What does a 2% percent population growth rate mean? It means that population would double every 35 years. So if you're 20 years old now, and there are 97 million Filipinos in the archipelago, by the time you reach the age of 50, there would be 190 million Filipinos. The photo bellow, by the way, is just an illustration on what exponential growth looks like in a time series line graph. It also gives us a sense of global context on population growth and how improved living conditions, industrialization, improved medical technology, has resulted to the sky rocketing of world population. There were only less than a billion people before the end of the 18th century but since then, our population grew by six times as much. And that's just in two centuries or less than one twentieth of the whole history of human civilization. Now can the planet sustain that growth? I don't know. The past seems distant, even if it's near and that the future seems assured, even if it isn't.
Data source: World Bank
1 comment:
And yet, countries like Sweden will implode if they continue to experience negative growth. Damned if you do. Damned if you don't. Managing population growth is a conundrum. Condoms in Catholic countries will help. Requiring everyone 60 and older to turn into Soylent Green is probably not viable. At a minimum, we should focus on better resource management, sustainable living, political stability, and education first. Community maturity and economic growth will naturally slow population increases, right? That's what we guess, anyway.
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