Preparing for the Miraculous

2012 and 1956: Doomsday? 105are no better than fifty-fifty that our present civilization onEarth will survive to the end of the present century withouta serious setback.” 14The CurveHowever scientifically well-founded or eloquent theabove illustrations of the threat to planet Earth and itsdenizens may be, most striking is no doubt the curve of itshuman population growth. “Ten thousand years ago theremay have been at most 2 to 3 million humans scatteredaround the globe. There were no cities, no great populationcenters. There were fewer people on the globe than arenow found in virtually any large city. Two thousand yearsago the number had swelled to perhaps 130 to 200 millionpeople. Our first billion was reached in the year 1800 [i.e.at the time of the first Industrial Revolution]. If we take thetime of origin of our species [Homo sapiens sapiens] as about100,000 years ago, it seems that it took our species 100,000years to reach the billion-person population plateau. Thenthings sped up considerably. We reached 2 billion peoplein 1930, about 1 000 times faster than it took to reach thefirst billion. But the rate of increase kept accelerating. By1950, only twenty years later, we had reached 2.5 billionsouls. In 1999, we hit 6 billion. There will be approximately7 billion people by 2020 and perhaps 11 billion by 2050 to2100.” 15 If the evolution has an aim, it cannot be to providestanding place only for the humans on our globe.Once again we turn to Edward Wilson: “The problembefore us is how to feed billions of new mouths over thenext several decades and save the rest of life at the sametime, without being wrapped in a Faustian bargain that14 Martin Rees: Our Final Century, p. 8.15 Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee: Rare Earth: Why Complex Life isUncommon in the Universe, p. 284.