It took from the dawn of mankind until the early part of the nineteenth century for the population of the earth to reach 1 billion. At the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 BC, there were only 4 million people living on the entire planet. They lived as hunters and gatherers. Two thousand years later, with the domestication of animals and plants, the population increased to five million. It took another eight thousand years, and the development of bronze and then iron, for the population to grow to 250 million. The Roman Empire was flourishing at that time.
Periodically decimated by major outbreaks of plague, smallpox, tuberculosis, leprosy, typhoid, syphilis, and other diseases, it took until the mid-1500s for the earth’s human population to grow to 450 million. The plague (Black Death) killed 75 million people two hundred years earlier. Smallpox vaccination began in 1796. Food canning was developed about 1810. Around 1825, the world’s population finally grew to 1 billion.
The Irish potato famine, accompanied by devastating epidemics of typhus and cholera, occurred during the 1840s. The hypodermic syringe was invented in 1853. Dynamite was invented in 1866. The first automobile was built in 1893, and the first airplane was flown in 1903. By this time the population had grown to 1.6 billion.
From that point, population growth was gaining momentum like an accelerating freight train. With advances including the development of penicillin, a vaccine for polio, and the development of crop dusting with insecticides, it took only fifty more years for the world’s population to reach 3 billion. The year was 1950—only sixty years ago.
The population explosion freight train was now running at full speed. By 1984, thirty-four years later, the earth’s human population increased to 5 billion, and by 2000, it reached the astounding figure of 6 billion. The population had doubled in fifty years. By May 2014, the world’s population reached 7.12 billion people.
According to the current projections of the U.S. Census Bureau, the earth’s population will reach 8 billion by the year 2025, and a staggering level of 9.3 billion by 2050. The majority of this growth is projected to occur in the lesser-developed countries of Africa, Asia, and South America.
Man, like other animals, has the remarkable capacity to develop from a single-celled embryo to a complex organism. Although man’s intellectual abilities exceed those of other animals, most people never develop their intellects to their fullest extent. The brain must be trained through education and discipline to take full advantage of man’s unique capabilities. Basic survival needs, including food, shelter, and reproduction, keep most people from attaining the maximal development of their intellect. Early man had to spend most of his time fulfilling these basic needs.
In our contemporary civilization, most people still have to spend much of their time meeting the basic needs of life. On the other hand, extensive specialization and division of labor have allowed some people to pursue education to its fullest extent. These relatively few people have led us to the brink of a supercivilization. We live in the greatest technological age that man has ever known. We have conquered diseases that used to kill millions of people prematurely. We have made survival infinitely easier and allowed people leisure time for learning, enjoyment, and fulfillment of their desires and dreams.
We have sent man beyond our own planet to the moon, and we have explored even farther with our space probes. Data from the space programs indicate that the other planets in our solar system are inhospitable to life. These findings undermine previous conceptions regarding the planets. We can no longer entertain images of races of giants inhabiting Jupiter or supercivilizations existing elsewhere in our solar system. Perhaps, billions of years ago, other planets in our solar system may have been capable of supporting life, and perhaps, billions of years in the future, other planets will have a life-supporting capability. But right now, we are here, alone, and there is no place else for us to go. If we destroy our planet’s delicate balance of nature and its ability to sustain life, we shall also destroy ourselves.
The development of mankind is gravely threatened by one glaring fact: there are too many of us. Leonardo di Vinci once said that most men contribute nothing to the development of civilization. They only exist and in the process are detriments to society. They eat, consume resources, and produce waste, and when they die, they leave a decomposing corpse behind. The statement is still true today but on a much larger and more serious scale. Most people today consume vast amounts of our limited energy resources while contributing very little to the progress of civilization. In the process of using these energy resources, whether by driving automobiles or using modern machines or their products, we are in turn polluting the environment to a degree that threatens our own existence.
Seven billion people now want to enjoy the same standard of living that is prevalent in the United States. Oil reserves are declining, forests and farmlands are disappearing, and food stocks are at their lowest levels in years. There are not enough resources to support everyone at the level enjoyed in the more advanced countries.
