As of February 25, 2006, the world population stands at 6.5 billion. Currently, this not a problem. However, it may become a quite serious one in the near future.
In 1950, the world population stood at 2.5 billion. Since then, the world population has increased by a billion almost every decade. Experts are predicting that in a mere forty years, world population will be just above 9 billion. Clearly, the population growth rate will become a problem by the end of the century.
We have several ways to address this situation. China is already passing one of them: population restriction. Thanks to the law, nobody can have anymore than two children. Population restriction is a very sensible method of addressing our problem, for it will cut population growth rate drastically. But it won't work forever; eventually, the population would rise again.
Our next method is to finish colonizing our world. We have so much unused space! There's Antarctica, the sky, the seas! We haven't even taken advantage of more than an eighth of our world. We still have some ways to go before we can begin colonizing the sea and making cities in the sky, but it's not too far off.
The most obvious method is colonizing the stars. We send colony ships to new worlds, explore them, make them our own. Once again, there a multiple ways of going about colonizing extrasolar planets.
Our first is habitat building. We go to planets that cannot naturally sustain life and build giant enclosed spaces for us to live in. NASA has recently launched a similar project. What NASA plans to do is send a small population to the moon and establish a small base there, which will expand over time. Then they will launch a mission from the moon to Mars and start the process over. Unfortunately, this will be a very painstaking process, as NASA plans to have their lunar base started in twenty years.
Our second option is to terraform planets that cannot sustain life so it becomes more earth-like. This is a little further in the future, for it requires that we create a breathable atmosphere, which is currently outside of our reach on a planet-wide scale.
Our final option is to select planets that can sustain life and build there like we would any colony here on Earth. This method seems to have the best likelihood of succeeding, for just last year, Gliese 581 c was found. Gliese 581 c is a planet orbiting just inside its parent star's habitable zone. Gliese 581 c is the most earth-like planet ever found out of the current 333 that are cataloged. Gliese 581 c is 1.5 time larger than Earth and may have water on its surface. Gliese 581 c is also only 20.3 light years away, which is relatively close in terms of space.
Gliese 581 c, however, has an interesting aspect that may pose a problem to colonizing it: it is tidally locked. When a planet is tidally locked, it means that it is in very much the same situation to its star as the moon is to Earth: one side is always facing towards the star and the other facing away. Gravity there is also 2.3 times stronger than on Earth, and one year equals 13 Earth days.
The main problem with this last method is travel: space is so big and our lives so short. We can always create a massive city-sized ship which holds all the necessities a colony will need when they arrive and hope that the original colonists' children or other descendants have retained some knowledge on how to go about living on the surface of the planet, and even that poses problems such as bone deterioration in space. However, space holds the most promise for humanity and we would be fools not to explore it.
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2 comments:
I think you give good options for some possible answers towards expanding the use of our already available resources. However, I still think that population control is key. I'm not sure how I feel about China's restricting the number of kids that you have; that has lead to several people aborting male babies due to the cultural want to have a son to carry on the family name and many other complicated issues. I do think that foundational knowledge is important, and I think that in order to provide this knowledge, which in turn can help people make better choices when it comes to choices for self (like sex, responsibility, life style choices, etc) it won't be so hard. I think education is the core of everything. We can do a lot of prevention with little education. I think that will help significantly. What do you think?
Good topic! Very thought provoking. Must get your brains from me eh? =0)
A. Krissy
Even with population restriction, eventually, we would need to go somewhere. If we were to use population restriction and research habitats for living underwater or in the sky, we would still not have to leave Earth for a maybe a millenium, if we are lucky. But the higher the population rises, the faster it grows. Eventually, population restriction would mean a certain amount of people would be forbidden by government by law tto have children, until only a small percentage of the world would have the right to have children. For example, lets say that out of the current population, half have a child each year. That would mean the population would rise by 1.625 billion in one year. Basing results off of this generation, in twenty years we would see a rise of 2 billion in one year. If the population continues to rise like so, we have no choice to move to other places. Not to mention that in a mere twenty years, we would have risen by 4 billion. And that is assuming that only half of the population have children. Clearly, this is shocking.
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