Instapundit link to another blog commenting on how the New York Times said Paul Ehrich’s book “The Population Bomb” was wrong.

It turns out that the birth rate is below the replacement rate in all developed countries and many developing. As economies change from agricultural to industrial and educate their women the birthrate goes down. And this is happening all over.

This was a bit of a mind blower to me. I’d never heard any one say there was an alternative to the world’s population going up. I knew the US’s birth rate was below replacement, but didn’t extrapolate this to rest of the world. This has major implications to the future of the planet. There is every probablity we won’t fill up and burn out the planet.

One of the reasons I though man would eventually get around to actually exploring the universe outside our own atmosphere is we’d need the room. What will be the motivation if the world’s population doesn’t get any bigger than it is now, or even decreases?

If the whole world is industrialized, the the world population would go down. What would this mean? I think the would be a point we’d level out. I wonder where that would be?

Any way interesting stuff. I like to think about the future and this puts a whole new spin on things.