Now, in a world that is more industrialized than ever before, there are more people than ever before.
What's more, the rate at which the population has been increasing has itself been increasing.The population increases because the birth rate is greater than the death rate; that is, more babies are born each year than there are people who die.
As it happens, the difference between the birth rate and the death rate is greater now than it has ever been. This has not been because the birth rate has gone up. Indeed, it has gone down. What has happened then?
Throughout most of man's history war, hunger, and disease have been the great killers.War still reduces the population tragically. As agriculture and herding deve- loped, hunger grew less prevalent. This meant that people lived a little longer, that a little larger percentage of the ba-bies born survived the first few years.The death rate dropped a little.The difference between birth rate and death rate increased and the population began to rise a little faster.
As long as disease continued unchecked, however, the death rate remained quite high and the population rise continued to be pretty slow. But with the nineteenth cen- tury, there came a victory over disease.The death rate began to drop more rapidly. Although the birth rate also dropped in those parts of the world where advances in science and technology were introduced, it never dropped as quickly as the death rate.
Now, even though earth carries more people than ever before, it is calculated that the population will double in a smaller time than ever before-in only 35 years. This means that by the 2008 earth's population will be about seven billion.
