By Australian Bureau of Statistics Population Clock
25 Million!
Well, we’ve finally made it. An official estimate of the population of Australia is that we reached 25,000,000 people just after 11pm on Tuesday 7th August. You can check the Population clock link above to see where we’re up to.
I remember about 29 years ago going to vote for the first time, and speaking with a young man who represented the population growth party in my area. At the time, the population of Australia was around 17 million, I think. And he told me that for Australia to be viable and commercially competitive with other nations, we really need a minimum population of 125 million.
100 million to go!
Though, at the rate of increase, and the slow rate of building infrastructure to cater for new arrivals, I’d guess we’d finally hit that magic number in about 200 years. In which case, I’m calling it that the 23rd century will be Australia’s century!
Of course, that figure was based on the economics of the time. Now it’s possible for one person to influence millions of people. It’s possible for 25 million people, working together, to compete with countries of billions. And almost anyone can do it at the swipe of a finger. Do we really need more people?
Overpopulation
This planet has far too many people already, and we really need to do something about overpopulation. We’re almost at 8 billion. World Population Clock. If you’ve seen the pictures of refugee camps with hundreds of thousands of starving people, you know that this is already unsustainable. 700,000 Rohingya refugees. 350,000 Congolese refugees.
But things are already starting to happen to balance the planet out, without many people even realizing it.
The Japanese are consistently in the news regarding their socially constructed depopulation drive. (i.e it’s not a government initiative) But they actually rank 13th in population decline, according to Wikipedia. Here’s the list: Latvia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Lithuania, Romania, Ukraine, Portugal, Hungary, Serbia, Georgia, Moldova, Estonia, Japan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Greece, Poland, Belarus, Italy and Puerto Rico. All these countries are taking one for the team and helping the planet by having negative population growth. Perhaps more countries will go negative and help to balance the planet. (Though, as some of those countries are suffering from the results of war, that isn’t an option I recommend other countries to pursue.)
It’s about time we became conscious about population growth, and found more ways to reduce conceptions. Rather than pursue the economic compulsion to create more consumers, aka the human Ponzi scheme, there should be a social compulsion to reduce consumption. Use less, eat less, do less, have less, conceive less, enjoy life with less.
Move to Mars!
Of course, I wouldn’t be worried about an overpopulated planet if we had started exploring other planets 30 years ago. If we had, there’d be regular flights to Mars and back by now.
So, Space X, NASA, I’m looking forward to those flights to Mars. Happy to do my part by reducing the planet’s population by one and helping to create livable cities on Mars to settle more.
Then again, the outback of Australia has about 10,000 square miles of desert and rocks that millions of people could be sent to, to help build multiple cities that they could then live in. Maybe we could get to that 125 million a bit sooner.