Are we having too many children?

https://www.worldometers.info/

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

The current world population is at 7.75 billion.



There are already countries where they don't even have enough clean water to sustain their population.

Countries like India and also countries in Africa and in South America.

Are we going to be able to produce enough food to feed everyone in the world.

Enough resources needed to generate electricity?

Electricity is generated mostly from coal.

How many decades of coal supply is left in the world?

Nuclear power is a small fraction of how the world gets electricity.

Hydropower plants will not generate electricity if there isn't enough water and water sources like lakes and rivers around the world are drying up.

Also we are so depended on oil for everything, not just to power cars.

So many products are made from oil, many of them most people who uses them every day don't know it's made from oil.

How much oil is left in the world?

Where's Thanos when you need him?

So, what is your point? Should counties that have clean water export there resources and live under the same restrictive rules as overpopulated ones?
Keep the discussion civil.

Electricity is produced by passing a magnetic field across a ferous (spelling) metal winding. Coal can not produce electricity. Coal provides the mechanical movement.
Electricity is a luxury of modern life. Electricity is not required for the human existence. You do not "need" a car to exist. (I drive less the 2K miles per year, so "NEED" a car in Detroit is a per peeve).
Keep the discussion civil.

Lakes can not produce Hydro-Electric power. A "lake" is the storage area for water. Hydro-Electric is produced by the mechanical movement provided by "rivers"
The lakes are drying up? I thought the world was being flooded by the melting of the polar ice caps.
Keep the discussion civil.

Nuclear power is the cleanest for the air, but the byproduct is the longest lasting and most dangerous for the soil.
Keep the discussion civil.

There are many types of "oil". I wonder if plastic is the greatest consumer of petroleum "oil".
Keep the discussion civil.

You are asking questions that do NOT have a yes or no answer. Every human will have a different answer, based upon the experience that there live must follow.
Keep the discussion civil.

A Life lived in Sweden will not be the same as a live liven in Zimbabwe.
Keep the discussion civil.

While we should embrace "inclusion", we should not reject "uniqueness" for the sole purpose of "inclusion"
Keep the discussion civil.

This is the best I could do at a response to your post.

The human existence is is hard. There is no "fair" to be found.
Keep the discussion civil.

Really? Without it, your phone won't work, your computer won't work, for many there will be no heating, cooling, hot water, cooking, food will rot in the fridge.

Many folks, the elderly, the disabled, the chronically ill, depend on electricity at home to run devices to keep them alive: breathing machines, dialysis machines at home, and so on.

Also many water plants are powered by electricity.

Without electricity, soon you won't have water coming out of your faucets and toilet.

History will eventually repeat, only this time we'll likely thin the ranks...

Wrong forum for this. PWEC

I have never owned a cell phone. I never will.
Keep the discussion civil.
Or move it to PWEC ;P

I think we are capable of a civil discussion or such a complex subject.

The Roman's did not have electricity, but they had running water.

edit2:
The elderly and the disabled. Well, Darwin had a theory that fits the human existence. Life is not fair.
Keep the discussion civil.

There is one interesting correlation when it comes to birthrate and you can interpret it any way you wish.

Countries where women have the same standing/rights and education as men in society tend to have lower birthrates while those countries where women are inferior to men in society tend to have higher birthrates.

Good comment PM. The subject header is deep, and the poster's comment make it even more broad.
Keep the discussion civil.

Edit: PM's comments were on track with the subject heading. The discussion was make more broad.

I only have one daughter, who has begged us for a sister. My wife, however, is permanently disabled, thus we are unable to provide her with another. We would like one if we could. Children are a blessing from God, and provided you can care for them and shelter them in a loving home that fosters growth and success, I see nothing wrong with raising a family.


FYI OP, regarding Oil--there are many technologies that have seen tremendous improvement over the last couple of decades such as nuclear and solar. Unfortunately the nuclear technologies are not being permitted to flourish or gain traction. The most promising involves below-ground self-contained traveling wave reactors(a form of a breeder reactor) that use waste fuel, which could power a community of 20k for 50 - 70 years per core. Would you like to know more?

https://terrapower.com/

The second is solar power. While efficiencies are still low in the 20 - 25% range, the technology exists now to build extensive solar farms to power sizeable swaths of the world. Would you like to know more?

http://www.firstsolar.com/en/

First Solar is the leading producer of panels, and at one time constructed entire power plants under contract for power companies, until switching exclusively to panel production. They are the only company in the business that somewhat consistently remains profitable(on-off but overall are fairly healthy). The downside to solar, however, is many of these plants tend to bake the birds that fly overhead. Of course, this is a fantastic opportunity for an all-natural air crisp free roam bird meal joint akin to McDonalds--maybe call it McCaw's.

