What can we do with overpopulation?

Answer 1

This problem, assuming it is one, will take care of itself. Western Europe and the United States have shown a clear trend: When countries get richer, their populations initially boom, then their growth rates drop. Western Europe's population is actually falling below replacement levels. The United States is still growing, but slowly.

Countries like China and India will boom for a bit as they integrate with the rest of the world and abandon socialism, but those populations will stabilize after a few decades.

No country on Earth is going to voluntarily surrender prosperity or agree to forego it in the name of saving the planet, particularly when they know that other nations are not going to do the same thing. The only way to keep people happy is to find more resources. A space program that would give us access to the resources of the asteroid belt is probably the best way to secure humanity's future. The belt has all of the water, metal and carbon we need to keep people happy for millenia.

Answer 2

The concerns with overpopulation is that there are getting to be too many people for each of us to get enough resources to live our lives free of hunger and disease. To have the energy to manufacture goods and keep warm. To have places to live, water to drink, social amenities like schools and hospitals. To many of us for all our waste to be treated.
The answer to overpopulation is to maintain the number of people to the point that there is enough of a population to create the social and lifestyle conditions we want, but not so many that the resources cannot meet their needs
That gets us to the biggest problem with finding or enacting a solution:
Overpopulation is a problem usually expressed as there being too many of "them". "We" are okay.
As a consequence all of the answers to overpopulation are met with the same responses as the proposals for control of global warming:

• There is no problem.
• Why should "we" put ourselves out when "they" are just going to eat up any improvement we make.
• We're okay, let "them" solve their own problems.
• We will eventually solve the problem without population control by developing new technical answers
• It's too big to tackle.

Observations of nature suggest that the problem of overpopulation will eventually sort itself out. When any population gets too big it suffers from a massive die off due to disease or social stress. In the case of human beings we could add war to the list. This could get messy as these solutions will impact everybody, not just "them". Also there is a tendency for natural or uncontrolled solutions to over-correct the problem. Instead of our present several billion folks we could end up with a few hundred thousand - enough to breed and continue the species, but not enough to continue the civilization or the technology.
So what can we do? As individuals, very little. As individual countries, not much more. As a majority of the human race maybe.
We'd have to agree to:

• Work together for a solution.
• Share what we have until we get to the solution.
• Abide by the solution after it is available.

The"solution" is the hard part. Writers of Science Fiction have come up with man, but none seem overly pleasant. Controlling birth by universal Birth Control, licensing or social pressure is often mentioned. Reducing medical care for the infirm is a potential solution that flies in the face of humanitarians. Some writers even suggest making life or death lottery choices a routine event