Since I was born the world population has doubled and I will live 4 years longer if I stay in Switzerland.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-15391515

All of us, have to stop having more than 2 children! I think Grynch and LiB should lead from the front and practise abstinence for the rest of this year!

If we cure AIDS and Malaria how will we all live together? In 2010, 7.6 million children under five died from Malaria. 6 million children die each year of hunger.

thread merge!!!

How do you fit into history?

More than 15'000 pregnancies every hour: population 7 billion

And if you believe the SVP, thats what Switzerland is going to be like with all the foreigners.....

it might not be as bad if there was more to watch on local TV ....

I don't want to watch 15'000 acts of copulation per hour on local TV. 10'000 on the internet is enough...., know your limits.

Does that mean every hour 15000 women are turning 18?

Life, as you know, is not that simple. I'll be sure to mention that comment to my parents (who lost one child), two sets of uncles and aunts (who each lost 1 child) and etc. etc...

The irony about this having "no more than 2 children" thing is that the people who buy into this ideology are usually the wealthy middle-class/income folk who can actually afford to have children and give them the education and motivation to contribute to society, as opposed to the chavs and chavettes (to use a distinctly British term) who have neither the motivation nor time to educate their children.

My 5 raps...

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Never let right or wrong get in the way of a good opinion

Still I think 1.9 chavs per family is quite enough!

Personally I am worried that the third world continues to add to the world population.
The resources are limited, and if we fix a few nasty diseases things will only get worse.

When you have got no job, nowhere to go and nothing to do, you have sex. That is a reason a lot of people living there have so many kids. It also probably because the more kids you have, the more chance you have of one of them making out of where ever you are, finding a job in the city and looking after you so you can go around having more kids.

Sad, but then in their situation I cant blame them.

Do you have a literary source for this revealing piece of demographic study?

How can we harness all of this coitus and turn it into a renewable energy source? There's kinetic energy, thermal energy, perhaps we could even harness sound waves. If there are 15,000 pregnancies an hour, how many acts of coitus does that translate into? How many thrusts per hour? How do we measure sound energy? J/dB? Can someone come up with a grand unified formula, something full of thurst and km and J and K? Someone stop me!

Chemmie. come on you can do better than that. There can be more than one pregnancy one person and there can other ages of pregnancy as well. , Sorry just taking a dig.

No, but I guess life experience should count. I mean if I have seen it with my own eyes and lived it, surely I can be used as a relatively sound reference. Or do I need to publish a thesis of my observations first?

Some interesting facts can be found here.

The fact is that population has slowed or stopped in most developed countries while developing countries account for more than 95 percent of population growth.

The world population bomb is ticking as the gap between rich and developing countries widens.

Scary reality is that it took humans on this planet tens of thousands of years to reach the 3 billion population mark (I think we hit it in the 60s) But we have taken just over 50 years to increase by 4 billion. That is a mind blowing statistic to think about. I do, however, disagree that humans will destroy the planet. This planet will find a way to wipe us out long before we kill it. Humans may be the most dominant species on the planet, but when the planet is threatened enough, it will react. Just ask those long be gone dinosaurs. As long as it doesn't go the way of the plot of The Walking Dead.

That's frankly wrong: A huge amount of developing countries managed to catch up over the past 30 years. Overall has the gap actually closed a lot. (just watch when he shows the development of the Chinese incomes vs. the US...)



The people in many emerging countries earn more today and have less kids...just like us. Asia used to be the poor part of the world - by now much of the poverty is gone. The only place left where most people have very low income and many kids is Africa.

The world can actually support really many humans - but not with hamburgers which require cattle which in turn needs a multiple of the resources of vegetables... theoretically would nobody need to hunger as our advances in production over the last century outperform even the steep increase in population easily.

I believe that is (with all due respect) rather a simplistic approach. There are several reasons for having more children, probably the most common factors are education and economics. Simply put, people who have had more formal education know of the benefits of having less children (and also know about the existence of contraception and probably have money to pay for it). In addition, farmers for example tend to have larger families to help with the crops. And many other reasons can be quoted. I used to live in one of the Latin American countries where poor people had jobs (badly paid perhaps, but that's another discussion), even TV at home, and still the average number of children in that social class was about 5 by the time the mother reached 30 years old.

In my mind, education is the key.

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Time Magazine are running a really interesting special feature this month entitled "The World at 7 Billion".

First of all, I really wish I could swap my professor for this guy, he's so entertaining!

Secondly, I agree with the post above, In 2010 we produced food for 11 billion people, proof that, if push comes to shove, we could feed 7 billion mouths. Of course I know the world doesn't quite work that way.
Most countries are getting closer and closer to a 2.1 birth rate because social aids in most countries are getting better and one no longer needs to make 7 children just to make sure 3 survive to help them through their old age.