With
environmentalists and economic development activists ringing alarm bells of
population explosion and commensurate resource depletion, provident sights are set
on alternative solutions to our growth predicament – including space
colonization, either through human
settlements, biodomes,
or even terraforming,
a concept seriously if preliminarily explored by NASA.
But
will we really need such extreme solutions? The idea of overpopulation is not
new: already in the 19th century, predictions of a Malthusian
catastrophe claimed that Earth would soon run out of resources and its human
population would be decimated by famines. These predictions were based on two
assumptions: one, that population growth would continue at the same rate; and
two, that productivity would not increase. By the 21st century, neither
has proved to be true.
