[LMB] [OT] May I do this?

[James Nicoll]

On Tue, 19 Dec 2006, WILLIAM A WENRICH wrote:

> James Nicoll:
> OK, here's the question. No offense to anyone intended.
>
>  Suppose you are told the Earth of AD 2300 has the following
> characteristics:
>
>> No space exploitation beyond information retrieval.
>>
>>         36 billion people (Africa ~ 22%, Asia ~ 57%, Latin America and
>
>> Caribbean ~ 9%, North America 6%, Europe ~ 6%, Oceania ~ ha!). Age
>> distribution is fairly flat, distributed mainly between 0 and 100
>> years (although a minority of the population is older than 100 years
>> of age).
>>
>>         What would you expect such a world to be like? (Explain your
>> reasoning.)
>
> There would have to be some sort of massive sociological change very soon to get those kinds of numbers. IIRC the current UN median estimates (which always over estimates population growth) has the world population topping out at ~10 billion in 2050 and declining after that.
>
> About the only thing I can think of that could make that kind of change would be a huge number of religious conversions say to LDS or Islam.

 	Coincidentally, the UN is the source of my numbers: this is based 
on the high population estimate of their most recent model. The low 
population estimate is about 2 billion by 2300.