There are currently 7,846,214,440 people living on this earth. In of itself, that number is mind-boggling to say the least, but what’s even crazier is how we got here. For the first 200,000 years of human existence, give or take a few centuries, there were less than 1 million people. In 1804, everything changed when we finally crossed into seven figures. From there, the growth has continued at an exponential rate, which for those of you not taking calculus (I don’t blame you), is very fast. These numbers are great and magnificent, but what the numbers represent for our collective future is the problem.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out there are a limited amount of resources available on this earth. From water, food, fossil fuels, oxygen, even the land we exist on, it seems there is an infinite amount of finite things on our planet. Eventually, we’re going to run out of one. It may not be this generation’s problem, or even the next’s, but it will happen.

First natural materials used for everyday life will become incredibly scarce. This will surely incite massive wars and unending conflict over these resources, which will probably be unsolvable by diplomatic methods. As we fight these battles and expand all over the planet, preserved ecosystems and natural wonders will slowly die out, threatening thousands of species with extinction. The rarer our necessities of life become, the more they will cost, as stated by supply and demand. With higher costs, families will be pushed into poverty until only the rich have anything left of life we might consider normal. As our cities get crowded with this influx of newly impoverished peoples, pandemics will become normal as sanitary living becomes impossible. If humanity makes it this far, lucky us, because next comes starvation, and finally after all these years of existence, extinction. Not by something cool like an asteroid, alien invasion or robot uprising, but by something lame, and entirely, easily, preventable.

And that’s just it. Overpopulation is preventable! There are in fact a variety of doable, agreeable steps we as a species can take to once again, survive. Perhaps the easiest, and most beneficial to everyone, is a focus on education. In a lot of male-dominated societies like those found in western and southeast Asia, as well as sub-saharan Africa, girls are not given equal opportunity towards education as boys. It is a known fact that girls who receive less education are more likely to have children early, and more of them. In a more general sense, a nucleus to this restructuring would include sexual education being taught widespread in third world countries, where the majority of the population growth is coming from.

Something that has always amazed me since I was a kid was that it cost money to adopt. This is entirely backwards from the way I believe it should be. Families should be praised and benefited for adopting children; there should be no penalty or strings to pull. According to the Children’s Bureau, there were over 400,000 kids in the foster care system in the United States alone! On another note, while instituting a mandatory one-child policy like China would never work, it would be a good idea to give things like tax benefits to families that had two or less children.

Regardless of the methods we choose, there needs to be a coordinated, group effort by all members of this planet if we are to save ourselves. Since I was little, I’ve always dreamed of having my own kids and starting a big family, but as I’ve matured I realized how much I want to adopt. Plus, then I won’t have to deal with a pregnant wife. As I am writing this, the world population has now reached 7,846,219,772, which for anyone too lazy to check, is 5,332 babies born in the hour or so I took to write. Let’s make the world better for them.