According to estimates, the world’s population has passed 7 billion people, more or less. Hard to count the squirming mass of humanity with any accuracy.
At the rate we are growing, the population will hit 8 billion by 2025, and 9 billion around 2043.
World population is growing at around 1.1% per year. That doesn’t sound like much, but it means the world population will double in less than 64 years. Less than 64 years to add as many people as it took us all of human history to achieve. That’s 14 years less than the average life expectancy in the US, so an average person will see the world’s population more than double in their lifetime.
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Except that if it actually did double, we might not be here to see anything. We’ve got a room for a few more, but we’re already overusing the environment – zero population growth would be a better goal. Of course then we run the risk of the problem of the “Marching Moron’s” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons
Michio Kaku has some very rational things to say about world population and stabilization at about 11 billion people. Mainly that the population is going up right now but birth rates are declining enough that the population explosion will taper off and they’ll balance out. Food is the biggest problem, but it’s possible that another green revolution will solve it.
The math on that is pretty bad. The last paragraph makes some pretty bad assumptions.