, to continue the bloodline, because you only live once, and for a very short time. I would not be very concerned about possible consequences in the year 2200 or later, because I really do not have anything at stake that far off. Besides, what is to say that those consequences will even occur? I am not giving up my one and only life for a possible event or series of events that will occur long after my family, friends and I am dead. I am going to have as much fun as I can in my 100 year limit, and if my actions contribute to horrible consequences in the year 2200, thank God that nobody alive today will see them. Would anybody today buy a 100 year government bond that will not pay off until the buyer is six feet under on February 2, 2115? Probably not, it is bad business to not have a stake in your investment. I will not invest in something that I have no stake in, for example the world in the year 2200.

Now, let's enter the alternate world where indefinite life extension becomes possible in the year 2050. People will not know right away that they are about to live forever, but I suspect that if aging was actually reversed, people would begin to realize what is happening around the year 2100, and that they may, in fact, live for millennia. Based on current accident statistics, there would likely be people who make it past the 100 century mark. Now, I am going to care very much about the environment, AND the consequences of my actions because I will be alive to see the consequences of my actions, whether they are good or bad. If I am expecting to live for thousands of years, I am not going to reproduce fruitfully because high birthrates are exactly what causes overpopulation. If I am expecting to live indefinitely, the attitude of "well I am going to be dead by then" is now null and void. Now, we all have a lot at stake for the future, even in the year 4000 so people are going to do their best to protect this Earth.

I really do believe that indefinite life extension is very possible in the near future, IF people fight for it. Almost anything is possible is there is enough momentum behind it, we NEED to have a DESIRE to change. It will be a huge transition, but living without a solid, concrete 100 year ceiling is clearly better than living with a heavy, solid, 100 year concrete ceiling.

Living in a healthy, active, vibrant, happy state is clearly better than being old, weak, and without a future, which is what indefinite life extension is all about- always having a future. Imagine how much more fun you can have in an entire 10 hour day at a theme park, versus just 6 minutes in the park. The same is true of life spans- one can have a lot more fun in 100 centuries than 100 years. Slowly and painfully dying of old age is truly unnecessary and does not really help the human race. Considering that it is human nature to want to create more than we are given, it is our duty to make indefinite life extension a reality.

Do you really want to be old, sickly, weak, frail, miserable, without a future, and suffering from extreme pain when you are 100 years old, if it is possible to be healthy, active, happy, and with a long future ahead? We have to think in this alternate world in order to succeed. Does anybody really want to suffer a disease (aging) that will slowly rob them of all their strength, happiness, and life? Seeing grandparents slowly grow old is very sad, and sometimes makes me question the point of being alive. Deep down inside, we are all indefinite life extensionists, but many people do not realize it until they are 80 or 90 years old. Nobody wants to die of cancer, and dying of "old age" is no different. We have to act NOW, we cannot wait until it is too late!

High birthrates lead to overpopulation through exponential growth. If everybody has 2 children during an indefinite lifetime, the worst that can happen is linear population growth. If everybody has 3 children during a 60 year lifetime, and all those children survive to marry and have 3 children, you are faced with an explosive, exponential population growth that will wreck havoc on the planet. I do hope that we all agree that death before reproductive age (let's say 30 years) is a bad thing.

If humans always just "accepted what nature gave them" then we would still be living in caves, freezing our behinds off because creating fire is "unnatural". We would be wondering where the heck to find another meal, if finding another meal was even possible without tools. Humans were given a brain for a reason- to make the world that we live in a better place. Humans were meant to break limits, and it is now time to shatter the 100 year ceiling on human life!

Nine years have passed since the article was written and the demographical catastrophe that some posters were so affraid from hasn't come. But anyway they continue posting about it XD

Please, take a careful look at the links provided in the article. Take your time to read the data and the analyses. Or, if you are too lazy, simply search the Wikipedia about birth rates, death rates, life expectancy, land use, energy resources, green revolution... We aren't heading towards an overpopulation crisis. Don't thrust me, search the data. It's all there on the Internet.

