You take a piece of paper, it is .1 milimeters thick. You cut this paper in two and stack those two pieces on top of each other, your paper is now .2 milimeters thick. You split it and stack the halves and its .4 milimeters now;if you were to repeat this process a mere 100 times the thickness of the stack would be 1.33x10^12 light years.
This amazing fact simply demonstrates exponential, or geometric, growth. This style of growth is one that we all are very familiar with, whether it be from math class, the depreciation of your car’s value once you drive it off the car lot, or the trend that the population of the world follows. Everybody here should know that just recently, the good old human race finally passed the 7 billion person mark. Bells and whistles, everyone has put in their fair share and deserves their bottle of victory gin and pack of victory cigarettes right? Not necessarily, the Earth isn’t suited to accommodate this many resource hungry individuals.The time has come where every single person needs to put effort into conserving more, wasting less, and maintaining an Earth worthy of bequeathing onto many generations to come.
Our population has, for so long, been depicted on that graph with the backwards “L” shape on it. “We start HERE *finger pointing*, at some date thousands of years ago, it doesn't matter how many thousands, this number is around 10 to 100 million. We move over, and over, and over, until we hit a little less then one million people in the late 1800’s then BAM the line goes vertical. Up, and up, and up, we are at the year 2000 and what do you know, we are rocking a solid 4 billion people; we go up and up and up and we find ourselves in September of 2012 and the 7 billionth child is born, her name is Danica May Camacho and she lives in Manila. We reach out into the future and in 2050, we will have a population just over 9 billion people, which is the predicted terminal point of the human race.
Our population is growing, SO WHAT? Well, homo sapiens (sensible humans) have managed to manipulate the environment to support more then the 10 million hunter gathering humans that populated the Earth more then 10 thousand years ago. But how long can we really manage to feed this massive, and growing, population? We really haven't been able to for a while now, thousands of people a day die from starvation, yet America gets to flout the title of ‘country with the highest obesity rate’. Joel Cohen, a population biologist at Rockefeller University, states that it takes 2.1 hectares of land to provide for the average human; on the other hand, it takes nearly 10 hectares of land to feed an American. If the American standard was adopted by every human being, we would need 4 earths just to keep everybody fed. So as our population is shooting up the side of that population graph we need to consciously reduce the amount of food we take in; along with the amount of everything else we use in excess.
For so long, we have been able to maintain, and thrive because of exaggerated agricultural practices and artificial energy. When these practices were started, nobody really could see how much damage it would actually do to the world; everyone was just thinking a short term scale. For the longest time, humans have lessened the quality and length of life of animals to increase ours. We have also dug, blasted, pumped, and fracked our way into a huge environmental issue, pollution; but more specifically, and controversially global warming. This is a problem that will just become more pressing and less easily ignored with more people driving and more cows farting.
This problem is one that we can not simply fix. One of mankind’s greatest achievements, is the exact same thing that started the vertical bump on the population chart. Focus on the science of medicine and ultimately away from religion, greatly increased the human life expectancy and made even an honorable death much less inviting. Our greatest achievement is ultimately going to kill us off.
So we, as Americans, need to start a trend that will elongate the livability of Earth. As it is plausible that we can start shipping people off to the moon to live, it is not something that we should depend on, because how many people can we pump to the moon from a population that is growing by thousands of people a day? We are part of a species that has lived its entire existence by making everything else adapt to us, it is about our time to be the ones to harmonize with the environment.
This amazing fact simply demonstrates exponential, or geometric, growth. This style of growth is one that we all are very familiar with, whether it be from math class, the depreciation of your car’s value once you drive it off the car lot, or the trend that the population of the world follows. Everybody here should know that just recently, the good old human race finally passed the 7 billion person mark. Bells and whistles, everyone has put in their fair share and deserves their bottle of victory gin and pack of victory cigarettes right? Not necessarily, the Earth isn’t suited to accommodate this many resource hungry individuals.The time has come where every single person needs to put effort into conserving more, wasting less, and maintaining an Earth worthy of bequeathing onto many generations to come.
Our population has, for so long, been depicted on that graph with the backwards “L” shape on it. “We start HERE *finger pointing*, at some date thousands of years ago, it doesn't matter how many thousands, this number is around 10 to 100 million. We move over, and over, and over, until we hit a little less then one million people in the late 1800’s then BAM the line goes vertical. Up, and up, and up, we are at the year 2000 and what do you know, we are rocking a solid 4 billion people; we go up and up and up and we find ourselves in September of 2012 and the 7 billionth child is born, her name is Danica May Camacho and she lives in Manila. We reach out into the future and in 2050, we will have a population just over 9 billion people, which is the predicted terminal point of the human race.
Our population is growing, SO WHAT? Well, homo sapiens (sensible humans) have managed to manipulate the environment to support more then the 10 million hunter gathering humans that populated the Earth more then 10 thousand years ago. But how long can we really manage to feed this massive, and growing, population? We really haven't been able to for a while now, thousands of people a day die from starvation, yet America gets to flout the title of ‘country with the highest obesity rate’. Joel Cohen, a population biologist at Rockefeller University, states that it takes 2.1 hectares of land to provide for the average human; on the other hand, it takes nearly 10 hectares of land to feed an American. If the American standard was adopted by every human being, we would need 4 earths just to keep everybody fed. So as our population is shooting up the side of that population graph we need to consciously reduce the amount of food we take in; along with the amount of everything else we use in excess.
For so long, we have been able to maintain, and thrive because of exaggerated agricultural practices and artificial energy. When these practices were started, nobody really could see how much damage it would actually do to the world; everyone was just thinking a short term scale. For the longest time, humans have lessened the quality and length of life of animals to increase ours. We have also dug, blasted, pumped, and fracked our way into a huge environmental issue, pollution; but more specifically, and controversially global warming. This is a problem that will just become more pressing and less easily ignored with more people driving and more cows farting.
This problem is one that we can not simply fix. One of mankind’s greatest achievements, is the exact same thing that started the vertical bump on the population chart. Focus on the science of medicine and ultimately away from religion, greatly increased the human life expectancy and made even an honorable death much less inviting. Our greatest achievement is ultimately going to kill us off.
So we, as Americans, need to start a trend that will elongate the livability of Earth. As it is plausible that we can start shipping people off to the moon to live, it is not something that we should depend on, because how many people can we pump to the moon from a population that is growing by thousands of people a day? We are part of a species that has lived its entire existence by making everything else adapt to us, it is about our time to be the ones to harmonize with the environment.
Attenborough, David. How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth. Dir. Olly Bootle. Documentary
Johnson, Boris. "Global Over-population Is the Real Issue." The Telegraph 25 Oct. 2011, Final ed.
Print.
Hopkins, James. "Overpopulation: The Human Population Crisis." Web log post.Cosmosmith Creations - Awesome T-Shirts with Free Shipping! Cosmosmith, 10 Feb. 2012. Web. 11 Dec. 2011. <http://www.cosmosmith.com/human_population_crisis.htm>.
Johnson, Boris. "Global Over-population Is the Real Issue." The Telegraph 25 Oct. 2011, Final ed.
Print.
Hopkins, James. "Overpopulation: The Human Population Crisis." Web log post.Cosmosmith Creations - Awesome T-Shirts with Free Shipping! Cosmosmith, 10 Feb. 2012. Web. 11 Dec. 2011. <http://www.cosmosmith.com/human_population_crisis.htm>.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.