SPRAWL! What Our Future Will Look Like When Earth Hits Pop. 10 Billion

 

         

Stephen Emmott, head of Computational Science at Microsoft Research, has created a devastating portrait the many ways we are impacting the planet. Emmott hascreated a one-man presentation that has taken theatregoers in Great Britain on tour through our own history and use of Earth’s resources, before offering a grim glimpse of what the future might look like if the population reaches 10 billion. In an interview with New Scientist, he shows that it isn’t good.

Emmot says his "goal was simply to inform and give people an opportunity and a framework for thinking differently about the nature of the problems that we face. You might say it’s quite stark, but 99 per cent of the talk is just the science and the facts. We could solve this problem with massive behaviour change. It’s the only part where I give an opinion - and I hope I’m wrong - but I don’t think we will make the kind of behaviour change necessary."

At one point in the talk Emmott suggests that "if we learned that an asteroid was going to slam into the planet, the entire world would rally to find a way to avert catastrophe - or set in motion a plan to rebuild if it hit.

"If astronomers and physicists actually discovered an asteroid, it’s a pretty simple problem: there’s a very large object hurtling up to earth and it’s going to slam into the planet. That’s pretty easy to understand. The complexity of this problem, that the inhabitants of the planet are gradually having the same impact for reasons that are all highly interconnected and complex, is harder to grasp. I also believe that as a species we tend to be either optimistic or want to just ignore problems until they stare us in the face. And this isn’t staring us in the face. It’s immensely appealing to want to believe that this isn’t a problem on this scale, or that even if it is, that we will figure out a way to stop it."

"Even with 7 billion of us, there are already several billion people on this planet who quite understandably look at the way in which Europeans and Americans live and think, I would like to live like that. But as many of these countries start to become more populous and prosperous, they are just going to add to the problem. I just don’t know what the solution is, really, other than behaviour change."

In an earlier call to action, the World Wildlife Federation's 2010 "Living Planet" report said that carbon pollution and over-use of Earth's natural resources have become so critical that, on current trends, we will need a second planet to meet our needs by 2030. The report says that 1 billion people do not have access to an adequate supply of fresh water. It pointed to 71 countries that were running down their sources of freshwater at a worrying, unsustainable rate. Nearly two-thirds of these countries experience "moderate to severe" water stress.

"This has profound implications for ecosystem health, food production and human wellbeing, and is likely to be exacerbated by climate change," WWF said.* Every week humans create the equivalent of a city the size of Vancouver. In 2007, Earth's 6.8 billion humans were living 50 percent beyond the planet's threshold of sustainability, according to its report, issued ahead of a UN biodiversity conference.

"Even with modest UN projections for population growth, consumption and climate change, by 2030 humanity will need the capacity of two Earths to absorb CO2 waste and keep up with natural resource consumption," the WWF warned.

 

 

 

The Daily Galaxy via New Scientist and Microsoft

Comments

[Don]

Don't worry as the big corporations have the answer. Maximize shareholder value at any cost and all will be good in the world.

[Scott]

Looks we only have 3 options - Forced depopulation, Massive societal global change with an actively managed resource system, or space based colonization / farming. I figure humanity can only pick two of the options and be successful at it, as resources are limited.

[novenator]

Reminds me of Coruscant
On Wookiepedia: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Coruscant

[Paradox]

Half the world is too stubborn to change for the better, and the other half has nothing to change.Get an even distribution of materials and all will be well.But for every glutton there is a starving person.

[Kevin Kind]

Nope, humanity is doomed. Tipping point is well past, our brains have reached limits of comprehension let alone doing something.

Don't worry we'll all be dead anyway.

[Singaporistu]

based on "how many ppl can live on earth" by 2050 population will reach 15 billion and agriculture land will be insufficient; oil, fish and forest reserves will be depleted. Then we will unprecedented wars for resources and survival, and some of us might live long enough to see the show.

how to fix this now before is to late? easy solution, pay tax exponentially based on number of children. That should stop some ppl of having 10 kids.

PPL in china coped very well with the "one child policy" and population is going down. If the want two, they can have but will have to pay more, to have 3 you must be really rich. On the other hand india government tried to use a payout mass sterilization which end up in a disaster as outraged ppl supported by religious nuts escalated it into public outrage.

Another radical solution but probably more efficient: if you want to have a child must make a downpayment first for a 18 years of the kid wellfare, which will be payed back monthly to the child ensuring the child don't starve even the parents run out of money and cannot feed him. Is like insurance policy, you wanna make a baby, show that you have the money to rise him.

