Are we in control?

Did you know that more than two thirds of the world population live under impoverished conditions? Yet we still refer to them as the third world rather than the 2 thirds world. Impoverished means they suffer from a lack of access to meeting basic needs. Lack of basic health care (malnutrition, dehydration, death from common curable diseases), insufficient supply of clean drinking water, lack of education, lack of community sustainability and housing due to civil war, genocide and climate...and that's not even scratching the surface.

By 2015, the year the UN have committed to halving the effect of contributing factors to world poverty, it is predicted that about three quarters of the wold population will suffer from lack of sustainable living and about a quarter of the world population will live in urban slums.

Statistics are disturbing, but maybe they are not disturbing us enough. I just came across a website with an 'Earth Clock' on it. Check it out. It's scary to see all those numbers changing so rapidly. I don't know how they do it but it calculates population growth in real time. It also calculates incidents of malnutrition, HIV/aids and cancer. You can see how many species have become and are becoming extinct, deforestation and desertification statistics and more. You can look at an annual view to what the stats say for a single day. You can even click on 'NOW' and watch the numbers run and see what happens within one minute.

Now here's the part I find most disturbing. I clicked on a link that predicts population growth for as far into the future as you want to look. it starts at 10 years and you can see we've added another billion people to our population. Then if you click on the up down arrows you can go into the future one year at a time to see how huge our population is really predicted to grow. I was curious so I did. I was heading up to 50 years from now and noticed the population growth rate slowing significantly, then at the 50 year mark it peaks at nearly 8.8 billion people. The next part isn't so exciting as from then on the population begins to shrink. So if this prediction is correct we will see a negative population growth rate within our lifetime, well before the turn of the century.
In 300 years time the entire world population size is predicted to shrink to the population size of New South Wales and in 330 years time the size of South Australia's current population. In 500 years from now there will be one person left on earth. That person will last 7 years then gone. Interesting conspiracy theory? Is there maybe some element of truth to population decline and if so what is the cause? The rapture? Is Christ coming back again in 50 years and then begin to cart us off in groups over the next 450 years? What does that say about the poor one left behind? Are we going to finally tip nature over the edge with our relentless unapologetic consumption of our resources?

We don't know what the future looks like, we can predict it and we can't control it. But we can learn a few things from our past. Our history tells a story we can learn from and learning is pointless if we don;t change. So you tell me, what does our future look like?

Shalom Mark