Originally posted by spikey
Overpopulation...really?

Let's take the most important requirement there is first..Air..without it, we all know we're toast in minutes...but there is plenty of breathable air and we can produce more if we ever needed to, so that's one required resource there's plenty of...no limited resource issue there.

The next important one..water..again, without it, we all know we've had it in just a few days..74% of our world is covered with water..it's everywhere, it's in the seas, it's in the lakes, it's in the rivers and the streams, it's in ponds, in plants and animals, it's in the very air we breathe. So that's taken care of..plenty of water, no issue with too little water.

Solar desalination will provide drinking and irrigation water, Solar water condensers will generate water from the air for land locked countries, and irrigation pipelines can be built.

Next requirement on the list would logically be food. Because food is tied in to all of the other requirements, i'll list them as one general requirement..For food we obviously need somewhere to grow it, land?

How much available land is there for farming, growing our food? Plenty.
Every single human being on this planet, could theoretically fit (with room to spare) in an area the size of Texas...every one of us.

With modern and innovative farming methods, even with using tried and tested traditional farming techniques, the rest of the world is a pretty big farming area, if every person on Earth only used a total area equivalent to the size of Texas.

Using vertical farming techniques (hydroponics -growing walls), and multi-story farming, our land and water and nutrients requirements have just been slashed to 20% of traditional requirements...20%. (based on tests carried out into these techniques). The real boon though, is the sheer amount of extra food that can be grown in the same space that tradition methods use, up to 2000% more food production in the same area! (20X)

Vast areas of our coastal waters, landlocked lakes, reservoirs and international waters at sea (avoiding international shipping lanes), could easily be used as space to build extensive networks of floating farms...no land required for farming *at all*, everything would be grown at sea.

The land would be exclusively for flora and fauna and habitation, forests could be replanted where thousand acre farms now sit...all over the world. So, land space is another non issue.

Energy is required for food production, and our use. The sun provides enough energy to the Earth in one day, to match or exceed human energy requirements for one year.

If we could capture just 1% of the total energy, we'd have much more energy than we need. Match advances in Solar technology (nanotechnology, metamaterials, Graphene, Solar roll printing etc) with wind power (also a type of Solar energy), and we have plenty of energy...also with the very latest in energy (still controversial of course) research in areas such as cold fusion (Rossi - Italy) the energy 'problem' isn't such a problem after all.

To put these numbers into a perspective with highly practical relevance, on average, humankind is only using about 1/10,000 of that amount for its total energy consumption. In other words, sunlight seems to be a viable option for our energy needs, at least from the perspective of the total amount needed.

Even using clean burn coal technology, the world has enough accessible coal to last (conservative estimates) approximately 2000 years. So, plainly our energy resources are plenty...and inexhaustible (Solar and wind).