At the rate your population is growing, how long before the US crosses a Billion in..

[Braznor]

... population?

I bet 40 years from now.

 

[yhelothar]

Going by this chart, we double about every 40 yrs... so I'd say around 60yrs when we hit 1bil

 

[busydude]

Many scientists predict that the population to plateau at 9 billion.. Assuming the world's population to be 7 Billion right now.. it will see a further increase of 28.5%.

The growth rate of US is ~0.97.. which means the population doubles after ~75 years.
Assuming the growth rate to be constant(which is not).. population of 1 billion will be achieved in ~100 years.

That said, I would go with never.

 

[Jeff7]

Hoping for "never". Ours is a great example of what happens when a species' natural predators are effectively eliminated.

 

[Braznor]

Going by this chart, we double about every 40 yrs... so I'd say around 60yrs when we hit 1bil

That rate is sure to accelerate further because of the composition of your population. With people having children like welfare tickets, the acceleration in birth rates haven't probably seen their true peaks yet.

 

[nageov3t]

population in nearly all developed countries is slowing down, isn't it?

I remember reading somewhere that the USA would have a negative population growth if not for immigration.

 

[Schadenfroh]

Hoping for "never". Ours is a great example of what happens when a species' natural predators are effectively eliminated.

We still have disease and other humans to kills us off. Pretty soon, we will have famine due to the impoverished not practicing birth control properly.

 

[Kirby]

We need a new plague.

 

[Jeff7]

We still have disease...

True, but even that faces our knowledge of medicine, and even basic hygiene to help mitigate some of its effects.

...and other humans to kills us off.

We're still nowhere near as efficient at that as a natural predator would be. Some of those birth/death rates of prey animals are just crazy - things like dik-diks are very popular meals for various predators. (And I'm sure a squishy, defenseless thing like us would be a wonderful prey animal too - some of Gary Larson's imagined crocodiles thought so, anyway. 😉)
That's an unfortunate situation to be in there though. Predators listed at Wiki include monitor lizards, small cats, lions, hyenas, wild dogs, leopards, cheetahs, jackals, baboons, eagles, hawks, and snakes. They're a bite-sized snack of choice.
And it says that hunters will kill them just so that they don't warn game animals about the presence of danger.
I guess there is no such thing as a paranoid dik-dik - everything really is out to kill them.

Pretty soon, we will have plenty of famine due to poor people not practicing birth control properly.

Unfortunately, it'll probably be as it is in some of the starving third-world nations now - you'll have a large number of people living on the brink of starvation, instead of a smaller number of people living sustainably.
I'm sure we could cram another 4-5 billion people into the US, and reduce us to a terribly impoverished nation.

 

[PieIsAwesome]

Dunno about a bllion, that may be too much, but we need to have a large population if we are to compete with the likes of China and whatnot in the future. Once strong European countries are no longer so because they are too small. They are advanced, have a high standard of living, but are too small to compete with a much less advanced but much more populous country like China.

 

[busydude]

Dunno about a bllion, that may be too much, but we need to have a large population if we are to compete with the likes of China and whatnot in the future. Once strong European countries are no longer so because they are too small. They are advanced, have a high standard of living, but are too small to compete with a much less advanced but much more populous country like China.

The problem with that.. is if you want to have the same standards of living as in the US.. by the time China and India become developed nations.. they would have consumed almost all of the natural resources.

US has that leeway because the world is still fairly sustainable even when the US was consuming ~60% of the total energy.

 

[vi edit]

Do the "growth rates" account for just new births in relation to deaths, or does it include immigration as well?

 

[Jeff7]

...
US has that leeway because the world is still fairly sustainable even when the US was consuming ~60% of the total energy.

Interesting note on the US' energy use vs that of the world that I decided to look into awhile ago: The US is also responsible for an approximately equal portion of the world's GDP.

I think it's actually something like 25% of the world's energy production that's used by the US. It's also about 25% of the world's GDP that the US is responsible for. (If I'm way off on this, please correct me. This is based on memory of stuff found at the CIA's statistics site.)
So yeah, we use a lot more power per person, but we're also a lot more productive.

 

[dmcowen674]

In many years will the US population will be a billion?

Negative Ghost rider pattern is full

Many Americans and people that came here thinking it would be Utopia are leaving as the country declines rapidly plus the boomer generation is dying off.

 

[Imp]

Considering the whole resource and carrying capacity of the earth, jobs, poverty, etc., I hope never.

 

[busydude]

I think it's actually something like 25% of the world's energy production that's used by the US. It's also about 25% of the world's GDP that the US is responsible for.

You are right. I was referring to during the cold war in the 60's when the US's GDP was close to 40% of the world's. I may have exaggerated a bit .. right now it is about 25%.

Interestingly, energy use per capita remained flat since the 70's.. and ROW has just started to catch up now.

http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds...try:USA:IND:CHN:BRA:RUS&tdim=true&hl=en&dl=en

 

[lxskllr]

dik-diks

I want one. I could be a bite sized deer rancher.

 

[Pocatello]

I don't want to eat soylent green.

 

[crashtestdummy]

population in nearly all developed countries is slowing down, isn't it?

I remember reading somewhere that the USA would have a negative population growth if not for immigration.

The US is just below replacement fertility (2.01 vs. 2.1), but is still the highest among the developed world. As you said, our population is still increasing due to immigration, but I think you'll see that as much of the world becomes developed in coming decades, the worldwide birth rate will slow enough that US population plateaus. I don't think the US population will pass 600 million in my lifetime.

 

[Schadenfroh]

I don't want to eat soylent green.

A better solution:
http://theyesmen.org/hijinks/plattsburgh

 

[gaidensensei]

I remember reading somewhere that the USA and China have roughly the same geographical continent size, but the USA is a third of china's 1.x billion people.

So imagine 1 extra person for every 3, ~1 extra house for every 3 persons.

The USA is only ~200+ years old compared to China's ~4000 though.

 

[SKORPI0]

U.S. population to hit 1 billion by 2100

If the USA seems too crowded and its roads too congested now, imagine future generations: The nation's population could more than triple to 1 billion as early as 2100.
That's the eye-popping projection that urban and rural planners, gathered today for their annual meeting in Las Vegas, are hearing from a land-use expert.
"What do we do now to start preparing for that?" asks Arthur Nelson, co-director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, whose analysis projects that the USA will hit the 1 billion mark sometime between 2100 and 2120. "It's a realistic long-term challenge."
The nation currently has almost 304 million people and is the world's third most populous, behind China (1.3 billion) and India (1.1 billion). China passed the 1 billion mark in the early 1980s.
Nelson's projection assumes that current fertility rates remain constant but that longevity and immigration will continue to rise.

 

[nageov3t]

that seems like a huge assumption considering that fertility rates are falling

 

[PieIsAwesome]

The problem with that.. is if you want to have the same standards of living as in the US.. by the time China and India become developed nations.. they would have consumed almost all of the natural resources.

US has that leeway because the world is still fairly sustainable even when the US was consuming ~60% of the total energy.

The future sounds not so good.

 

[Bignate603]

U.S. population to hit 1 billion by 2100

Nelson's projection assumes that current fertility rates remain constant but that longevity and immigration will continue to rise.

And that would be an incorrect assumption. Fertility rates are falling and if immigration continues to rise you'll see quite a backlash which will results in restrictions to it.