“Billions and billions,” he said in his best Carl Sagan. Not locally, but still…

The truest wild beasts live in the most populous places.

Gracián

Sometime tomorrow, the predicted U.S. population will exceed three hundred million: five percent of the world's six and one-half billion.

I remember talk of overpopulation when I was a small boy. We don't seem to talk about it anymore, but I remain concerned.

Tip o' the virtual hat to Ed Mooney for the Census Bureau pointer.

Comments:

No need to worry. People around the world are increasingly gravitating to urban centers which dramatically reduces the incentive to produce children, compared to rural living. So says Stewart Brand, president of the Long Now Foundation. He has the slides to his talk online.

There's also a Nature article, The end of world population growth, with different methods but a similar conclusion.

Posted by Turadg Aleahmad on 17 Oct 2006 @ 02:06am UTC #

Should be interesting to see who the 300 millionth child is.I hope it is a girl

Posted by ashley on 17 Oct 2006 @ 09:50am UTC #
Add a comment or subscribe to (existing and future) comments on this essay.
Name:
Email*:
 *Please provide your real email address; it will not be displayed as part of the comment.
Homepage:
Comment**:
 **The following markup may be used in the body of the comment: a, abbr, b, br, code, em, i, p, pre, strong, and var. You can also use character entities. Any other markup will be discarded, including all attributes (except href on a). Your tag soup will be sanitized...