Human Exponential Growth

The size of the human race continues to grow at an ever increasing rate, according to population estimates. Most of the exponential growth in the human population occurs due to technological innovations in the field of medicine and agriculture. It takes far longer for a person alive today to die, than just a few decades ago. How the earth handles this population explosion remains one of the biggest debates in ecology today.

Identification

• Human exponential growth refers to the phenomenon of sudden jumps in the population of the Earth since around 500,000 years B.C. A chart of population growth would should a slow and steady uptick until it skyrockets during the 19th and 20th centuries, forming an "J' shape. The rate peaks at 2.1 percent during the mid-1960's, according to University of Michigan's Global Change website.

Considerations

• Technology advancements that improve the survival rates explain most of the recent human population explosion, according to Carolyn Kinder of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. Agricultural advances now allow humans to produce more food with less people and sustain a greater population. Medical technology might be the most important technological advance. Diseases that afflicted society for centuries -- like polio and cholera -- no longer kill a significant amount of people.

Future Growth

• A demographic breakdown of the world's people shows the developed world has a relatively even distribution of ages, while the developing world is heavily skewed towards younger people. The developing world has the highest birth rates and the most amount of females. This trend will lead to the developing world accounting for most of the net population growth in the future.

Limits

• Ecologists, like Joel Cohen, who study the human population, debate whether the Earth has a carrying capacity. Simple logical thinking would assume that eventually the world will run out of space or resources for people. But authors like Julian Simon believe that additional people could result in more minds coming up with the technology to increase the planet's carrying capacity of the earth.

Theories/Speculation

• A panel of experts at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry believe that overpopulation constitutes the greatest environmental danger during the 21st century. Current trends do not suggest that humanity looks to decrease greenhouse emissions during the next century. Exponential growth will require many new resources for these new people, which the earth may not have.