I fear an overpopulation of you people on our planet. Just a bunch of rich pricks thinking them living forever isn`t gonna cause an overpopulation. If all of you people die off maybe we actually won`t have an overpopulation problem, but then again we still will because there are so few of you degenerates.

Wow skeptic. You sound both educated, AND classy.

Overpopulation is a perception, like everything else. The point is that we should make an effort to build a future we desire.

This post shows the dubious nature of a lot of the info on this site. To think there are enough resources for 100 billion people on this planet with even a doubling or tripling production or resource efficiency is completely uninformed and unreasonable.

It's about as unreasonable and uninformed as thinking that anyone is advocating for the world to have 100 billion people, or that the population will ever reach that point, regardless of aging or not.

1. How can you be so sure that there is life on other planets for us to just escape to?
2. How can you be so sure that technological advancements will be so advanced that we wont need natural resources?
3. What resources would we use if we run out of resources we need to survive?
4. Have you ever looked at the increasing growth rate of the world and how it has constantly been rising since forever?

This is overall one of the dumbest things Ive read online, read a book

"4. Have you ever looked at the increasing growth rate of the world and how it has constantly been rising since forever?

This is overall one of the dumbest things Ive read online"

It's you who wrote the dumbest thing on this thread. Check the data before opening your mouth.

Hans Rosling has died :(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo

because you live somewhere that the population is growing, is it possible that it's due to more people moving there, instead of being overpopulated by birth rates? sorry I just don't see that many more children now than I did in the 60's , 70's 80's 90's or 2000's, in fact I see less. maybe there's more adult aliens from around the world, than I have noticed in the past? but I don't know the numbers bear that out

There is a new book now "" EMPTY PLANET"", the authors predict leveling off and declining of global population. Over or under population will not be a problem. This planet will not be empty.
If we will have fewer humans, then the gap will be filled with more wild animals reproducing.

In any case , if we will have too many humans, there are trillions of other planets ( at least 4000 of newly discovered planets were confirmed). Some of those planets will be earth-like. And humans will move to settle them. By the time massive life-extension will be available, cheaper space transportation will {hopefully} become a reality.

There is also no housing crisis, of course in the future we can live in a tent with 5 people to solve this problem.

Total BS. There is a population issue. more people chasing fewer resources. How on earth can you pee in our ear and tell us its raining? This is most likely based on a model and one thing we know is models are always BS and end up being changed and wrong. Just as Ross Perot was right about the sucking sound of jobs leaving the USA he was off on the timeline. Just because its not been a total blow out does not mean its not an issue. You have to be stupid to buy this nonsense.

@jim
We can quote the labs of confusion that they're are too many people and too many problems. But weekend you say to many which material do you use?
A metric that we will all starve due to overpopulation is wrong at least until we reach 40 billions. A metric that says we destroy or alter the nature, well that ship has sailed in 18th century. European leopards were exterminated during Roman empire, for example. American mammoths and horses went extinct thousands of years ago due to overhunting. Having more people means you have to care more about the ecology and there unique problems of organizing, interacting and mediating. Also economic migration can concentrate disproportionally high numbers in some cities and areas to make living and commuting there challenging if not nightmare. However, those people are occupying now less slabs than if they stayed were they were. Ironically, cities use much less resources per capita than rural places. Suburbans are in between.

But all of this is straw man because by most protections we will reach peal human by 2050. Even now Europe's birth rates are below replacement and migration is the major growth source. For example, Eastern Europe is losing population due to both negative replacement rate and immigration to reacher countries. Most of Asia is undergoing now this demographic transition and soon (a couple decades) will be having negative growth. The only place that is lagging this transition is sub Sahara Africa.

This argument was discussed many times by people smarter than me.