Both of the above technologies are environmentally friendly and reduce our dependence on oil, leading to better air quality and more opportunity to raise healthy families and adapt to growing electric car usage.

Dependence on oil is a myth. The technologies exist now to divorce us from the MIddle East. We only need to educate the public and embrace these future looking strategies.


And lastly, space based power is still an option through orbital platforms and microwave laser transmission beams. With proper attenuation a measurable amount of solar power from orbit could be transmitted to the ground. Would you like to know more?

https://www.energy.gov/articles/space-based-solar-power




Alas, that was not last on my list. Since you mention overpopulation, you skip over the most important pressing issue of all time. This is the danger of underemployment due to increasing automation and integration of robotic solutions into society. There will come a time over the next thirty to fifty years where mass unemployment could drastically reshape the world. This is an issue that needs to be discussed... now.

" Are we having too many children?"
Not in the developed world it seems, Norway particularly Japan, Scandinavia and here in the UK it is going to be a problem supporting us oldies in our dotage with a shrinking working and tax paying workforce.
I've done my bit, having had four who having graduated work in professions that aid the wider UK population. Get their brains from their mum, I hasten to add, I'm a bit thick and left school at 15.



Wasn't that sure in the early years, thinking of one day after a gruelling 12 hours of work, returning home to find two olders teasing and reducing their younger sister to tears and my poor wife covered in milky vomit with not a baby suit left clean in the house due to the washer packing up and an over-greedy newborn!

Well, there are a couple of draconian measures that will reduce the world population...

1. We all get drawn into another protracted world war and all that entails.

2. Government intervention that prohibits couples from having a large family.

Or, I could also add... we have a worldwide epidemic that wipes out half the worlds population.

None of the above are a politically correct way of addressing the problem, lol!

I don't share the Malthusian world view that the future brings nothing but doom, gloom, mass poverty, and mass starvation. Quite the contrary, pretty much all social indicators show an overall positive trend. In 1960 the worl literacy rate was somewhere in the order of 30...40% (10% for women); today it's close to 90% (and about 85% for women). We were all supposed to starving to death by 1980 (if you were to believe certain Malthusian computer models), and here we have probably the greatest inventor of all time who saved more people's lives than anyone else, [b]Norman Borlaug[/b], a name that everybody should be familiar with, proving the doomsayers wrong (Fritz Haber being one of the very few other scientists playing in a comparable league, except that his life was overshadowed by his leading role in chemical warfare; Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur probably belong into that category as well).
Economic growth is less and less dependant on increased energy consumption. Cell phones are connecting the agrarian societies of Africa, opening to them the vast knowledge pool of the internet. Yes, we're more people, but we're also vastly more educated people who will think of solutions to the world's problems. By today's models the world population will peak in about 80 years, and then start shrinking - possibly too rapidly for comfort (could become quite a disaster for world economy), but that's a problem that our great grand kids will have to deal with. All in all I think that we're too much focused on bad news and pay not nearly enough attention to the positive developments.

Elon Musk doubled down on his theory that the world population is headed for collapse

Japan is in an especially severe situation because its population has been declining steadily since about 2000 and will continue to drop. The nearly non-existent immigration to Japan also compounds the issue.


The Scandinavian countries have actually found a "sweet spot" concerning population growth since even though the birthrate is very low, it's still in positive territory. The Scandinavian countries have also been used to having relatively small populations for a long time anyway. Sweden has the largest population currently at 10.3 million. Heck, that's about half the population of my state of Florida!

Thinking of nieces and nephews, and now their children (some who are about to visit), I'm sure they are. I've never felt regret for not having them, especially with accepting a disproportionate amount of responsibility for taking care of parents. “A man’s got to know his limitations.” – Clint Eastwood. I feel like we made the right decision under our odd circumstances, and fortunately neither of us were wired with strong biological clocks.

I think I could have been a perpetual bachelor and never settle down at all, but I was just so smitten with the girl...and 35+ years later, I still am.

Hey Mark, that's absolutely fine and it's infinitely better for people to NOT have children who simply know it's not for them than for people to have children who are definitely NOT parent material (ie unemployed, uneducated, irresponsible, drug and/or alcohol addiction, criminal record, etc.).

