Monday 15 July 2013

Want to know where you stand?

According to José Miguel Guzman, I may be the 3 billionth person to have been born into the human race. Jose Miguel heads up the UN organisation that looks at the impact of population and development. The 7 billionth has recently been chosen "symbolically". Congratulations, Danica!

UNFPA have published a great tool that is as informative as it is entertaining. You can try it for yourself at www.7billionandme.org. It's brilliant and I am sure it will provoke you to think.

Lots of the statistics made me gasp. Take this as an example. I am already older than nearly three quarters of the world's population and by the time we reach 9 billion, I will be over 80. Unless we can master Asimov's Bi-Centennial Man science, I am unlikely to see the 10 billion. That's fine.

People are getting older and living longer in the developed world. Take the UK as my example but its trends mirror those of other developed societies. In a little more than my lifetime, the population of UK residents over 65 has increased by 80%. By 2050, the number of older persons worldwide in developed societies is expected to rise by some 10% over 2011 numbers, with some Western countries having close to a third of their population in this category.

If you couple this with the increasing number of people being diagnosed with some form of age-related dementia, then you have a growing problem in need of an international approach. I have written before about solving problems at scale and the role that we will have to allow intelligent machines to play.

You will know too I am optimistic about how robotics will help make a positive difference, providing we work together to address the myriad of obstacles seemingly placed in the way. Some things are worth striving for and, in this case, the prize is a worthy one.

And then where are we all going to live? Increased urbanisation will have over 70% of the population living in cities in the next 30 years - most in the developing world. 

Few doubt that this century will present the Earth with its greatest ever ecological and social challenge. With our global population edging ever closer towards that frightening 10 billion, resources are finite. Conventional wisdom (to the extent any of this is conventional) is suggesting the Earth will be full, once we reach between 9 and 10 billion inhabitants. This is (happily) the point when we might also reach what I call the "one in - one out" point, where for every one born, one dies. 

The problem becomes matching the location of the birth and the death! 

Science and technology will no doubt provide part of the rescue service, but science is finite and it is also highly likely that we will need markedly to change many of our (western) views. Our model of immodest consumption has to change. Seems that, even with a world population of less than our current 7 billion, if everyone lived like a "European" we would need 3 Earths to sustain us. Live like a North American and that number rises to 5! 

We will need new, if to some unpalatable, sources of food. According to the UN, there are over 1900 edible insects to choose from and David Gordon is ahead of the game with his cookbook on how best to prepare them!

And one to finish on: every time you use Google for a look up, you use the same amount of energy as when boiling a kettle. This is "hotly" contested by Google, but nothing is for free!  

I wonder how much energy this blog uses?