How Many People Is Too Many?
Some say the Earth is overpopulated; others (like Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson) say we don’t have enough people
The United Nations has announced the date that the 8 billionth human will be born: November 15, 2022. Who knows? They may be off by a day or two or a month or more.
But, what’s your first thought? Does that sound like a lot of people to you, maybe too many? Or do you think the Earth can hold billions more?
In just a few decades
I don’t like crowds. I don’t like big cities. I feel overwhelmed in a packed bus or busy sidewalk. So, when I think about how fast the world’s population has increased in my lifetime, I’m concerned. Surely, 8 billion is just way too many people for our earth and her limited resources.
In 1800, just a couple of hundred years ago—a snap of the fingers in relation to Earth’s history—there were 1 billion people on the Earth. One hundred years later, in 1900, the world population was 1.6 billion.
When I was born, in 1955, we had almost 2.8 billion people on the planet. When I graduated from high school in 1973, we had just shy of 4 billion—half as many people as we do today.
