Shhh, if you listen carefully, you can hear the first cry of the mathematically precise 8 billionth baby being born. Today, earth officially holds 8 billion people, apart from the vast population of animals and fish and creepy crawlies it supports in life forms. This estimate hopefully includes illegal immigrants, those locked in attics for ‘insanity’, the brain-dead kept clinically alive, and fugitives.
How different the planet must look to any time-traveller from the past, with its teeming crowds. If Adam and Eve were to check into a B&B now, they’d be too frightened to look out of their window! Travelling in a bus in an Indian city makes a global population of 8 billion seem too conservative a figure to quote. We live in a country where overcrowded vehicles routinely turn over on highways, unable to carry the weight of its combined passengers.
The United Nations looks at the year 2080 for reaching 10 billion, and it may take another 15 years to become 9 billion in number, a billion more than today. To a naked eye that seems like a long time, the time taken to make that many more human beings, but in reality, the population explosion only merrily continues on its way. Everything is just like before: people meet people and have sex. Breeding is one of the main by-products of marriages, not to mention biology. Surrogates and IVF treatments are flourishing, and all the old mythological tales of babies being born hither and thither under magical circumstances are coming true in a scientifically sound way.
Cloning, though, did not catch on to the extent we feared, our siblings boringly as flesh and blood as we. Dolly, the first cloned sheep in 1996, said her last baa on Valentine’s Day in 2003. AI, too, is trying its best to insert robots into our midst, as domestic help, as lost limbs, as soul mates – these won’t be counted by census.
Even in the densest throng, however, we are all about maintaining our individuality. The fact that we moved away from joint families to nuclear, went from whatever the uterus gave us to two children or even one child or none as per the norm today, proves that we have grasped the silliness of replicating ourselves ad nauseum. The planet’s resources are dwindling rapidly, we know that, and some of us have decided not to reproduce. From the Catholic church’s displeasure with birth control to China’s one-child policy, somehow this is a place that balances itself when it comes to numerals.
And though musician Bob Geldof had warned long ago, ‘I think the tipping point has been reached. There can’t be more people on the Earth than we can feed,’ we are perhaps the sum total of how many we are. We grow in volume as we speak, taking over every nook and cranny available on this terra firma, and continue to attend baptisms and naamkarans. Destiny or failed contraception – are we accidents or planned? We will never know.
Also see: In Pics | A look at how world population has grown since 1950
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