[California Z]

Am I the only one who's looking forward to the peak of this roller coaster? Wouldn't you like you or your kid to be one of one billion, instead of one of 7 billion? The world pop is getting older and older, and they will start dying in droves at some point. Maybe it will be like that Clive Owen movie where all of a sudden no women get pregnant, and then they do. Around 1800 was when the world was at a billion people.

[DwarfGalaxy]

Humans won't change, they don't care until it's too late, they need to make a living, resources are there to be used to exhaustion. It's not a problem, many other life forms in this Universe would probably behave the same way. If horror and chaos comes our way it's only Nature at work, restoring equilibrium, the hardest way.

[Relentless]

Behavior change

or sterilizing 90 percent of the planet sounds good

and no, nuclear war might solve one problem, but it'll sure as hell create a dozen more!

Or, final option... Just admit we're all doomed, and prepare for the worst by gathering yourself a small population of people, build an isolated self-sustainable city in a place that will be least affected by all the problems we are to face... Isolate yourself from the rest of the world, and wait it out (might take a century though)... Then, once the worst is over, repopulate the world and slowly take in all the survivors with your New Green Never-Again type of culture, which will ultimately give us a second chance :D <--- this is my plan at least

[Jig]

So the guy drew a picture of Coruscant. Big deal. Ooooohhhhh so groundbreaking.

[goba]

the problem Is people pop out babies every day your right its not our problem we wont have to deal with it all those babies will and most will die from it

[goba]

it never has made any sense to me who would want to bring a kid into this world that's becoming over populated hardly any jobs as it is are they just morons and I see people all the time having 3 or 4 kids at a time I just think they are total idiots its mostly the girls with the problem that don't understand over population maybe they should start teaching overpopulation in schools or something

[Arenaboi]

Goba: Please use punctuation, such as a period at the end of a sentence, or a comma between thoughts. Reading that was painful

[Lee]

This is yet another triviote and breeds pessimism for a already growing death culture excepting their own demise by a psychopathic Anglo Saxon elite. If their plan of creative destruction is fully implemented there will be less than 6 million of us left and that means you; Read the Georgia Guide Stones and realize the ideology.
If Russia losses the capability to counter strike and destroy the heart of the Anglo Saxon empire within their bunkers they along with China will inevitably be forced to submit to this ideology of death. Without the hindrance of the empire a true global alliance can be formed with all sovereign nations to cooperate toward the attainable goal of continued development for all. The idea of sustainability for economic growth will then be ridiculous as there will now be unlimited resources within and outside the base of our Earth. The possibilities of fusion and 1g accelerated space flight are enormous and very soon will open up the entire solar system for development. The culture of pessimism that presently covers the globe will then dissipate when we come to realize this reality and a continual golden age will occur not ever seen in human history.

[Zathras]

Those wishing to entertain their fears further should investigate Thomas Robert Malthus, author of "An Essay on the Principle of Population," in which he too wrote about the dangers of population growth. In his book, first published in 1798, when the estimated world population was 1 billion, Malthus also projected an unsustainable Earth.

Stephen Emmott, though an adept and credentialed alarmist, does not really capture the subtleties of fear and statism as does the original Malthus. How does Emmott expect anyone to surrender their freedom and sovereignty to do as they're told for the good of the collective with little more than extravagant wiz-bang CGI? To truly feel like a helpless cog in a society bent on its own destruction, read Malthus. To thoroughly fret and worry and wring-hands over something you have absolutely no control over, read Malthus. To appretiate how prosperity is our greatest enemy, read Malthus. He has formulas.

Living is going to kill us!

[Noochy]

If you look at the population growth rates of developed countries, they may accidentally have it right. It is becommng sooo expensive to have kids these days that any middle-class couple can barely afford more than 2 kids and therefore the pop growth rate is stagnant. On top of that, eradicate the tax incentives for children per household and we will be good to go. People will have to educate themselves instead of slamming out kids to get money from the government.

[Pete]

I thought about the images from Somalia when people came into refugee camps in Kenya. There was one couple with 9 children. They had 11 but 2 died on the trip. Then a woman came in with 14 children! No husband to be found! People like that just don't care about overpopulation. They have no idea of sustainability.

[Singaporistu]

@Pete: That's because their only entertainment is sex ... no books, no electricity, no tv, no internet, no playstation. Zero knowledge and they don't know nor care about contraception, they still live by the natural selection law, have as many as possible kids and maybe some will survive.

