Modern medicine has added years to a person life expectancy. More people are living longer, illness free lives thanks to advances in antibiotics and disease prevention.
The graph to the left shows the change in population over the past 209 years. As you can see, a sharp increase in the rate of growth of the population occurs around 1950, which is when vaccines came available for many deadly childhood diseases. Going to school in Vermont I know people are going to hate me for saying this: genetically modified foods may be a good thing. Thanks to genetically modified foods, crops can be grown where crops have never been able to be grow. Also they are more affordable and today's crops have a higher yield of usable substance to them than food from before genetic modification. Monsanto, the worlds leading supplier of genetically modified crops, helps developing countries with their rice. They are actually donating their seed to countries that have a food shortage. These crops have been engineered to be able to grow in harsher climates and even have been engineered to produce vitamins.
Today's way of life in developing countries is incredibly easy compared to the way of life in developing countries. We are even at the point where we can buy a robot to vacuum our floor, as if that task wasn't easy enough. A lot of people would be happy enough just to say they even have a floor. We could be on the cusp of having machines do all of our work for us.
While it may be good that humans are now living longer than ever, we may be set to exceed the Earth's carrying capacity if we haven't already. We can attempt to modify the carrying capacity as much as we can by creating genetically modified foods and planting them where plants haven't been able to live before, but eventually we will reach a wall. Eventually we wont be able to sustain anymore people. Science and technology have been good to us so far and helped us live much longer than our ancestors. However, our science and technology may soon come to haunt us.
Sources:
"Monsanto to Offer Free Rice Tech." Wired News. Web. 06 Sept. 2010. .
"Population of the Earth since 1900 - Wolfram|Alpha." Web. 06 Sept. 2010. .
"A Science Odyssey: Then Now: Medicine and Health." PBS. Web. 06 Sept. 2010. .
Jacob, I completely agree with everything that you said on this post. Many people don't understand that our generation and future generations are in. We purchase clothes, food, electronics...items that we truly don't need in order to have temporary pleasure and happiness by doing so. We don't realize that in a short amount of time it will all become waste that will pollute our earth and will never compost into the earth. Another way we are selfish, is by having children. It's true that adopting a child is not the same as having one of your own, but I believe that we don't have enough resources to support the current trend of families having five babies, and there is no way this will be able to continue without serious consequences in the future.
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