Of the many thoughts and quandaries that go through my mind, this is one that has recently reappeared. It is the thought of what the world would be like if all of the wars and genocides had not happened. I have thought about this for a long time, and in January I read a National Geographic article about the genocide in the world in the 1900's, and it really made me think.
The world today has a healthy population, several billion, and we still have room for growth, but too much growth and we are going to run out of resources, even more growth and land may start to become an issue. Right now, we have many millions of unused square miles of land, so it is not a limiting factor as of yet. Now think about how many more people would be living here is the wars and genocides had not taken place.
First the wars. By just looking at the conflicts during the last 100 years, American would be greatly different. Bring back all of the casualties from the 1st and 2nd World Wars, Vietman, Korea and Iraq, and there would be a substantial increase in popluation. Since this doesn't happened, it would be too much to say if there would be more unemployment, less health care, ect., but one thing is for certain, less land, and more resource use.
Now the genocides. Probably the most common one that comes to mind would be the halocaust. Over 11 million people were killed. Now put those people in Europe today, and you have a much larger population. Germany, Poland, and the other "jewish" countries would have have enormous amounts of people. The halocaust wasn't the only genocide though. In China under Mao's rule, 30 million people died. Trying to imagine what China would be like with this many more people is hard. They are already under a population strain as it is. If there were more, their energy, pollution, and employment situation would be a much larger difficulty to overcome. There are many more cases of genocide in other countries.
I am not saying that war and genocide are good things. I think that they are events that deprive people of living life and they take away people that could have contributed to the good of society. But when I think about the world with millions of more people, it makes me wonder if these atrocious events may have helped the world out. It is a tough concept and my feelings about this issue are not fully expressed here because I am not sure what I entirely think.
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My thoughts are that fear of population crises are overplayed. it's not difficult to do some information-gathering and calm your mind. for instance:
the world's population growth has been slowing according to this graph.
The number of children women have on average has halved since 1950, from 5 to 2.5 and is expected to decline further by about 20%, to about two children per woman. convenient, huh?
Food production per person has been increasing for decades.
An uncited sentence here tells me that the land required to support one person has decreased by a factor of over 43,000, from 160 acres to 15 square meters.
For these reasons, total world population is predicted to top out at around ten billion near the year 2100.
I'm pretty sure massive shocks to the population, like the ones you named, aren't necessary, or anywhere close to desirable.
nice entry, btw.
Michael Allen Yarbrough (PBUH)