World population growth is an outcome of two factors: increasing births and decreasing rates of mortality: lower rates of mortality mean more people live longer, or in other words, the number of people dying slows down. We're getting close to 'peak child', but we've got a long way to go before we reach 'peak old'.

http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/pdf/mortality/World-Mortality-2017-Data-Booklet.pdf

But remember that French woman who lived to be 120 ? She died around thirty years ago. Nobody else has reached 120. So that may be about the limit of ageing. So, sooner or later, and maybe at a lot less than 120, we will reach 'peak old' for the general population, which may fix, more or less, well below 100. If birth numbers have declined by then, as is likely, then the world's population will gradually decline.

Probably from now on, population growth will be less a matter of births than of increasing life expectancy, since we've almost reached 'peak child'. Japanese women already have a life expectancy of around 86 (partly because infant mortality in Japan is so low, medical services are so efficient and comparatively few people die from accidents or diseases before they reach 86). If a Japanese woman reaches 86, she still has maybe ten more years on average. If she reaches 96, she'll probably reach 100.

Yes, we're a long way from that around the world but it's coming: population 'growth' because of fewer deaths, and longer life expectancy - until the general limits of life expectancy are reached. Then the population will start to slowly decline.

'Over-population' is a bit of a myth: countries have enough slack to increase food production, improve food production technology. African countries have enormous potential in this sense. As for some stipulation that countries are defined as 'over-populated' if they can't produce all their own food - there goes most of Europe. After all, many countries, including Australia, produce far more food than they usually consume, and export the rest. That's standard comparative advantage, according to Adam Smith: you produce and export what you can produce best in exchange.

Sleep soundly.

Joe

Read all three links, one struck me, that 7 point something billion
Have been thinking we passed 8 got that wrong
Not able to change my opinion, will say that never existed mother nature may have a say
It seems to be a natural thing that intrudes on every thing maybe its in our DNA
Swine flue, tell us it has wiped out 25 percent of pigs?
If it or some thing like it[Swine Fever can not harm humans]we could see very real drop
But surely we could lift the standard of living for billions if we controlled population

The philosopher John Rawls implies
when considering the world's worst off, there by
the grace of God or, if a non-believer,
by chance, go we.

We could be the lucky children who have never been
at school but find ourselves working in a Third World
sweat-shop, six days a week, sending most of our wages
back to our parents and our eight siblings who live in
rural poverty, while we live in a slum. breathe particulate-
dense air, and are continually on guard against the
crippling diseases that lurk within our drinking water.

We are lucky ones because at least we'll have life-
sustaining meagre rations and a neighbourhood health-clinic
when the inevitable sickness occurs. Those back in the
distant village will scratch and scrape for food and rely
on witchcraft when illness arrives.

Notwithstanding all the great science, with all those great
inventions mentioned in earlier posts, only a minority of our
fellow humans are benefiting. Yet we have to be optimistic.

If we, the middle class, can have the life-saving and life-
rewarding tools of modernity, so can everyone. As long as there
are not too many of us. This is a fundamental caveat. The planet
we have come to inhabit is very small.

The experts who measure human demands on the planet suggest -
if by some miracle of economics - everyone living today
was top have a middle-class lifestyle, we would need
immediately two or three more planet earths.

Humans as stated earlier, do have the intelligence, the
tools and the natural resources to provide for a good,
sustainable life as long as there are not so many humans
that we exceed the globe's carrying capacity.

All the evidence suggests that we must
turn around population growth and aim
for a much smaller population than we have
today.

Earth is our home and we must find a way to live on it
sustainably. It seems clear that we must
scale back our consumption, in particular
a transition to a lower carbon
lifestyle.

The world has enough for everyone's need - but not enough
for everyone's greed.

'The world has enough for everyone's need - but not enough
for everyone's greed.'

We can certainly agree with that Foxy. That is why socialism always leads to poverty for the masses.

Dear Foxy,

The sustainable carrying capacity of the planet for its human population is 5.6 billion and this was reached in 1985.

The capitalism of the modern industrial error is part of the problem and socialism is the only chance most of the world's population is going to have of getting an equitable share of the world's resources. Those who don't want to see socialism introduced to manage the environment upon which we all depend for our sustenance and lifestyles are driven to do so by greed.

Dear Runner,

'The world has enough for everyone's need - but not enough for everyone's greed.'

Greed is not necessarily bad. It is bad when one is greedy for the temporal, but not when one is thirsty for God.

I am disappointed to see that practically everyone here is talking about the shortage or otherwise of temporal resources. I personally think that temporal resources can be stretched even further, if that is what would give us true happiness - but of course it won't!

What we ought to be concerned about instead, is that survival under overpopulation requires more and more control, regimentation and the stifling of unique individual expressions, including religious expression. We already see this in China and it looks like religion is becoming for most of us a luxury that is increasingly difficult to afford.

For example, food and medicine will still be there for the foreseeable future, but if your religion restricts your diet or calls for alternative medicine/healing, this doesn't fit well with mass-production and so becomes increasingly expensive and unaffordable, if not outright prohibited. Drinking water will still be there, but if you want to avoid drinking fluoride with your water (and worse things in the future, such as compulsory health-monitoring micro-robots), you now need to be rich.

One aspect of regimentation is the proliferation of digital devices and temptations - this allows big-business and government to streamline an ever larger society, but the cost is slavery to those gadgets, including their acquisition, study and protection, and so people find it much harder to find time for church or any other spiritual activity. Actually, try even to find a space for a church when all space is taken and everyone is forced to live in hive-like flats and when robots automatically report to the authorities when "too many" people convene in one.

If you want to fit more sardines in a box, you must align them with all the heads in one direction, the tails in the opposite, you cannot allow them to lie sidewards or diagonally!