(September 5, 2014 at 7:22 pm)Zack Wrote: There is the whole food and water problem for an ever increasing population.
Since the 1960s, due to tremendous advances in agricultural technology such as chemical fertilizers and agricultural infrastructure such as irrigation, gap between agricultural productivity growth rate and population growth rate has widened, not narrowed.
In other words, over the last 50 years, the more people there were in the world, the more each individual had to eat, not less.
Most population projection do not foresee ever increasing population. Instead the population will peak around 2040-2060 and then hold steady or decline. The progress in agricultural technology such as GM food does not seem to have slowed, nor has growth in agricultural productivity. So we might just dodge the food and water problem this time around, before it solves itself through population self-management.
