When I checked the global population today on Worldometers.info, I found it stands at 7,714,576,923 – that’s 7.7 billion people. In terms of net gain (360,000 births minus 150,000 deaths), we are adding over 210,000 people to this planet every day. We only reached our first billion milestone a little over 200 years ago, and I was just 7 years old when we hit the 3 billion mark in 1960. About 100 billion people have lived on Earth throughout history.
Scientists have said that the maximum the Earth can stand is between 9 to 10 billion people at one time, and we will reach that target within 2 decades from now, as we are adding more than a billion every 12 years (or less). At 10 billion, we would need to stop eating animals and use all our farming land to produce fruit and vegetables. But there are many who think we are doomed to destroy civilization by famine, with dwindling supplies of food, water and clean air to breathe.
"The power of population is so superior to the power of the Earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race." The late-18th century philosopher Thomas Malthus wrote these ominous words in an essay on what he saw as the dire future of humanity. Humans' unquenchable urge to reproduce, Malthus argued, would ultimately lead us to overpopulate the planet, eat up all its resources and die in a mass famine.
So, do you sometimes feel insignificant, as if whatever you do does not matter in the greater scheme of things? You will have heard many times that “we are all connected” but our brains do not register this truth via our 5 senses. We need to connect with our higher mind. One blogger this week posed the question: “Do you think a single drop of water feels responsible for the flood? Or Do you think a single snowflake feels responsible for the avalanche? Individually, we may not feel responsible for the world, but we are.”
And you could also ponder the question that if a person has a full and rewarding life, having great experiences and gaining lots of knowledge, does it all go to waste as soon as they die? No! It is all added to the collective experience of humanity. Each of us adds to the human existence, in however small a way. It all gets recorded in the Akasha! (Refer to last week’s bulletin about the Akashic Sphere).