Thinking About Population
On 31st October 2011, according to the UN, the world’s population reached 7 billion. They may be wrong. These things are hard to estimate. But, if they are, it is only by a year or two. Most of those people have arrived since I was born. The BBC has a cute calculator that shows the population (approximately) on your birth date. For me, it was less than 3 billion. There are many scary statistics about population. For example, it should only be about 14 years before we reach 8 billion. The population of Australia – which I came to 16 years ago – has increased by 15% since I got here. And so on.
Population is a terrific bogeyman in sci-fi. Asimov did it best – remember Terminus? the Caves of Steel? Like Thomas Malthus, sci-fi writers have long made us shudder at the prospect of unchecked population growth. The Sixties and Seventies saw a big revival of these ideas (which were 150 years old at the time!) and the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth (1972) pretty much set the agenda for every doomsayer of the past 40 years. Basically, we’ve known forever that capitalism is unsustainable. And yet, the miracle of prosperity and (some say) education appears to be saving us from our own laissez faire philosophy. Even despite increasing longevity, countries that do well have birth rates significantly below “replacement level” – that is, more people die than are being born. The population in these First World countries is falling, and, naturally, ageing, on average. As a baby boomer myself (O blessed generation) I can’t help but feel privileged to be in the last great demographic bulge before the Apocalypse comes.
In my own near-future sci-fi, my protagonists live in a world of flooded coastal cities, and Siberia is the bread basket of Europe. Climate change is such a depressing bogeyman. Resource wars, famine, plagues, refugees, and wild, wild weather are real downers, while overpopulation was at least packed with conflict and characters and waycool tech for continent-spanning arcologies. (Yes, I know the Great God Hamilton has domed cities and all, but most futurists are far less intelligent about it.) In my worlds Bahrain is a blasted desert and the oil is long gone, but the capital Manama is the thriving home of the Two Seas Spacebridge. There can be sparkling technological beauty in any future we throw at ourselves.
The world’s population may well carry on its exponential growth – in which case, the only hope for our survival as a species is to move into space and take our growth elsewhere. If it keeps growing at the present rate, Earth’s population will be 16 billion by 2100. Of course, most people hope this won’t happen. they hope that countries like China will become prosperous (and, possibly, educated) and its 1.5 billion people will stop having kids. If this kind of thing happens, Earth’s population might level off at about 10 billion. That’s a 40% increase, of course. Just imagine the traffic jams! (Let alone the resource wars, famines, plagues, refugees, and coast-to-coast arcologies.)
Of course, by 2100 there will be no oil left and, probably, no coal. The global temperature will be at the very least 4 degrees higher (maybe 6), sea levels will be up by at least a metre (maybe 4 metres), and the world’s deserts will have spread by 50%. (The world’s rain forests will all have been cut down by then, there will be no other primates but ourselves, and geopolitics as we now know it will be a distant memory.) It’s no wonder, really, that sci-fi is so gloomy these days. Anybody who thinks seriously about the future is doomed to a life of misery and depression.
The one tiny thread of hope is that we get off this goddamned rock and learn how to thrive in space. Gerard O’Neill had it right. It is the only hope for us. And it’s not so hard to imagine. We could do it. But we need to do it soon, before the shit we’re stirring up down here completely overwhelms us.
