I am happy to report that the current human population is estimated to exceed 7.4 billion and growing. For my annual update to the Optihumanist Principles, I changed the last line of the "Life is limitless" section to the following:
We welcome the propagation of life throughout the Universe.
One of my favorite new YouTube channels,
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell, covers this topic in a recent episode, Overpopulation – The Human Explosion Explained, which concludes with the following:
More people is going to mean more people able to advance our species.
Kurzgesagt quotes a United Nations report as predicting that the human population will stabilize at less than twelve billion. For the following reasons, I predict that the population will someday exceed twelve trillion:
- As world-wide prosperity increases, industrialized nations will no longer be able to rely upon economic immigration to sustain population levels. To prevent decline, governments will adopt policies supporting families raising children.
- As medical technology advances, both life spans and fertility spans will increase. Living longer means that people will have more years to have more children.
- As the human race progresses, access to resources supporting population growth will increase. This means using advanced technology to do more with less here on Earth while simultaneously reaching out to the near-limitless resources off-world as we colonize space.
Posts
