The Crowded Scene

The following excursion into a strange and not-so-pleasant world is fictional. What is not fictional is that a continuing population growth rate of 2 percent per year will rapidly lead to very large numbers of people. When sustained for four hundred years, a growth rate of 2 percent per year will increase the population by a factor of about 2,750. Thus, starting with a world population of about 3 billion not very many years ago, the number of people in the world will grow to 8,250 billion about four hundred years later. At the same time, the population in the United States will increase to 550 billion if it started from 200 million and also increased at the rate of 2 percent per year. Allowing for some minor calamities, such as a small nuclear war, we may not reach the preliminary goal for the world population of 8,250 billions of people until the year 2388. This small extrapolation has been made in our story.