It's crazy to think that just in the 1920's there were only 2 billion people and now there's over 7 billion. It's only been about 90 years... 5 billion extra people in 90 years... that's so insane. A 71% increase...
We didn't even reach 1 billion until 1800. There was a small spike in population around 500BC and again at around year 1000 after which there were a few small spikes every 150-200 years or so until until about 1950 when it just shot up like a bottle rocket.
And who's to blame?
The governments. All the ~20 year old soldiers came back from the war having lived through the Great Depression they were rewarded by the government, in the US in the form of the
G.I. Bill of Rights.
From Wikipedia:
This bill encouraged home ownership and investment in higher education through the distribution of loans at low or no interest rates to veterans.
Returning veterans married, started families, pursued higher education, and bought their first homes. With veteran's benefits, the twenty-somethings found new homes in planned communities on the outskirts of American cities. This group, whose formative years covered the Great Depression, was a generation hardened by poverty and deprived of the security of a home or job. Now thriving on the American Dream, life was simple, jobs were plentiful, and a record number of babies were born. Many Americans believed that lack of post-war government spending would send the United States back into depression. However, consumer demand fueled economic growth. The baby boom triggered a housing boom, consumption boom and a boom in the labor force. Between 1940 and 1960, the nation's GDP jumped more than $300 million. The middle class grew and the majority of America's labor force held white-collar jobs. This increase led to urbanization and increased the demand for ownership in cars and other 1950s and 1960s inventions.
In the United States more babies were born during the seven years after 1948 than the previous 30, causing a shortage of teenage babysitters. Madison, New Jersey, for example, only had 50 high-school girls to babysit for a town of 8,000, and any sitter could have had two sitting jobs at once if desired. $5 of the $7 that a California couple spent to go to the movies in 1950 went to the babysitter.
Similar things were done in other countries.
The moral of the story? If you have a genocide don't reward soldiers by making their lives ridiculously easier once they come home.
~72
million people died in WWII, and then in the 20 years that followed over a
billion babies were born. ~4.5 billion in ~60 years.
Insane...My conclusion? Anyone who thinks that genocides are actually good for the world since they reduce the population.... is fucking stupid.... since they appear to have a direct correlation to the exact opposite.
Anyways, this is all very useful for
the story I'm writing. If I want to increase the population all I have to do is make everyone's lives amazing after a long and bloody war with about a decade of terrible times. If I don't want to increase it all I have to do is not do them any favors and just let them be kinda fucked by all the death and destruction that ensued.
Hmm.... what to do...
I suppose I could make their lives easier and also help them along with technology that'd make population irrelevant but if I'm going to do that then the ~5 billion death count seems a bit pointless, aside from cleaning the gene pool a bit. I mean either way I'd probably need to kill over a billion people just to ensure everything afterwords runs smoothly, probably more... then again, something like 2 out of 7 billion is a lot less severe than 5 out of 7 billion.
I guess it'd be a lot easier of a decision to make if I
were a god since I could just run simulations of the scenarios and see which play out like I want. I mean, it doesn't really matter anyways... I have magic fingers. Anything I type becomes the truth in their reality anyways, so regardless of what stupid scenario I use they have no way of fighting back. It's kinda amusing writing about being a god while in the act of writing you have an absolute god power... just with the thought of it you can erase entire chapters from history. Well, and a well placed mouse click and a backspace... but still!
I wonder if I should give humans the information necessary for FTL travel or if I should just create some wormholes leading between Earth and a few hundred earth-like inhabitable planets...
