Population

I was thinking about a program I saw on Blaze about the fact the world already is 70% overpopulated I searched for more details which stated Our population has become so large that the Earth cannot cope. There are now more than 8,000,000,000 people on planet Earth. It took until the early 1800s for the world population to reach one billion. Now we add a billion every 12-15 years. People must have somewhere to live and to build and build.

I came across BBC article, and this is what they have stated:

Towards the end of 2022, the human population on Earth is expected to reach eight billion. To mark the occasion, BBC Future looks at one of the most controversial issues of our time. Are there too many of us? Or is this the wrong question?

One moment, the valley was a tranquil, swampy wetland. Grasses and palm trees cast fuzzy shadows on the water below. Fish lurked warily at the edges of mangroves. Orangutans sought out fruit with leathery fingers. Then a dormant giant awoke from its sleep.

It was around 72,000 BC on the island of Sumatra,?Indonesia.?The Toba super volcano was erupting, in what is thought to have been the greatest such event in the last 100,000 years. A series of thunderous explosions blasted out 9.5 quadrillion kilograms of ash which billowed out in sky-darkening clouds that crept around 47km (29 miles) into the atmosphere.

In the aftermath, a vast area across Asia was blanketed in a layer of soft dust 3-10cm thick. It choked water sources and stuck to vegetation like cement – deposits from Toba have been found as far away as East Africa, 7,300km (4,536 miles) west of the eruption. But crucially, some scientists believe it plunged the world into a volcanic winter that lasted decades – and nearly made our species extinct.

Back in 1993, a team of American researchers studied the human genome for clues to its deep past and discovered the tell-tale signature of a major "population bottleneck” – a moment when humanity shrank so drastically, all subsequent generations outside Africa were significantly more closely related.

Later studies have revealed that in this precarious era, which may have occurred between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, our collective numbers may have hit as few as 10,000 people ??– equivalent to the current population of the sleepy settlement of Elkhorn in Wisconsin, or the number who attended a single drive-through wedding in Malaysia in 2020. The least affected part of the world was Africa, where genetic diversity remains high to this day – on this single continent, there are larger genetic differences between certain groups than there are between Africans and Europeans.?

Some think this timing isn’t a coincidence– they believe it was the Toba volcanic eruption ?that did it. The idea is hotly disputed, but there's no doubt that much of humanity is descended from a relatively modest number of super-hardy ancestors. At times, the inhabitants of the world have been in great peril.?????

Fast-forward 74,000 years and our once-obscure species of hairless ape has undergone a population explosion, colonising nearly every habitat on the planet, and exerting our influence on even the remotest corners – in 2018, scientists found a plastic bag 10,898m (35,754ft) below the ocean's surface at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, while another team recently discovered man-made “forever chemicals” on Mount Everest. No part of the world is pristine – every lake, forest and canyon has been touched by human activity.

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