To illustrate the magnitude of this problem we're facing today, I'll show this image from a java applet population clock (available for download here, it will run in your browser, off your hard drive). It's also available in various places on the web and was modified by my friend Michael Gilpin, who teaches conservation biology at UC San Diego. It shows the approximate number of human beings on earth at this moment, a little over 6 billion. So, your assignment for today is to write down the number there are right now and at the end of my talk write down the number at that time and see how many more people have been added to this planet during my lecture.

This represents an average birthrate of about 5, minus a death rate of about 2 per second. So, the global population is increasing at about 3 people per second. We've got 6 billion now and some scientists have estimated that the earth has a carrying capacity of about 12 billion: twice as many. If there were 12 billion people, unless we were able to create food from outer space or something, we'd be all subsisting with a minimum of resources. So most scientists, including myself, feel that the earth is already highly over-populated. Evidence of this can be seen in what is happening to other species. Mainly, they're beginning to go extinct, like the bivalves in the Gulf of California.

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