The premise that we might some day pay the piper for overpopulation is certainly not a new one. We are indebted to two gentlemen for postulating this theory over one hundred years ago. They are Thomas Robert Malthus and Charles Darwin.
Malthus was an English economist and demographer who lived from 1766 to 1834. The Malthusian theory states that population tends to increase at a geometrical ratio, while the means of subsistence increase comparatively slowly at an arithmetical ratio, and that this leads to an inadequate supply of the goods supporting life. Historically, three mechanisms have restored balance whenever the human population has exceeded the food supply: famine, disease, and war. In 1798, Malthus explained that without these periodic checks, the birthrate would so far exceed the death rate that the multiplication of mouths would nullify any increase in the production of food.
Malthus said that the only way to check overpopulation was sexual restraint. As far as economics was concerned, he was a pessimist and viewed poverty as man’s inescapable lot. He pointed out that issuing relief funds or supplies to the poor encouraged them to reproduce all the more and thus add to the problem. Such an attempt at solution would merely postpone the calamity.
In nonindustrial societies, the Malthusian theory seems to have a potentially threatening validity. Industrial societies, however, have so far refuted the postulations of Malthus. National income has tended to outpace population growth, and the size of the family has become a matter of choice due to the prevalence of the various types of birth control.
It is interesting that it was Malthus who set Charles Darwin on the train of reasoning that led to the theory of natural selection. Darwin (1809–1882) was an English naturalist who first established the theory of evolution in his monumental work The Origin of Species. From 1831 to 1836, Darwin sailed the HMS Beagle as a naturalist for a surveying expedition. His observations of the relationships between animals separated by time and distance led him to reflect on the contemporary prevailing view of the fixity of species.
In October 1838, Darwin read Malthus’s Essay on the Principles of Population. Darwin’s own observations had convinced him of the struggle for existence; upon reading the views of Malthus, it at once struck Darwin “that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of a new species.” Hence, the theory of natural selection, or survival of the fittest, was born.
In the nonhuman animal world the fittest individuals or groups are those whose physical and behavioral traits make them best able to survive in their environment. This is also true of humans, yet man is different. Man lives under social and cultural as well as biological rules. His technology, combined with his intelligence, allows him to survive under conditions that would kill him if he were an animal. Man’s intelligence can manifest itself in many forms: the ability to comprehend complex situations and to solve problems; military acumen; scientific, mathematical, and engineering ingenuity; business acumen, and so on. Intelligence combined with the basic instinct of aggressiveness is an especially ideal combination for fitness and survival in the human situation.
The economists and demographers of today say that Malthus was shortsighted because he could not anticipate the development of modern agricultural techniques like disease-resistant plants, fungicides, and insecticides, all of which have increased food production markedly. He also did not anticipate the advances in science, engineering, and medicine, which, over the years, have brought remarkable increases in our standard of living and allowed us to live longer and healthier lives.
Ironically, the industrialization that has given us a high standard of living has resulted in deforestation and pollution of land, air, and water. Pollution has resulted in contamination of major food supplies, disappearance of animal and plant species, and major illnesses among workers and consumers exposed to the toxic by-products of industries. The United States has led the way in reducing pollutants in the workplace and protecting the environment though at the cost of losing jobs to other countries where costly antipollution laws are less strict or nonexistent.
But we are again approaching the end of our rope. We are running out of resources. In short, there are too many people and too many machines, all consuming too many goods. We have two choices. We can cut down on the number of people, reduce environmental destruction and pollution to a viable level, and progress toward a supercivilization, or we can continue as we are and eventually destroy ourselves. The choice is ours. Will we be able to develop new resources sufficient to support 8 billion people? Or will we have a massive population cleansing by war, famine, or disease and reduce the demand on the earth’s resources to sustainable levels?
The bottom line here is that the man-made disasters described in this section of the website are offshoots of the root problem—overpopulation. The pressures of overpopulation on the earth’s ability to sustain it are approaching the breaking point. The usual equalizers of overpopulation may soon recur in force. If it is war with weapons of mass destruction, the reduction in population may be swift but furious, and massive in scope. Only those who are prepared will have a reasonable chance to survive.
