“Be fruitful and multiply, and populate the earth”
Throughout history philosophers, priests, and demographers have attempted to scare the human race in to believing that there is a limit to how many humans can inhabit the Earth.
Plato is his treatise on Society The Republic argued that the entire human population of earth should not exceed five thousand and forty.( Ncayiyana 97) Today, many high schools in the United States house more than five thousand students. The average Freshmen class of most state Universities even surpasses this magical five thousand person limit.
In the nineteenth century the clergyman Thomas Malthus shook the world with his theory that “proved” the destiny of man to destroy himself through overpopulation. Malthus wrote that “population, when unchecked, increases in a geometric ration, whereas agricultural production increases in an arithmetical ration.”( Ncayiyana 97) Malthus’ theory may have held true on paper, but one of his premises is utterly flawed. One word unravels his entire argument, “unchecked”. A population of human beings is never unchecked. The forces of nature always keep human beings in “check”. Populations of humans are “checked” by their ability to procure food and living space. To say that a population of human beings is “unchecked” is to say that gravity works sporadically, or that Newtonian physics only work in certain situations.
The even bigger problem with Malthus’ claim is that he is trying to separate the growth of human populations from the availability of food, and this just cannot be done. The growth of any given population of living entities is controlled by the availability of food. If as he says the population is growing exponentially, it is doing so because the technology is also growing exponentially. Ten thousand years ago the earth experienced an agricultural revolution. This new agricultural technology enabled the human species to increase their numbers to ten million. These early humans did not increase their numbers prior to the agricultural revolution because they did not posses the knowledge necessary to do so. Their population was checked by the lack of technology in the same way that an object at rest stays that way until acted upon. In the mid eighteenth century the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution enabled the human species to increase its numbers to eight hundred million.( Ncayiyana 97) Again, the technological advance incited the rapid growth of the population. The human species did not destroy itself ten thousand years ago with unchecked population growth it just waited for the right technological advance. So, it is obvious that the growth of the human species and the growth of agricultural advances are not in fact at odds as Malthus claimed, but they are in actuality reliant on one another. The growth of agricultural capabilities allows the human species to increase its numbers.
What is even more frightening than Malthus’ prediction is that people still believe it to be true. In the twentieth century, Paul Ehrilich published The Population Bomb. In this work of illogic Ehrilich predicted that the world would run out of lead by 1983, zinc by 1985 and oil by the year 2000.(Carter 99) Although I wish Ehrilich’s prediction concerning oil would come true, the fact still remains that it has not. Not only have we not run out of oil, but we continue to find new oil rich regions in the world. Just recently, many American oil companies including Chevron undertook a project to extract oil and natural gas from the Caspian Sea in Central Asia. Even in the United States oil rich regions are still being discovered.
The contemporary advocates of Malthusian logic do however create an
interesting paradox. The paradox is this, in trying to
save the world these thinkers will destroy it, these men claim that to save the
world we must focus on reducing the population of humans. But attempting to stop a population of
humans from growing is an act of futility.
To effectively save our species we must not fight the rising population
but embrace it and create technology to enable our planet to house as many
people as is possible. The United
Nations predicts that the world population will rise to 9,400,000,000 by the
year 2050.(Hollingsworth 98) I want to
prove that the world could house approximately seventy five to one hundred
billion people. We may never reach a
population of one hundred billion, but if I can prove that the world could
contain this many human beings, then any claim that planet Earth is somehow
reaching its carrying capacity will prove false.
The first question that most people would ask
when one asserts that the Earth could hold seventy five billion people is,
where will everyone live? Due to the media’s depiction of inner city slums and
crowded villages in Africa, we seem to think that there is just not enough room
on our planet for the continued growth of our species. But the truth is that the Earth could easily
hold seventy five billion people, we just have to use our land more efficiently. In 1984, it was proven by the economist
Thomas Sowell that the entire world population (4.4 billion at the time) could
live comfortably in the state of Texas.
He wrote “Every human being on the face of the Earth could be housed in
the state of Texas in one-story, single-family homes, each with a front and a
back yard. A family of four would thus
have 6,800 square feet- about the size of the typical middle-class American
home with front and backyards.”(Carter 99)
According to more recent research on the topic, all of the world’s 1997
population (5.84 billion) could fit on the small Island of Bali in
Indonesia.(Stiefel 98) In other words,
there is no impending spatial capacity to how many humans could live on planet
earth, we just have to develop new technologies that will allow humans to
survive in any region of Earth. Look at
Russia for instance, if Texas can hold 4.4 billion people how many could the in
the entire nation of Russia alone? Tens
of billions, we just have to design greater technology to make a region as
harsh as Siberia habitable to the average person. Australia is an enormous continent, yet it is sparsely
populated. There is no reason that we could
not develop the Australian outback to the point that the outback of Australia
is as densely populated as the Island of Manhattan. We will replace deserted regions of the world will thriving
cities.
