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SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Tuesday February 05 2019, @12:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the Betteridge-says-maybe dept.

By 2050 there will be 9 billion carbon-burning, plastic-polluting, calorie-consuming people on the planet. By 2100, that number will balloon to 11 billion, pushing society into a Soylent Green scenario. Such dire population predictions aren't the stuff of sci-fi; those numbers come from one of the most trusted world authorities, the United Nations.

But what if they're wrong? Not like, off by a rounding error, but like totally, completely goofed?

That's the conclusion Canadian journalist John Ibbitson and political scientist Darrel Bricker come to in their newest book, Empty Planet, due out February 5th. After painstakingly breaking down the numbers for themselves, the pair arrived at a drastically different prediction for the future of the human species. "In roughly three decades, the global population will begin to decline," they write. "Once that decline begins, it will never end."

The World Might Actually Run Out of People (archive)

Empty Planet

Who do you think is right ? The United Nations or Darrel Bricker/John Ibbitson ?


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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday February 05 2019, @03:09AM (2 children)

    by Immerman (3985) on Tuesday February 05 2019, @03:09AM (#796461)

    What makes you think it was a mistake? The same thing has happened with atmospheric CO2-level predictions. The UN is a political body, not a scientific one, and it shouldn't be at all surprising that their official predictions reflect politics more accurately than science.

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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday February 05 2019, @09:08AM (1 child)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday February 05 2019, @09:08AM (#796562) Homepage
    What makes you think that because I used the word "mistake", I think it was an actual mistake? To mispredict in one report may be regarded as a misfortune, Mr Immerman; to mispredict in two looks like carelessness.
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday February 05 2019, @04:23PM

      by Immerman (3985) on Tuesday February 05 2019, @04:23PM (#796724)

      Because you said mistake, rather than "mistake" as is typically done to indicate that it was a "mistake" in name only. Nor does anything else in your post suggest you were using the term sarcastically. Words and language conventions have meaning, and I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt and assume are using them appropriately to convey the meaning they intended.