What I want is to turn your question around and ask you what would be the absolute minimum population size which can persevere our civilization with all its achievements and knowledge. (Let's not count achievements for to sheer size)

This article is pure propaganda. The key outcomes of overpopulation aren't even mentioned, There are some statements made without serious scientific research backing them up as "the world can afford tens of billions of people".

@Markel
The talk about Overpopulation as the result of extended life span is just completely ridiculous.
Overpopulation is the result of over breeding and not the result of people not dying fast enough.
When people will stop producing more than one or two children and stop having them so early in their lives in their 20s then population will grow even slower than now.
On the other hand even if human life span will be less than today's life span(natural life span) we are still going to overpopulate the world without a serious change in technology or society.

More people = more garbage, more natural habitat paved over for development, more waste, more consumption, more tension, more disease. Overpopulation is the problem of all problems. You are in denial and not very intelligent if you can not see that!

If you think the overpopulation is a huge problem, what would be the minimal population to be able to preserve most of the civilizations achievements? Another question. if all the humankind disappeared overnight who loud care that the nature has recovered?

This is the biggest load of BS I have seen since the farm truck over turned dumping cow crap on the interstate. What a bunch of crap. We are over populated today. We are encroaching on all wildlife habitat every day more and more. More and more people every day chasing fewer and fewer resources. Fresh water is running out, the water cycle can not keep up with how fast we are using it, food is being produced in horrible ways to keep up with demand. If you saw how they breed Chickens so they can not even walk and keep them in huge pens to feed and breed them so they grow at unprecedented rates so its a few weeks from birth to the fryer its sick. The seas are actually being over fished and because of long line nets everything from coral to other species are being wiped out in collateral damage. This simple minded BS that the earth can not be or is not over populated is are you going to believe me or your lying eyes BS from so called Scientists. I don't buy this crap that we will grow to 11 billion and level off crap. Name one time in history this has happened? You can can't

This stupid idea that we can go to other planets is so idiotic its not even worth a Marvel comic strip. How many light years is the nearest sun? Well its about 137 Thousand years at current technology. Not to mention all the other issues of space travel. Even going to mars is stupid. Humans can only keep a small group of people supplied and alive in Antarctica and there is water and air there. This mars thing is such a load of horse pucky its stupid. Science may put a couple of people there but even then it would be very dangerous and no help if crap went wrong and what could possibly go wrong? And when you get there its Baron and makes the Antarctic look like an oasis. People are so stupid. We have the best life boat we are going to have and we are punching holes in it faster than they can be repaired. Humans sorry to say are SOL in the next 200 years.

@Jim Young
Yes we are altering the habitats and damaging the species. Those is nothing new. It was happening the moment hominids learned how to make some tools and spears. Setting forests in fire was standard practice. Back then the damage per person was enormous but there were too few of us to matter on planetary scale. The mega fauna got wiped out from Australia and the americas, for example.

As for human population going down. It is happening right now. Many countries have birth rates well below the replacement.

Some of the reasons are the increased lifespan and delayed marriage. That alone can slow down the population growth. In fact, there was only one population control measure proposed by Malthus. Delay the marriage until 20-something. In most countries it is way past that and with the birth control we rarely have more than 2 children , if any.

If you can make the 60s the new forties this will stretch and delay the birth rates accordingly.

We are heading towards peak human. In just 30 years.

@Andrew. Going to Mars, Moon etc will be the biggest push to human rejuvenation. Think about all the DNA repairing technologies required. Go Elon!

Go ahead keep breeding. Have as many children as you want. Go on! See what happens!

It's not a matter of how many humans are on the planet, it's how we live our lives. Classic case of quality over quantity. The current COVID-19 pandemic has forced some of us to live as simple but self-sufficient, or to consider simplifying our lifestyles. We see preppers and homesteaders growing their own food while simultaneously creating mini ecosystems within their property. This is what nature needs, not the mainstream lifestyle of luxury. The Earth has more than enough for everyone's need, but not one man's greed.