Fate of the Earth

It must be acknowledged that today we live in the world with a great degree of carelessness . Indeed , if economically well-off , we have access to virtually unlimited quality food supply , may find a clean place to live and may find a good place to enjoy nature , sometimes even almost unaltered by humans . If one lives in a developed country , he or she may firmly count , economical aspect aside , on a steady supply of such technological products as electrical energy or fuel . Unfortunately , I strongly suspect that the vast majority of people never , or

rarely at best , think deep enough to understand that this situation might not last forever . To make things even worse , most of us have already got accustomed to ecological alerts issued by activists from organizations like Greenpeace and lost attention to them . Maybe to a certain degree prophets of an upcoming ecological cataclysm are themselves to be blamed for being sometimes too pessimistic and inaccurate in predictions . But in general , there is little doubt that the modern trend of development by active consumption of natural resources and rapid population growth will rather soon lead if not to a much feared ecological cataclysm but at least to a need to drastically revise our approach to the world we live in

During a relatively recent period of time which our grandparents and parents witnessed , humanity achieved an unprecedented level of growth both in productivity of labor and in population . Not surprisingly , these two aspects are tightly interconnected and have always been mutually dependent . However , in the 20th century due to exponential population growth , initiated since the Industrial Revolution of the middle of 18th century , human beings achieved a point when we have turned into a visible factor of influence on the Earth . Indeed , population increase had been ever more rapid during the past century , with the time needed to double the population constantly shortening . It took approximately 80 years (1850 - 1930 ) to double the population from 1 billion to 2 billion , but then only approximately 45 years (1930 - 1975 ) to double it again to 4 billion . And there is a solid reason to believe that this trend will continue , with 8 billion reached sometime around 2010-2015 further reducing the doubling time . In general , this implies that the population is currently growing so quickly that it can double even twice in an average human lifetime ! Consider an example of a person born 75 years ago , like one of your grandparents , at the time when there were about 2 billion humans . Today there are more than 6 billion , an increase of 4 billion people . This is an enormous figure , but still , if compared with expectations based on existing exponential growth , this is nothing in contrast to the anticipated increase in number of people that will take place in the next 75 years , i .e . during the lifetime of our children . Under this scenario , which seemingly will linger at least for the near future , the Earth is expected to reach a population...