Name: The Science of Overpopulation
Uploaded: 2016-08-15T14:39:11.000Z
Duration: 10 min 18 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

So I assume you know that there's a lot of people on this planet. As of last week, Wednesday,

Adverbs of manner

I think, was when we turned over to seven -- I --, nobody knows. But nobody knows exactly

how many people there are, it's kinda hard to keep track; it's a big planet. But there

are about seven billion people on the Earth right now.

And they keep getting born, all the time. In fact, for every 2 people who die, about

4 are born. Every second, there are about four babies introducing themselves to this

world, and there are less than two people saying goodbye to it.

So, easy math here, our world's population is growing by about 2.5 people per second.

And as a reminder of this, during this video I'm going to have 2.5 ping pong balls being

thrown at me every single second throughout the entire rest of the video. Who's hitting

Ok, instead of the balls, uh, were just gonna do a clock because I get nosebleeds pretty

easily, and I don't want you to have to see that.

So 7 billion people, it's hard to actually get your mind around how many people that

is, maybe if you were to just like sit down and count to 7 billion, it would take you

On the other hand, there is plenty of space for them. If you took 7 billion people and

stood us shoulder to shoulder like we were at a Sting concert, those 7 billion people

could fit in an area the size of Los Angeles. We can fit on the Earth. There's space for

So as long as there's space for us all, what's the big deal about having 7 billion people?

Well it turns out people have been thinking about this for a long time, since around 1800,

when the world first clocked 1 billion people.

I know what you're thinking, you're like 1 billion, that's nothing, haha. Well at that

time all the economies in the world were based on agriculture. How much stuff we could grow

with human hands, farm animals, maybe a scythe and a wooden plow or something. So that kind

of technology, a billion people was really pushing it.

And the first like big-time thinker guy, to totally have a cow about there just being

too many freakin' people was a British economist named Thomas Malthus. Thomas Malthus calculated

that human populations tend to grow exponentially, while the ability of humans to feed each other

tends to grow more linearly. And so our growth as a species tends to outstrip our ability

And when that happens, it's pretty obvious what happens, you get the famine, and the

starvation. And for the people who are left over who don't die of those things, they can

Basically, Malthus thought that humanities natural state was to be cruel, miserable,

pathetic and sniveling in a pile of dirty underpants. In his essay on the principle

of population, Malthus observed... "The vices of mankind are active and able

ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often

finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly

seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their

thousands and tens of thousands. Should their success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable

famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of

Diseases also have an easier time taking hold, and of course starvation can kill off a lot

of people as well. Though he did make some pretty good points, as long as humanity is

well-fed, we're a pretty nice lot of people. But I have this problem too; when my blood

sugar just gets a little bit low, I start killing all of my neighbors -- that's not

When you and your family's lives are threatened by starvation there's a lot of things that

you will do for food, including go to war. However, what Mister Doom and Gloom didn't

predict was the frickin' Industrial Revolution- which not only allowed the production of much

more food with far fewer laborers, it was also the impetus for this.

Uh, yeah. What that there is, is uh, the population of the Earth busting through Malthus's ceiling

and then his atmosphere and then his ozone layer and then his mesosphere and then his

- probably be pretty impressed by this. If you're not impressed yet, ah, just keep staring

It took humanity fifty thousand years to go from zero to one billion people, and then

to get from one billion to seven billion, about two hundred. So wow, Industrial Revolution,

thank you for allowing us to grow more food using machines, and for the fast and efficient

transportation that it takes to move all that food around to the people who needed it, and

thanks for the medical advances too, which help us understand things like the importance

of soap and the way that diseases worked, and as a result, humans now live about four

decades longer than the average guy in the eighteenth century.

So Malthus might have been right about how frickin' stupid it was to be a human if the

Industrial Revolution had not happened. So now, the world's population is growing at

about 1.1 percent per year, which is a tiny bit better than the 1.3 percent per year that

got us here. If this current rate continues by 2050, we should have about 9.3 billion

So the question is: at what point are these numbers going to outstrip our ability to feed

all of the people on the planet? It turns out actually that the question isn't how many

people can the Earth accommodate, it's more like: how many rich people can the Earth accommodate?

Because people in general, they tend to demand stuff for their survival like uh, oxygen,

water, and food. But rich people, we have different expectations. We, for example, in

America have a lot of agricultural crops, and we have to use a lot of fresh water to

water those agricultural crops. Do you want to take a guess at the number one irrigated

crop in the United States of America? Unless you've heard this statistic before, you were

wrong! It's grass! It takes more water to create lawns than it does to create all of

We're using it like crazy; though it is a pretty scarce resource, we can use less than

one percent of the water on our planet. Most of it is salt water that we cannot use to

drink or irrigate crops, and 70 percent of our freshwater is frozen in glaciers. So clean

freshwater, non-negotiable and scarce. So what's next?

Ah, food. The world's combined food output could feed around 11 billion people, and yet,

there are 1 billion people who need food. So yeah that's one of the most pathetic and

infuriating things about our planet. So if there's enough food for 11 billion people,

and there's 7 billion people and a billion of them are hungry, who is eating all of our

Food, is eating all that food. A huge amount of the food that we grow in America gets uh,

It's so hard to say the truth, which is that, but, rich people can do what they want. Now

when I say 'rich' it's important to note that I'm not talking about like, uh, the 99 percent

versus the 1 percent rich. I'm talking about if you have running water, electricity that

comes into your home, a computer that you can watch youtube videos on, and regularly

can afford to eat meat - you are a rich person on the earth, and you, you know sometimes

we just have to come to terms with the fact that we - even those of us who don't have

it great in America - have it better off than a whole lot of other people. There's a lot

of people in the world who don't get that. If you can have a hot shower, that's like