The more a country is developed and parents think about the future an care about their kids welfare, the less children they will have. Nigeria population will grow three time the current size in only 30 years. They have 10 kids on average but still complain about not having food for all of them. And the worse are the Christianity groups which teach them the condom is evil and life is sacred. Those ppl need education not aid.

[DaveG]

**There are some crazy arguments here: A tax for having more children, wtf? So.. you're allowed to have more children than me because you make more money and can afford to pay a price I can't, really? FU! And the last guy blaming Christianity for "teaching the condom is evil" again, wtf? Stop categorizing and labeling humans. I know most people do this, but think for yourself and don't follow what the other do. This is not a religious or financial issue, it's way above that. No religion or amount of money can generate depleted natural resources when mother nature can keep up with our consumption. Please come with better ideas, not arguments.

[Kurt Cagel]

Systemic collapse is already underway. The primary driver - oil - peaked globally eight years ago, and most of the economic crises that have occurred since then are simply manifestations of having reached this peak and now moving into decline.

The situation now is very much like the process of keeping plates spinning on sticks. Keeping one plate spinning is not hard. Even two or three plates can be managed without too much effort. When you start getting to ten or fifteen such plates, however, you reach a point where the time and energy necessarily to move from one plate on one side of the stage to another plate on the other side exceeds the ability of the performer. Eventually the plates start to fall, and the performer has to add deciding which plates to save on top of everything else, all the while having to deal with broken glass shards and exhaustion.

We have hundreds of plates spinning right now that are decaying because of degradation - oil depletion, global warming, overpopulation, financial crises, generalized resource depletion, aging infrastructure, aging populations, antibiotic resistance, nuclear radiation, mass species die-off, and so forth. One by one these issues are overwhelming our ability to keep the plates spinning.

Eventually (and soon, within the next thirty years by many estimates) these issues will manifest as starvation, plagues, resource wars and civil wars, drought, economic collapse and the like which should rapidly depopulate the world. I'd say there's a very real possibility that within 150 years, the global human population might be closer to ten million than ten billion. To put that into perspective, imagine the next thousand people you encounter in the next week are gone from the world, then assume, that the next person after that, rather than you, is one of those left.

Humankind may eventually recover, but having exhausted most of the easily accessible petroleum fuel that made the spike in population possible, it may be another thousand years before we reach the levels of where we were 100 years ago. This is what we're facing.

[Zathras]

@DaveG: Might I address you alone for a moment? You demonstrate a serious misunderstanding of an argument. What others propose here, sadly, *are* their ideas; unsupported, unjustified, baseless, and without reason. An argument has the form "this is so because of that," or "this ought to be done because of that." They have no that; they make no argument. As viciously ignorant as their ideas are, and they are (no doubt responsible for your "wft" exclamations), they make no argument. Their claims and their proposals, owing to many years of being told their ideas as equally valid as anyone's, are designed to be challenges, daring all comers to "prove" that they, not their ideas, wrong. Thus, ad hominem attacks follow any criticism.

Practitioners of such nonsense, while affecting a godlike veneer, seek not to better the world by their participation in it, but instead, to devise inexplicable duties that "we" must effect in service of their unaccountable causes. It is though, a pose, a thoughtless dispassionate pose.

One recommendation of yours I can agree with: think for yourself. If those in the house of religion believe the premise, then, for them, it is an issue. If those ministers in the halls of finance buy the basic idea, then for them too, it is an issue. If the rest of us willingly accept as true, a depletion of natural resources in the face of some nameless but none-the-less inherent inability to overcome, then better ideas are doomed to fail, as are bad.

In Malthus' day, more than 200 years ago, whale oil was used to light his pessimistic predictions, before natural gas, and before electricity that followed gas. He, like Emmott, predicted the doom of his world. Malthus was right; his world died, replaced with a world of wealth he would scarcely recognise.

[simon salosny]

Although most of our planet´s inhabitants barely exist, only the Chinese have implemented a corrective system, in order to control the otherwise un controllable demographic explosion. Unfortunately, the poorest and less educated humans are irresponsibly reproducing at an exponential rate. So, the only way out is to apply the Chinese system. Also, the UN should stop feeding the Africans, who are destroying their forests and fauna, and let nature recover the equilibrium. They have lost all of their quality of life. Is that OK? This is happening in many places around the planet and is unfair to the new generations, who are being robbed of any acceptable future by their unconscious parents and governments.

[Ruth Mc]

Never mind moaning about people in Africa. It seems to me that people in W Europe and the U.S need to change their thinking and soon. It's scary. The vast majority believe it is their 'right' to reproduce..and it is politically incorrect to argue otherwise.