All three of my 'kids' (23, 21 and 17) swear they don't want kids of their own. They have been hearing the doom and gloom of over population since they were toddlers and from talks with them about kids and their future, it has definitely influenced their thinking.

I'm just asking if we are over populating this planet while at the same time we are killing it and will there be enough resources to feed everyone.

I'm not trying to start an argument war.

Understood. Well, let's look at it mathematically. The global population is roughly growing by about 100 million per year. At that rate, the entire surface of the planet will be covered by a human body in a few centuries. Before that happens though, I believe humanity will find ways to curtail that population growth either by authoritarian means via the state or by providing some economic incentives. Thanks to industrialized agriculture I don't foresee any mass starvations any time soon but the one big concern which I believe will come much sooner is unemployment. The combination of population growth with declining demand for labor due to automation/technology/robotization will cause some major upheavals.

Same here, I don't expect to be a Grandad anytime in the foreseeable future; too involved in their burgeoning careers.

No.1 daughter that works as a Dog Charity's behaviorist would give birth to puppies if she could

And one day they will all realize that they actually would have liked to have children, and then it's too late.

It's hard to answer since the future is inherently unknowable. That being said, I remain fundamentally optimistic. The biggest threats are, IMO, first and foremost the decline in biodiversity - an alarming signal that the planetary ecosphere is overtaxed by the combination of a growing human population and less-than-optimal production methods (e.g. importing avocados from Chile or Mexico, Spanish strawberries and tomatos) - followed by political overreactions from the doomsayers (FFF, Exctinction Rebellion, and especially the Marxists who use them as tools) like, "we need to make biofuels mandatory for CO2 neutrality" when this is in direct competition to growing food for the population, resulting in rising food prices that rich people (us) can afford while we're "pricing out" (=starving) the poor in distant countries.

The world population will probably peak at about 10 billion people in about 80 years. This is going to create a considerable load on nature. After that we'll be surprised how quickly the human population will shrink (voluntarily) simply because if you're financially better off, you tend to have fewer children; the most effective contraceptives seem to be TV and the internet, followed by The Pill. Electricity in your home makes for longer evenings with less time for sex. At the same time I think that in the coming 80 years we'll develop a lot of new technologies that will help to reduce the individual person's ecofootprint so that the overall burden on the planetary ecosphere will more or less stay at the current level (which appears unsustainable) - but we only need to hold on for another 100...140 years before the big transition will be over. After that the human world population might shrink to something like 3...5 billion in the long run, at a much reduced toll on nature per person, with a decent chance that nature and wildlife will actually recover from the industrial age.

It's just speculation, of course. But all predictions about the future are speculation. All I'm saying is, any world model that calculates population growth and the use of resources which doesn't take technological progress into consideration - and here you have a very wide spectrum of possible developments - will fail in its predictions in that the predictions are systematically biased towards doom and gloom.

I'd say the odds of the world population shrinking to several hundred million or less from where we are now--i.e. from 7 billion -> 100 million, are much greater than your scenario Ssnake. The robotic revolution will lead to class disparity unlike anything the world has ever seen, with mass extinction of careers and entire fields of work.

I believe human nature is stilted towards self preservation and greed, not generosity. This is a biological trait, not a learned one. Thus I fear that war is the end result and there we may see a purging of humanity on a horrific scale.

The question is... will we be the ones purging each other, or will we last long enough to see true AI surpass us and then be purged by the AI. Of course, the AI could ignore us entirely, but the prospect of mass job loss is very real and almost no career is safe.

So to answer the OP's question, we don't have to worry about the world sustaining the pending population growth because we're already making strides towards solving the problem ourselves, albeit in a less than ideal way.



In order to right our way we must shift global philosophy away from greed and that means defying our DNA.

No. My thoughts on the subject are very similar to Ssnake's. Ingenuity and technology has taken us to the current heights, and I expect that to continue. Or, something(s) [war, disease, etc.] will come along to thin the herds and render the question somewhat moot.

Humanity at any given time typically has some subset of people who correctly perceive problems, and a subset of that group who find / devise solutions. The infrastructure for sharing ideas / information continues to improve, which bodes well for future problem solving... if humanity manages to avoid EMPing itself back to the 18th century, of nuking itself back to an even earlier technology level. Robotics and AI are potentially disruptive to our current economic models, but could also serve to mitigate future problems.



Yes. That is not say everyone will actually get enough. Food goes to waste now, and I doubt that will cease completely.



