[wallawe]

It will have to be checked one way or another. Either we as humans will have to (as in the case of China) or nature will take its course in checking the population. We can't grow at the rate that we are, while consuming the resources at the rate we do for much longer. Check out economist Thomas Malthus' "Malthusian Theory:"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe

[T-hawk]

Malthus has been debunked plenty of times. The school of thought has been predicting overpopulation disaster for 200 years which hasn't come close to materializing. The key point is that resource production also increases -- all those extra humans have a way of figuring out how to produce the resources they need.

Okay, eventually there's a hard cap on resource production, limited by the total insolation energy to Earth or perhaps that which can be captured with space power satellites or a Dyson sphere. And you can continuously predict Malthusian disaster until that comes true. But that's a bit like predicting "recession!" for every year from 1992 through 2001 and then claiming in 2001 that you were right.

[wallawe]

Your response conveys that you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what the theory even describes. It has not "been predicting overpopulation disaster for 200 years" on a continual basis as you make it seem by your analogy in the second paragraph.

The theory merely maintains that population increases ‘geometrically’ or exponentially and that subsistence increases arithmetically. Thus, population increases along the order of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32..., whereas subsistence limps along at the rate of 1, 2, 3, 4... You are correct that this has been debunked in the past in many ways due to technological and agricultural developments, changes in societal organization.

But it has been revived recently. What you don't take into account is that fact that we are only approaching 7 Billion which is sustainable currently but is expected to double within the next 100 years if not checked. Also, the problem has changed as agriculture is no longer the main concern; Oil and energy are. Peak Oil production has, or will have been reached within the next 10 years which presents an entirely new and much more serious problem for world economies. We are already seeing some of the beginning effects that depletion is having.

Don't get me wrong, I believe humans are ingenious and can move to solve problems when cornered, but I don't think you can argue that at the growth rate we are seeing today, that there will not be any sort of check necessary whether it be natural or imposed by man.

(and i don't think a downvote was necessary, as I was merely stating opinion, as you have as well)