So, now we have proven that there is enough land for human population to continue to grow and survive, but the question arises as to how these future generations will survive? Where will they live, how will they organize their society, what about resources? Before I discuss the issue of seemingly limited resources, I will address the concerns of where a population so large would live. The answer comes in modern architecture. We have already asserted that 4.4 billon people living in one-story houses could live comfortably in the state of Texas. But how many people could live in Texas if instead of one-story houses we built five hundred and twenty eight story skyscrapers? Mile high skyscrapers are not a novel idea in 1954 Frank Lloyd Wright developed a plan for a 528 story skyscraper called “The Illinois”. In more contemporary times, nations are already building such mass structures. In India the building of a massive pyramid like Vedic temple is already under construction. The building will rise to 224 stories, and will house sixty thousand people. In the nation of Japan, Sir Thomas Foster proposed his plan to build the “Millennium Tower”. Foster’s building will rise over one half mile high, and will house approximately 52,000 people. Foster thinks his building will serve as a solution to the future generations problems with population density. He remarked that it will be “ an alternative to the alienating, polluting, fragmentation of existing urban development”.(anonymous 2000)
These new super buildings will be complete societies. Just imagine a building so tall that you
cannot even see its peak. Imagine the
current day mall, school, police department, grocery store, amusement park, zoo
and museum all stacked on top of one another.
One hundred thousand people living comfortably in one building. Eventually, when there are many of these
enormous buildings they will be interconnected, creating a sort of floating
highway. Cars will become obsolete
because anything one could desire will exist within the building. Frank Lloyd Wright summed up the necessity
of these new buildings when he introduced his plan for the mile high skyscraper
“No one can afford to build it now," Wright told the stunned
gathering, "but in the future no one can afford not build it."
So, we have proven that there is
enough land for a population of seventy five billion, and I have illustrated an
example of how these people could be housed, but now we must ask the most
important question of all. Are there
enough resources to sustain such an enormous population? Will these people have enough to eat, will
there be enough water? First, let us
establish what humans essentially need to survive. Human beings need oxygen, water and energy. I do not say food because food is a means by
which we obtain energy. If we could
somehow design a technology to allow humans to soak up energy from the sun, or
plug in to an energy source there would be no need to eat anything at all.
I do not foresee a lack of clean
oxygen as a problem for future generations.
I think rapidly advancing technology will continually make our means of
producing energy cleaner, and mile high skyscrapers will reduce the need for
travel which will mean less pollution.
So the quality of air will probably get better instead of worse. Food could be a problem for such a large
population, but currently the United States produces enough food to feed the
entire world. The United States
Government actually pays farmers to destroy their crops, so the argument that
there just won’t be enough food seems to be slightly absurd. Those who point to starving children in
Africa to prove that the world isn’t producing enough food are simply
mistaken. Starving children in Africa
prove that we need a more global economy.
Amartya Sen a Harvard economist
researches famines, and she concluded that "There has never been a
famine in any country that's been a democracy with a relatively free
press". So, the starving children
in Africa are a problem that needs to be addressed, but the answer is not more
food, but more access to food.
Water however does seem to pose a
problem. Currently, many nations fight
over water rights, and in some regions the problem is getting worse rather than
better. Again, I must stress the point
that there is not a lack of water, just a lack of access. A nation such as Canada has no problem
procuring fresh water, but a nation such as the Sudan virtually has no
water. Future generations could solve
the problem of water through various different methods. First, we must develop cheap and efficient
technology that will allow us to clean saltwater and turn it to fresh
water. This technology will afford us
much more water, next we must accept one important idea. We must realize that water does not simply
disappear. I mean when someone drinks
water, the water isn’t gone. There is a
finite amount of water, but this water can be used an infinite amount of
times. Basically, in a population of
one hundred billion people each person will have to subsist using less
water. People will have to be more
efficient in their use of water, but I think the other solutions I have offered
such as mile high skyscrapers will necessitate more efficient use of
water.
This
has been just one scenario as to how a human population of one hundred billion
could survive, there are millions of other scenarios that could also work. Ultimately I realize that there must be some
point at which the Earth could hold no more humans, but I do not think that
number is any less that one hundred billion.
Works Cited
1.
Carter, Tom. Insight; March 22, 1999.
2. Ncayiyana, Daniel. The Lancet; May 24, 1997.
3. Stiefel, Chana. Science World; April 13, 1998.
4. Hollingsworth, William. USA Today Magazine; July 1998
5. www.worldstallest.com