My thermo professor had a discussion on this one time, was a tangent related to his discussion on the worlds consumption of power. He said that a couple of his research friends (agricultural researcher and something else) one time did a study on how many people the world could sustain with the natural resources our planet has. This meaning no genetic modification of plants, steroids in cattle, etc to keep up with our population's needs. He said the planet on it's own would hold 4 billion people, i believe the world is already into the 6 billions........

Milt, what if you knew a giant astroid was headed for the earth (again)? ...would this question of population be a concern? How 'bout if you knew the magnetic field would drop, during a pole-flip (again), causing massively high cancer rates of the population? Would you want the human race to have a high or low statistical change of surviving?

People should have as many children as they want, assuming they can afford it.

The population of the planet is projected to peak in mid-century, then decline.

depends on how much welfare you want to collect

They should wait until their Middle Years and then have 2.7:D

No, they should wait a bit longer and have 3.2 (but make sure they're skinny to save weight) :)

I have a couple if anybody is looking for some.

In China for many years they have had a One child policy. That policy has had many repercussions not simply a reduction in the growth of their population.

Due to their culture and the fact that children support their parents in their later years where before the policy you had a group of children supporting the parents now you have one child supporting four parents (his and his wife's typically).

It doesn't end there, with advances in medicine, life expectancy is longer. So, now that single child is also supporting 8 grand parents. Consequently, now China has started giving subsidies to families who followed the one child rule.

This is not even going into the fact that if you limit the number of children people have by and large they will want boys to carry on their name so, the girls get aborted. You also end up with an unbalanced ratio of men to women.

Again this has happened in China and now they subsidize the births of girls.

I think it is ill advised to attempt to control population through a 'population control measure' like limits and such. Part of the problem and part of the solution is Education. Educated people by and large have fewer children (an observation of my own), so it stands to reason (possibly) that if we focus on the general education of the populace they will have fewer children. The reasoning behind this is that educated people want tend to build families later in life with SOME planning where as your uneducated (Read hillbillies) knock boots early in life and start multiplying in litters. The propensity of this is well documented and easily understood. Look back a few generations when farming was much less automated and farmers had many children to help them with their farming.

If we educated the people they will want a more materialistic lifestyle thus they will put off having children and have fewer of them.

It sounds worse than it is I think, I am an example of this. I am moderately educated (BS degree) and I waited until later in my youth (early 30s) to have children.

The other side of the coin is that we need smarter people to have MORE children and dumber people (read hillbillies) to have fewer. We have plenty of dumb people (quota met).

Just my $1.50's worth...

China had a pretty good reason for their one child policy. I don't think many, if any, of us here can imagine what it's like to live in a place that has lost tens of millions to famine in a few years. You know famine plays a big part in your history when you say hello by saying "Have you eaten yet?" ("Ni chi le ma?" in Mandarin). But yes, their one child policy has been enforced sort of like our 55 mph speed limit - very selectively. They have way, way too many boys and I fear what such a huge number of men who can't find wives will be capable of doing. But they also have less arable land than the US, most of which is a big earthquake zone, have unimagineable floods and monsoon and still have close to 5x our population to feed. So it's not exactly apples to apples there.

We are all on the same planet and eventually we will all face the same population concerns.

BBA MBA 3KID

Be fruitful and multiply!

More well adjusted people should have children even if only to combat the hordes of morons and imbeciles that seemingly can't help but do so.

BS, MBA, 3 Kids

Trying for two, but hit the double on the last one. I didn't have any kids until after 40.

that works until you get a dumbass for a president who leaves the door open for i don't recall how many million illegals.

Yeah, Bush was the first one to ignore this problem, eh?

mikester your comments on China are fascinating. i've always been very vocal about how irresponsible it is for people to birth entire baseball teams but never gave too much consideration to the consequences of legislating such things.

Absolutely not. Sorry to have implied that it was the case.

That Reagan guy kinda set the tone i guess huh?

I saw a documentary about China a few months back. They said that if China had not implemented the one child per family policy when they did (late ‘70’s, I think), there would be 800 million more Chinese mouths to feed today.

Don't get me wrong, I didn't say they shouldn't have done it. In fact I tried to imply no judgment at all. My intent was for us to learn from their experience.

Jeff,too bad your parents ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY wanted you. :rolleyes:

No joy in your world is there?