As noted in an earlier blog, through the years, our population has continued to grow.
The following is a glimpse at how our population has risen and will continue to rise.
Year Population
1 AD 200 million
1000 275 million
1500 450 million
1650 500 million
1750 750 million
1804 1 billion
1900 1.6 billion
1927 2 billion
1960 3 billion
1975 4 billion
1987 5 billion
1999 6 billion
2011 7 billion
2030 8.5 billion (United Nations’ projection)
2050 9.7 billion (United Nations’ projection)
2100 11.2 billion (United Nations’ projection)
It took from the very beginning of the evolution of our species, homo sapiens, about 300,000 years ago, to the year 1900 for us to reach a population of 1.6 billion.
Then something extraordinary happened.
It’s something that will likely never again occur on this planet.
From the year 1900 to 1960, our population jumped from 1.6 billion people to 3 billion.
In sixty years, we nearly doubled the population that it took all of evolution to produce.
Then, in the next thirty-nine years our population doubled, we added an astonishing 3 billion people to reach a population of 6 billion in 1999.
In other words, in 39 years, 1960 to1999, we added as many people, 3 billion, as it took for our entire previous existence, approximately 300,000 years, to accumulate.
United Nations’ population projections are that we will reach 8.5 billion in 2030.
It is estimated that in 2050 our population will be 9.7 billion.
The latest United Nations’ projections are that world population will nearly stabilize at just above 11 billion persons after 2100.
At our current rate of growth, we add about 80 million people a year — more than a million and a half a week — to our global population.
With so many people, and the addition of in excess of 1,500,000 more every week, on a tiny planet with a fragile ecosystem, we can no longer continue to exploit each other, deplete our resources, and destroy the web of life, i.e., our biosphere (the sum of all ecosystems).
Our social and political attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs must advance to a higher level.
That’s not easy.
If we take a survey of the social and political attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs, of a representative sample of our population, do a statistical distribution with our data and plot the results on a graph, we typically come up with a classic bell-shaped curve also known as a normal distribution.
The area at the top in the center of the curve is known as the normal range of behavior, average behavior.
It is here where we find common ground and agreement.
People generally get along with each other.
Off to the right and left of the curve are standard deviations from “normal” behavior.
The further down the curve to both the left and right the deviation from normal becomes more extreme.
What does all of this mean?
It means that whatever the issue may be, the people on one side of the curve will have very different views than those on the opposite side.
This results in opposition, conflict, and strife, up to and including wars, all of which are common in our world.
This very normal and predictable bell-shaped curve, a snapshot of humanity, is a remarkable phenomenon:
It represents one of the greatest challenges in life: how to bridge our differences which are the products of evolution.
This very predictable pattern contributes to and practically guarantees life’s multiple interpersonal problems, challenges, unpredictability, instability, and uncertainty.
We make it worse politically when we tamper with this normal distribution.
We do that by a process known as gerrymandering, rigging and radicalizing voting districts, that attempts to establish a political advantage for a particular party.
Gerrymandering guarantees that there will not be a normal distribution that results in normal constructive opposition.
Instead, we end up with hyperpolarization that radicalizes opposition political parties rendering them unable to work together for the common good.
Further contributing to life’s unpredictability, instability, and uncertainty is the fickleness of nature.
Natural disasters include earthquakes, hurricanes (also known as typhoons and cyclones), volcanoes, tornadoes, tsunamis, forest fires, floods, droughts, and other severe weather phenomena.
Also contributing to life’s unpredictability, instability, and uncertainty are a vast number of illnesses that we contract and from which we suffer, and an extraordinary array of accidents and injuries that occur regularly.
On top of it all, we have all kinds of criminal activity that goes on every day, everywhere, in every way imaginable.
If all of the above is not way more than enough to deal with – which it most certainly is – in addition to it all, because we have so many people and are a young species that has been largely ignorant of the physical reality and the behavioral demands of the reality in which we live, and which enables us to exist, we have created an interrelated web of life-threatening environmental problems:
- We are depleting our resources: forests, fisheries, range lands, croplands, and plant and animal species.
- We are destroying the biological diversity on which evolution thrives.
This is called the sixth great wave of extinction in the history of life on earth, different from the others in that it is caused not by an external event like an asteroid impact or climate change but by us, humanity.
Climate change, incidentally, caused four of the five great extinctions.
- With powerful electrical and diesel pumping techniques, we are draining our aquifers and lowering our water tables.
- We are systemically polluting our air, water, and soil, and consequently our food chain. We now have microplastic contaminants in our food and water. This is as result of dumping about fourteen million tons of plastic garbage into our oceans annually.
- We are depleting the stratospheric ozone that shields us from harmful ultraviolet radiation.
- And, we are experiencing symptoms of global warming and climate change such as heat waves, devastating droughts, destruction of croplands, dying forests, accelerated species extinction, dying coral reefs, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, more frequent and intense storms, coastal flooding, more rapid spread of diseases, poisoned oceans (acidification), famine and starvation, human migration, heat deaths, economic collapse, and social conflict and potential wars. And more.
All of this, and more, is attributable to the warming of our planet and resultant climate change, the existence of which many people are in denial.
Even more people are in denial that we are the cause of global warming with the greenhouse gases, like methane and carbon dioxide – from the burning of fossil fuels coal, oil, and gas – that we send into our atmosphere.
The burning of fossil fuels, incidentally, means the burning of the remains of dead plants and animals.
How much carbon dioxide do we send into the atmosphere?
We send 2.6 million pounds of carbon dioxide every second! And the amount is still rising.
This thing we call life, perilous and far from certain, is a fragile phenomenon.
It is up and down like a seesaw on which we are sitting.
In our theatres, where we have for thousands of years told the stories of our lives, we have for symbols the classic masks of comedy and tragedy to represent joy and sorrow.
Life has always been this way.
To explain life, we have turned to two disciplines that are opposed diametrically, science and religion.