Well, the originator's intent is only part of the conversation. It is a subject ripe for controversy, but it appears folks are keeping it civil, which is appreciated.

Not likely. Approaching the end of that window of opportunity, I'd think one would be long past knowing what they wanted. 17 - 23 year-olds? Maybe not.

IIRC, we were certain of our decision by age 30. Ages 25 - 28 (Atlanta, GA) would have been the opportune time, getting my brother and his wife to babysit as we often did their kid (up until age 5, when we moved to Jacksonville, FL.).

I do know that the pill and Essure work, unless one of us was broken (no reason to think so). But neither is 100%, only age removes that minuscule worry (just keeping a positive middle-age attitude).

All this reminds me very much of the movie "Idiocracy". The sad thing is that some of it's seemingly ridiculous projections seem to be coming to pass.

Nature seems to try to limit the population. AIDS had a good shot but medical tech and the speed of response slowed it down more than would have happened a hundred years ago. Epidemic diseases have done more to thin the population than anything short of WWI.

Automation is good but what will happen to the people who won't have a job because of it.

No job = no money = no food = a lot of hungry and poor people.

Hungry and poor people have a history of revolting.

Soon even Uber and Lyft drivers and truck drivers that we depend on every day to get all our goods will be out of a job.

They're not the only ones...

Even nurses, doctors and lawyers aren't safe. Computer developers? They should bend over and kiss their asses goodbye. Software engineers? Toast. IT? Gone. Very little is safe. The truck drivers and retail workers will be among the first to feel the pain, but many of the higher cost jobs will be lost afterwards because the bottom line is king.

WW3 is coming,and it'll be a century long war.

One possible future I see is that future governments will charge some kind of "robot tax" on businesses that have widespread automation and then that money will be handed out to those individuals who lost their jobs as a sort of universal basic income.

A well done thread by all!

PM,
Universal basic income is not the answer. I must be honest and say that if you pay me enough to eat and heat my house, I will stop working and spend even more of my time with modding and gaming. The nature of the human animal is survival first and gratification second. The rest of the world's concerns are a distant third place. My example is motorcycle repair. I had a desire to eat, so I spent 35+ years learning that occupation. It ceased to be fun long ago, but I continue because I like to eat. If you feed me, I would never repair another motorcycle, other then my own.

Also, value (income, wealth, taxation. etc) is not created from thin air. Some knowledge or effort must be expended to create it. Where is the incentive for the effort to learn or do. Would Apple, Facebook, Youtube, etc, have been created if the people responsible did not have a personal motivation?

Sorry, I think I have wandered from the original subject.

If WWIII really comes it will be over in an hour.

Just because a job CAN be automated does not guarantee that it will, and generally technologists seem to be too optimistic when it comes to practical applications. That's not to say that it won't happen, but it might happen slow enough that socially compatible mitigation strategies (beyond "learn to code") could work. If robotization is as disruptive as some predict, it's inevitable that there will be countering forces such as robot taxes to finance the unemployment of the unemployables. All our political systems - no matter which country you look at - are stacked against megacorporations. As soon as Facebook is perceived as a threat to political leaders, they start throwing out laws to bring it back under control. Standard Oil was smashed to pieces as was the Bell Corporation, and that didn't happen in Soviet Russia. In fact, megacorporations can usually exist for a longer period only if they are state controlled, in which case they usually are so uncompetitive that eventually they become money sinkholes that even a state is unwilling to keep alive by funelling tax money into them.
From that perspective it appears unlikely the Googlebots will take over all industries and concentrate the power in a single corporation (in fact, Google has yet to prove that they can come up with a single profitable product that is not a search engine).

Sorry but I think my post was misconstrued. Personally I'm against any concept of a "universal basic income" and I agree fully with all the points you made. However, it's my belief that if things get bad enough with very high unemployment rates that most or at least many countries will attempt to implement UBI as a means to preventing major social unrest.

Posted by NoFlyBoy, bottom of first page (I screwed up and replied to the post ot the bottom of the first page without seeing page 2):


I agree; it would seem the discussion has been pretty civil so far. I wish I had time to read it in totality. Good thoughts on all sides of it. We need these sorts of exchanges where people can examine the thoughts of others and really weigh their merits instead of the flame wars so common in much of public discussion.

For my 2 cents worth:

1. There is no question that we live on the surface of a sphere. This is by definition a finite resource. For 3 of the world's major religions, the Book Of Genesis gives man stewardship over creation and it's resources. I see this as a responsibility, not wanton privilege. I wish many gov't. leaders would see their positions the same way.

