No Opin, energy is the enabler of everything.
It does not matter what area you consider without cheap energy
nothing happens.
Progress from pre Roman times to the 16th century was in slow stages
just relying on slaves and animal power.
Then it just suddenly took off over 100 years from mid 17th century.
Steam was king, Britain suddenly became the world number one power
and slavery became too expensive.
Travel times reduced dramatically.
Railways demanded faster communications and here we are today, keyboard warriors !

Dear Bazz,

Wrong answer! Put your interchangeable BAZZ / DUNCE hat on and go and sit at the back of the room with Hasbeen, ttbn, Loudmouth, individual and mhaze. If you all promise to stay quiet I'll let you play Swap The Dunce Hat with each other.

Before some of us wet ourselves about massively rapid population growth, let's face the statistical realities that:

* . world population growth is slowing down, and will stabilise by around 2100, and then decline.

* . that population in many developed countries is either stable or gradually declining already (as ours would be without immigration), and

* . that the more technologically developed a country may be, the more able it is to handle higher populations. After all, there are no African countries with the population density of, say, the Netherlands.

Frankly, I suspect a certain amount of racism in this 'debate', that the countries which some of you here are getting hysterical about tend to be non-white, and that some 'remedies' which some of you would dearly love to promote involve the sterilisation or extermination of non-white populations in order to - what ? Save the rest of us more civilized and deserving folk ?

Contemptible.

Joe

promote the sterilisation or extermination of non-white populations in order to - what ?
Loudmouth,
I have always advocated birth control for families of more than 3 children in order to eliminate so much human suffering AND to reduce pollution. How do you manage to get Race in to this ?

World over populated?

Can that be turned around. Yes

I have said this before on many occasions and there is a need to say once again. The answer lies in two countries. Thailand and Iran.

If you google 'family planning' in either country you will see that both countries reduced the birth rate for women from 6 per woman down to about 2 per woman, simply by education on contraception and the government supplying the means.

So government sponsored family planning does work to reduce birth rates, it has been tried and tested and is what the UN should be concentrating on, especially in countries that are often subject to famine.

It is up to people, like on this forum, to spread the word that will put pressure on governments and the UN to act.

I invite all readers to google 'family planning' in either Thailand or Iran and read how they did it. Do not just sit there and wring your hands and say we cannot stop the world from over populating.

If Iran and Thailand can do it, so can all countries that try.

Henry,

Not just family planning, but huge efforts (now in decline in Iran) to educate women. Everywhere, the more education that women seize, the later they marry, the fewer kids they have, and (hopefully) the more power they have over their lives, even in patriarchal societies.

Even in Iran, with the ayatollahs trying to discourage women from getting out from under the patriarchy, women are not likely to turn back to having less education and more babies.

And in China, even with the reversal of the idiotic one-child policy, after more than a generation of it, young adults - themselves products of that policy - are not having any more kids just because the policy has been relaxed. My bet is that, in the next generations in China, people will have either no kids or only one, and rarely any more - and that China's population will stabilise by mid-century and start to decline. In fact, it will be kept high for a time only because people will be living longer.

The lessons seem to be that, once women have more equality in their choices, once they have access to higher education, they will be slightly less likely to marry, and they will either have no kids or far fewer than their mothers and grandmothers did. And that once a society condones no-kids, or one-kid, or very-few-kids, there is no return.

Joe