Getting Crowded Here

Despite wars and a falling birth rate, the population of the world will probably double within the next 70 years to about 5 billion people, the Population Reference Bureau estimated this week. Reason: medicine and technology are letting people live longer.

Still, such prophecies have been wrong before: Abraham Lincoln, on the basis of population growth in his day, estimated that the U.S would have a population of 250 million by 1930, and turned out to have predicted twice too many.

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