Overpopulation

 "At present the population of the world is increasing ... War so far has had no great effect on this increase ... I do not pretend that birth control is the only way in which population can be kept from increasing. There are others ... If a Black Death could be spread throughout the world once in every generation, survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full ... the state of affairs might be somewhat unpleasant, but what of it? Really high-minded people are indifferent to suffering, especially that of others."  -- Bertrand Russel, Nobel Prize winner [1]

“World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn't even say it. But the general situation in which we are involved is lamentable.” --- Jaques Ives Cousteau, Oceanographer [2] This works out to a minimum of 128,000,000 people per year who must be "eliminated".

 “I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding; and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done. Criminals should be sterilized and feebleminded persons forbidden to leave offspring behind them... The emphasis should be laid on getting desirable people to breed...” -- Franklin Rooselvelt, United States President [3]

“Political unification in some sort of world government will be required... Even though... any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable.”  --Julian Huxley, Director of UNESCO, the United Nations [4]

“There is also some established precedent for taking account of family planning performance in appraisal of assistance requirements by [U.S. Agency for International Development] and consultative groups. Since population growth is a major determinant of increases in food demand, allocation of scarce PL 480 resources should take account of what steps a country is taking in population control as well as food production. In these sensitive relations, however, it is important in style as well as substance to avoid the appearance of coercion... Is the U.S. prepared to accept food rationing to help people who can't/won't control their population growth?” – Henry Kissenger, Head of United States National Security Council and later Secretary of State [5]

“Depopulation should be the highest priority of US foreign policy towards the Third World” [ibid] “Within the next 5 to 10 years it would be possible to produce a synthetic biological agent, an agent that does not naturally exist and for which no natural immunity could have been acquired... It would probably be possible to make a new infective micro-organism which could differ in certain important respects from any known disease-causing organisms. Most important of these is that it might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease.”  – Director Advanced Research Project Agency United States Department of Defence; Director Defence Research and Engineering United States Department of Defence [6]. 

The world's human population is approaching 6,500,000,000. This number is increasing at the rate of roughly 3/second (5 births per second and 2 deaths per second on average). Take a look at the chart at right, which I plotted from data available through the United Nations. With 510 million square kilometers of land on earth, this means that in 1950 there where approximately 19 people per square kilometer on the planet. Within our lifetimes however this will change to almost 70 people per square kilometer. In the least developed parts of the world (that is to say, the majority of the planet) the United Nations conservatively estimates that this number will be 84 humans per square kilometer by 2050.

But these numbers, high as they are, fail to take into account the fact that since 1999 more people live in cities than outside of cities. Hence for the majority of humanity, population density is far higher than these numbers indicate. Tokyo for example has a population density of 13,416 people per square kilometer [7]. Central London's population density is in excess of 10,000 per square kilometer [8]. These numbers are constantly, and rapidly, increasing [9]. Given these easily available statistics, the fact that most people who can afford birth control methods continue to have more than one child rather than adopting, is appalling (see [10] regarding the effects of religion on this issue).

If the curve at right is stepped back to a longer time line, it becomes obvious that growth rate since about 1500 has been higher than exponential. Whilst food production in theory may be able to handle this continued rate, there is absolutely no doubt that distribution systems cannot do so. At current rates of diminution of fresh water resource, the question of food however may be moot since there is not sufficient clean water today, let alone with a few more billion on the planet. Either way, providing fuel for distribution as well as the logistics of doing so have not been solved and are unlikely to be within the foreseeable future. Thus Malthusian effects are highly probable.

Two recent United Nations' reports [11,12] showed that the planet could not support the projected human population rise. One pointed out rather clearly that the species upon which humanity depends, from plants to animals were becoming extinct 100 times faster than shown by the fossil records. 12% of birds have become extinct since 1900. 23% of mammals. And more than more than 30% of amphibians. And so on. Much of this extinction rate is due to agricultural run-off. This run-off is lethal. It is filled with the toxic detritus of factory farming and poisonous fertilizers. According to the UN agricultural run-off has create thousands and thousands of square miles of dead zones of deoxygenated water  throughout the world [13]. In these dead zones, nothing can live. As they multiply, so does the chain reaction of species extinctions.

