That's a lot of people

This is not a article I would usually write, but I stumbled across a website today that had some pretty sobering statistics.  According to this site, I was the 2,909,470,267th person alive when I was born and the 76,444,994,032nd person to have lived since history began.  In my mind, those are staggering numbers.  Think of all the people that have ever been on this earth and 1 in 15 are alive right now.  Between the time I was born and my daughter, my first born, was born, 3.7 trillion people were born, including my three sisters and my wife.

Since I was born the population of the planet has more than doubled with the population surpassing 7 billion people in October 2011.  If that trend continues, the population of the earth will pass 8 billion in the year 2025 and it could conceivably triple since I was born by the year 2043. With good health, I think I have a reasonable chance of still being alive then and 9 billion people on the planet sounds like just an enormous amount of people. 

With the strain from this many people, resources, such as food, water and fuel will become increasingly scarce.  Based on the consumption of resources and the population increased, sometime during the 2030s, the UN estimates that we will need the equivalent of two earths in order to support all of the people in it.  Of course a lot can change between now and then.

Clearly, this can't happen since we only have one earth.  But technology could bail us out.  200 years ago, 97% of people in the United States lived and worked on farms supplying the needs of the entire country.  Today, only about 3% of our population lives and works on farms and those farms supply most of the food for the world.  Somewhere down the road, there has to be a limit to the amount of food that can be produced.  What it is, we don't know yet.  Perhaps we've already hit the limit.  That food will be a limiting factor on the population of the planet is a foregone conclusion.  Fresh, clean, drinkable water will be the other main limiting factor.

I do not know what the answers to these problems will be and of other problems that plague this planet, but it seems as if we need to work together.  I'm concerned about the future of number 80,198,082,265, number 80,520,546,297 and number 81,067,205,912.  How we react to this in the future will probably be our legacy to not only our children but our grandchildren, great grandchildren and beyond.  What numbers are you concerned about?  And consider this.  In the time it took you to read this short article, the earth's population increased by slightly more than 1000 people.