There are only 328 million people in the United States, and we only gain about 2 million a year. The US has plenty of land and resources to continue for a very long time if we do things right. But we better get going on that boarder wall because the longer we put it off the and the worse things get, the more people that will move into our country. Back in the 1800s we relied a lot on whale oil, by the late 1800s we had almost wiped out all the whales except the ones the were really hard to get. Fortunately we discovered petroleum, and electricity wasn't far behind. Then came natural gas, nuclear, solar. Not to mention we've been using water power and wind power for hundreds of years. Power is not a problem for a very, very long time. There has been many times we have almost lost all of our crops, but we have always found ways to combat that. Our biggest problem now is all are crops are Mono crops, we only use things that we have genetically altered, if something goes wrong we could be screwed, however there are many edible species of plans, we may just have to adjust to them. If we would not have genetically altered our crops we would be having an extremely difficult time feeding everyone in the world. Our food prices are currently extreamly low due to technologies, even though people still tend to complain about it. If the population does get wiped out in the next couple hundred years it will probably be from disease, or the hole in the ozone layer creating an environment that is too hot for us to live with, or nuclear enialation or something similar that some nut case comes up with that we currently don't know about. The odds of a meteor or volcanic eruptions taking us out would be like winning the lottery because they usually only happen every hundred million years or so. In other words all you have to fear is fear its self, somethings are best left alone. Have you ever stopped and thought about how big is space? And where does it end? You will never know the answer, so just leave it be.

Lots of people think birthrates are the possible fix.
I don't see it that way.

Consider this:
World-wide all mating is limited to 1 child per man-woman mating.
If there are 7 billion of us that is 3.5 billion men and 3.5 billion women that would have 1.75 billion children. This immediately brings the population to 8.75 billion people. At 10 billion, one child per couple means 12.5 billion in population.

Even at 1 child per couple, it is a runaway population explosion.

I do understand what yer saying.
I don't think I stated anything in contrast to that intent.
Nature does find its own balance but sometimes that balance means extinction.
Sometimes the damage done requires long time periods to recover ecologically.
That long time could be 100,000 or millions of years but nature does eventually rebound from ecological change.
If it didn't, the world would have stayed dead after the first ice age or global disaster.
Yes, some natural species will fill the gap.
Mammals filled the gap left by dinosaurs and so on.

The thread intent is about how people (you and me people) are not thinking about a significant issue and prefer to think of immediate issues.
Population rates are not prevalent in social consciousness.

People will ignore the issue until it can no longer be ignored and then, suddenly, everyone will be all for finding a fix, but its already past the tipping point for a humane solution.
All possible solutions from now forward will need to be extreme.
The longer we wait to address the problem, the more extreme the solutions will have to be.
The issue needs focus now, while we can still have a somewhat humane solution.

Not sure if its your math skills that sucks, or your just don't understand the concept of time. If I have one child I have replaced myself by half (it take 2 people to make a child) and if I have 2 children, that will replace me when I'm dead. The fact that generations are created in between is not relevant. In the long run it all works out, just a matter of waiting for enough people to die to stabilize it. Here in the United States many people are actually waiting longer to have children which means there will be less generations alive at any one time. Also people are trending towards having fewer children here in the United States, much of our growth is immigants. The thinking of many researchers is that 100 years of age is all the body is capable, a few live lo longer but overall they would have to come up with some really radical solutions to extend life much longer than 100. We also have people die from sickness, accidents, and other causes at a much earlier age. So while your 78 year life expectancy may sneak up a little, it will only cause a slight swing in population that would level out over time. So if on average everybody had just 2 children the population would level out over time. Clearly we are unable to force people not to have more than 2 children, but if we could then we could learn what we need to do long term to support the planet with 10 million people.

I understood what you were getting at. What I was somewhat obliquely trying to point out, is that what we do about a given situation, requires accepting ALL of the consequences of our acts, and not just the INTENTIONS behind them.

We do NOT, for example, have an option available to us that includes preserving everything the way that it is now. In order to limit human population expansion significantly, or even further, to forcibly reduce how many are here now, requires the end of a LOT of existing human standards of behavior, the ideas of rights, freedom, and all sorts of things.

I've paid attention, while doing other historical investigations, to the MANY times that humans on this planet have tried to gain control of all of humanity, in order to try to make the future safe for whatever they had in mind as an ideal life for all. In every instance, the journey from what we were, to what we would have to become in order to find that "Eden," or "Nirvana," involved doing things that were VERY unpleasant to a VERY large number of people.

That doesn't mean I personally think we should do nothing, by any stretch of the imagination. What I am intent on getting across, is that regardless of what we jointly choose, there will be "unpleasantness," especially including if we do nothing.

I am convinced that population ALONE, is not the problem. Even a much smaller population than we have now, has in the past, managed to nearly destroy itself, on a number of occasions, due to fairly obviously "bad behavior."

In order to do better than the previous people who attempted to solve the Problem Of Humanity, will require a FAR higher dedication to education, to self discipline, and to assiduous protection of respect for each other, than any large number of human's has yet managed.

I believe it can be done, simply because there is nothing inherently stopping us. However, there is no sign anywhere in the leaders of the current world, of anyone who WANTS to find the best solution to our challenge.

We only have a lot of people looking for quick fixes and short cuts.

some posts were pretty long so I am not sure if someone mentioned this or not...but even though China is crowded, they actually decided to limit population years ago by saying families could only have one child. Then,
in November 2013, following the Third Plenum of the 18th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, China announced the decision to relax the one-child policy. Under the new policy, families can have two children if one parent, rather than both parents, was an only child

Any 'balancing' nature does do will be far too late, and the mass extinctions and loss of cornerstone species will mean ecological collapse and a whole new state of affairs biologically, and meteorologically.

Throwing facts and education and disincentives at over populating cultures is needed. And the culture of greed and lies and hoarding must be de-valued.

Society as it was before WW I, but with medical advances.

Agrarian villages cooperating, not competing.

http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by-country/