In addition to the spread of polluted water supplies from dead zones, pollutants in the form of acid rain (the US, China, and Brazil are the main sources of acid rain [14, 11]) are further toxifying water. In general the UN states that water supplies have become so polluted that contaminated that water has now become the world's leading cause of death. Industrial pollutants from contaminated water have been found in every mammal, plant, and insect on the planet.

In sum human (mis)use of natural resources is a disaster currently leading to a world unable to sustain humanity, as population continues its greater than exponential growth.

Rather than look to solve these problems however, various governments since the mid-1970's have been investigating various means of population control. The United States' National Security Study Memorandum 200 [15] and that country's population control initiatives begun by Henry Kissinger are probably the best known, but there are others from most major governments around the world (see for example [16,21,33]. Russel's comments as well as those other supra, have been taken to heart by planners around the world. A few of the more obvious methods which have been proposed in those cited as well as others (see in particular [27]) are:

• Wars: War has been a method of choice for population reduction throughout historical times. It has traditionally been a messy but effective tool, with the advantagous side effect of securing resources for the conquering nation. The problem with this technique however is that escalating weaponry particularly in fields of biowarfare may reduce human population to zero.
• Pandemics: There are many diseases maintained in vitro in various microbiology laboratories.  High population density is an excellent vector for  disease propagation. Targeting particular genes and genotypes which are held only be certain populations has been tested and shown viable. Vectors are obvious, from food, water, to atmospheric particulate dispersion, or drug resistant engineered flu.
• Eugenics: Explored by think tanks throughout the world, from the early Rockefeller funded Eugenics Institute to some of the better known contemporary think tanks. Particularly those with similar funding sources. David Rockefeller's recent speech at the United Nations Ambassador's dinner urged the UN to act immediately to "stabilize" world population. At both the Cairo and Rio UN meetings on sustainability this has been discussed at length. 
• Medical non-aid: Pricing drugs, medical services, and the like beyond the reach of the majority assures an eventual population decrease. The obvious example is UN Special Envoy Stephen Lewis' description of how AIDs drugs although readily available are not offered to poor African countries for the sole reason of maximizing corporate profit.
• Economic collapse: Engineered economic collapse tends to reduce surplus population quite rapidly. Engineered economic collapse also of course has the collateral effect of enhancing the consolidation of power in the the hands of a few whilst also allowing for unprecedented rape of a country's treasuries. Both the consolidated power and vast personal fortunes can be nicely used to quell riots using rapid deployment of mass crowd control weapons currently being tested in several war zones. Economic collapse has historically lead to population decrease through ensuing disease, limitation of travel, curtailment of food and water distribution, and similar whilst those in power grow fat. Zimbabwe is but one such illustrative example.
• Environment: Purposeful environmental devastation can reduce human population. This was a method used by the United States in Vietnam for example, where the forests and rice fields were destroyed to induce starvation through planned environmental disaster... and its consequent side effect of leaving few humans left to fight the brave bringers of democracy. The disadvantage of this method is that on a world wide basis such destruction can rapidly escalate beyond control. (The threat of devastation has and is perhaps even more useful, however.)
• Decrease Oil Supply: The advantage of this strategy is the ease with which it can be accomplished. Since oil is necessary food and water distribution, the results will be rapid and obvious. The disadvantage is the concomitant damage to the means of maintaining power.
• Sterilization: There are many methods for this. Using the highly directional upper atmosphere winds to disperse depleted uranium is an example. State mandated inoculation (currently legal in many countries even where there is strong research that such is unnecessary; use of forced inoculation is legal in parts of the United States; inclusion of 50,000 nm RFID micropowers to remotely effect cell receptors, etc.), is another.

 Consider the graph of United Nations data regarding fertility rates, below. Using this data, the following five charts compare at the .001 confidence level the probabilities that ... sorry, the rest of the article is for this site's members only. 

 (Citations to work mentioned herein, on request)