World population reaches 7 billion

Halloween came yesterday with news that was, in many ways, pretty scary.

On Monday, the United Nations marked the world population at 7 billion people.

In reality, neither the U.N. nor anyone else for that matter, knows exactly what the world’s population is. Babies are born and people die, and there’s no way to accurately calculate how many people are living at the same time.

The world could have had 7 billion people back in May, or that threshold might not be reached until next April. But based on available data, the U.N. guessed that person No. 7 billion was probably born sometime Monday.

How big is that number? Well, let’s put it like this: Every day, McDonald’s restaurants serve 27 million customers. If every person on Earth got in a McDonald’s drive-through today, it would take about 260 days before everyone was served.

The scary part of this is whether the planet can continue supporting an ever-increasing number of people, a number that is rising sharply. Estimates are that 7 billion will increase to 8 billion in about 14 years and to 10 billion by 2083. That’s incredible when you consider the world population only reached 1 billion in 1804, took 123 years to hit 2 billion and another 32 to mark 3 billion. Thirteen years ago, the population was estimated at 6 billion.

In a world where there is already a stark contrast between those who have resources and those who don’t, the dividing line will only get bigger as time — and the birthrate — go on. Improvements in agriculture and transportation have kept many of the problems at bay, but it’s hard to believe that technological advancements in farming will enable food production to keep pace.

As those years pass, what happens in one country could have serious worldwide impact. This is particularly true in China, which, for three decades, has had a strict one-child-per-couple policy for urban residents and two-per-couple for most rural citizens.

At 1.34 billion people, China is the world’s most populous nation, a title it is expected to cede to India sometime around 2030. Population experts say that at some point in the near future, China won’t have enough young adults working to support its enormous elderly population. Now, China is a driving force in the world economy, but the natural conflict and friction that a situation like that can have on a nation is something that could easily spill over and wreck the world economy even more than the recent recession.

Already there is some talk that a global one-child-per-couple policy should be adopted to head off a disastrous future in which there are acute fuel, food and clean water shortages. That is an approach that won’t work. First, most sovereign nations would reject such a notion. Second, while the policy has kept China’s population growth lower than what it would have been, the results have been aborted pregnancies based on the fetus being female.

Education about reproduction is the best approach, along with ensuring that people throughout the world have access to means of effective birth control. People have to understand how decisions made today can negatively impact their children and other descendants.

Otherwise, our children’s children and their children may well find the world to be a crowded, hungry place.

— The Albany Herald Editorial Board