While world fears have generally centered around the proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weaponry, the major time bomb clicking away is a demographic one. Developed in this work is how under ideal conditions human numbers increase geometrically. Six years after its publication, in 1804, world population first reached one billion people. Just 123 years later the population reached two billion, and in 47 years doubled again to four billion in 1974. In the April 1997 issue of Women's Press the following summation was made.
Serious stresses involving population, resources, and environment are clearly visible ahead.
Despite greater material output, the world's people will be poorer in many ways than they are today. How prophetic was this report, especially given that much of this increase has occurred in the world's developing nations. And let's not forget Paul Ehrlich's warnings of overpopulation in The Population Bomb . See for yourself from the satellite images at Microsoft's Terra Server . According to demographic transition theory, there are five demographic epochs in the history of human population growth which have a profound bearing on such things as the pace of social change, the rate of cultural evolution, or the relative size of dependent populations.