Archaeologists have determined that homo-sapiens appeared first in the southern part of the African continent about 160,000 years ago, and after 100,000 years of perilous migration, our ancestors reached Europe 60,000 years ago. After another 50,000 years had passed, agriculture began. That was just 10,000 years ago, following the final collapse of the last ice age, and Earth now appears to be in the early stages of the 5th (current) warming phase indicated in the Vostok ice core, which, like the previous four, could span thirty thousand years, with many fluctuations. Those are very long times in terms of a personal life span but they're mere blips in the life of the planet.              About 58,000 years after humans appeared              in Europe, while North America was busy with              the war of 1812-14, the world's population              had grown to One Billion People. That’s Billion, with a ‘B’, a large number of people indeed. But it was a long, slow climb from a perilous beginning, for those 58,000 years, before the Earth’s population reached that One Billion level.              A mere 120 years later… in 1930, while we              were wrestling with the great depression,              the number of people in the world had              doubled to Two Billion In the years that followed, millions of people were slaughtered in the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and other armed conflicts, but the number of people in the world continued to mushroom.              In 1975, a scant 45 years after reaching the              two billion mark in 1930, the population had              again doubled... to Four Billion, and a mere              24 years later, in 1999, while we were focused              on Y2K, the new millennium, the population              had increased by 50% to Six Billion. That was 58,000 years for the First Billion; 120 years for the second billion; 45 years for the next two billion and just 24 years for two billion more, increasing the population to Six Billion People. In 2010, it reached Seven and a Half Billion. and less than twenty years from now, when babies born this year will be young adults the world will be inhabited by Nine Billion People. When our children are middle-aged in 2050, the population of their world will be about Ten Billion Meanwhile, billions of people, especially in under-developed countries, unwittingly follow the command that God is said to have given to Noah and his sons, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth" (Genesis 9: verse 1:) That command may have been relevant in Noah’s time, but its need is long past. Human beings, like rabbits, have demonstrated a devastating propensity to multiply exponentially without being ordered to do so.              But it's not just People. The problem is              compounded by our insatiable consumption              and our transportation toys that swell along              with our numbers. In 1910 there were about 8000 Cars in the world. By 1967 that number had swollen to more than 200 Million Cars and Trucks. In 2007 it jumped to 600 Million and is predicted to double to 1.2 Billion Cars and Trucks By 2030 In 1960 there were 76,500 Aircraft in the USA. By the year 2000, that had grown by a multiple of 3 to 220,000 Aircraft in the USA alone              By 2025 We can look forward to a population of              Nine Billion People;  more than One Billion Cars              and Trucks, and more than A Quarter of a Million              Aircraft in the world. By our unbridled proliferation, our voracious appetites and our unbounded exploitation of knowledge and technology, we are on an inexorable march to make the Earth unfit for human habitation. We eat everything we can devour, far beyond our needs. We gnaw away at the Earth, extracting its minerals, and leave behind a trail of waste. We tear down the forests and reshape the wood for shelter, leaving barren land behind. We suck oil and gas out of the Earth’s innards, burn it, and mindlessly pump the residue into our air and water. And as we increase in number, the tempo of this ravenous excess likewise increases.              Like worms in an apple, we are destroying              the host that supports us, yet many among              us focus myopically on CO² as the villain,              and turn a blind eye to the root cause of the              coming disaster;   the swelling population. Meanwhile, growth, globalization and productivity are universal mantras in business and industry. As technology advances, more and more stuff is being produced by fewer and fewer people. Tens of thousands of employable people are idled almost daily and replaced by robots and computers. It’s conceivable that in time, those who make computers and robots will be the only people gainfully employed. Poverty, idleness and frustration will afflict most others. Along the way, as our numbers swell and the competition for food and living space becomes more intense, we’ll inevitably stumble into an ever-increasing succession of racial, religious and inter-continental wars. We’ll fight to survive by killing each other, even as we continue to reproduce.               "If we don't halt population growth with               justice and compassion, it will be done for               us by nature, brutally and without pity; and               will leave a ravaged world."                                    Nobel Laureate, Dr. Henry Kendall How long can the Earth sustain this madness? Already, in a churn of emigration and immigration, people are scurrying from country to country to find living space (never mind parking space for their cars) yet the next doubling of the population will occur within the lifetime of our children. In the face of that mushrooming mass of people, changing light bulbs to save energy is either the trivial product of small minds, or ludicrous political posturing, or both. Of course, our planet will not become a barren wasteland in the next thousand years, with or without global warming; for in the time frame of the solar system, a thousand years is like a flea bite on an elephant’s rump.              But as sure as night follows day, when the              Earth can no longer support its swollen load              of human flesh, our race will expire and the              planet will continue without us,   perhaps for              millions of years on the long journey to its              ultimate end.. Panic mongers who threaten us with a seven metre surge in sea level and searing temperatures thousands of years in the future, seemingly fail to realize that the population explosion will render their predictions irrelevant. The human race will almost certainly succumb to extinction long before the passing of those many thousands of years, so no one will be here to know or care. If benign acceptance of unbridled population growth persists, it can only reinforce the unpleasant truth that the world’s future faces less risk from CO² or from nuclear energy that we fear, than it does from sexual energy that we cherish, and that men take pills to prolong.              If we stay on our present course and              continue to do what comes naturally, we              will simply fuck ourselves into oblivion and              the Earth will spin on merrily without us. Certainly, we must give thought to the threat from increasing CO² and other Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere, but we face terminal peril if we ignore the greater threat posed by the sheer weight of numbers in our burgeoning population; or if we lack the political and collective will to do something about it. The Earth can support only a finite number of people, so if we allow the population explosion to continue unchecked, over-population will ultimately write finis to the human race.