2. In direct reply to NoFlyBoy, that possibility is real. The question is why? I have come to the conclusion that we don't have economic and resource problems that are even a fraction of our moral problems. You may be surprised to know that, assuming 4 people per family as an average, the entire world's population could be given a decent-sized lot and a house and the total area would not cover all of Texas and Oklahoma. That quick calculation doesn't account for roads and infrastructure needed to support said monstrous housing plan, nor rivers and other areas where building would be impossible, but it puts the actual size of the population in a little more perspective. It's a big world out there.

3. But it's a badly corrupted world. Aid pours out of the US and other developed nations. Sometimes misguided, it actually undermines locals trying to get paid for producing goods that well meaning charities are providing for free. Give a man a fish or teach the man to fish? Other times corruption and civil unrest destroys or steals the aid meant for the poor to enrich thieves and corrupt gov't officials. James Madison (I believe) once said that our US Constitution was fit only for a "religious and self-governing people." Is that not true, really of almost any gov't? We see in the US the legalization of all sorts of vice because that's what the people want and gov't, hungry for power and cash, sees the vice as a revenue stream. Make up any "fair" set of rules, and you'll find people trying to find a way to game those rules and get a leg up on everyone else. And gov'ts around the world are notoriously corrupt.

4. I see in the politics surrounding the global climate change issue, a plan by some parties to eviscerate the developed nations while allowing emissions from developing nations to go unchecked. Smarter heads may prevail, but they seem to see the issue as both a chance to gain control of a lot of wealth, as well as viewing the whole resource thing as a "zero-sum" game. Capitalism* generates wealth and innovation and thus my view is that we bring developing nations up, not pull ourselves down. Many of the power generation proposals (that is my industry) simply aren't feasible. But here the moral problems of humanity are in sharp focus: we could generate much more power, and end up with radioactive by-products with a much lower half-life (as low as 500 years) if we could go through the full fuel cycle. But we don't trust each other enough to allow production of plutonium. The thorium cycle similarly produces very low half-life waste and yet only China is working on it, to my knowledge.

*I note though, that capitalism without compassion is as carnivorous as any other system; but at it's basis is the fairest system, I think.

Well, again, keep it civil. My intention is to contribute as well, not inflame tempers.

I watched a documentary about the oceans recently.

In it they say we are going to run out of seafood soon.

Too many countries that don't regulate their seafood industry and allow anyone with a boat to throw down a net and bring up everything the net catches while it's scraping the ocean floor.

Everything in the net that's not part of the seafood that can be sold for consumption will be thrown back and most of the time by the time it's thrown back, it's all already dead.

For example if that fishing boat is part of the industry that makes money from catching shrimp, it will keep the shrimp that's caught in the net and everything else is thrown back: crabs, starfish, shellfish like clams and oysters and mussels, other type of fish of all size shape and color, even sea turtles.

The documentary also say that's why in recent years we started eating fish that at one time we wouldn't even look at once like Tilapia and Carp.

I've always had a problem with doomsayers (especially when doomsaying brings in the grant money and/or political power), but in this case there is a problem with the way they are fishing, so what is the answer? Better regulation? How do you regulate a boat at sea, how do not catch certain things in a net and only catch what you want? Do you put an officer on every boat? Here again may be a moral problem - people don't care. There may be ways to do better, but who cares? Cheap quick and dirty does the trick. And again, you said countries that don't regulate, and I typically associate that with less developed countries that couldn't enforce the regulations anyway. To be honest, though I shouldn't say too much here, it's not an area I'm very familiar with.

You know at one time shrimp and lobster were considered garbage fish and were fed to slaves and such?

Yes, Sir.

I've heard about that about the lobsters.

Same for beef fajita meat: the skirt steak part of the beef's belly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skirt_steak

It used to be considered garbage.

After the cow is slaughtered for the prime cuts, the skirt steak is given to the hired help the cattle ranchers hired to help them herd the cows, most of them were Mexican.

Now it got to the point that you go to most restaurants and order beef fajita, many restaurant don't use the skirt steak.

There is not enough of it on each cow to meet the demand of 1000 of restaurants around the country that serve fajitas.

I don't eat a lot of Mexican food and when I do go to a Mexican restaurant, all I ever order is beef fajita.

But I always ask the server what cut of beef they use for their beef fajita and that I will only order it if they use the actual skirt steak.

Many of them give me a puzzled and confused look.

I have been to restaurant that use the cheapest cut of beef for their fajita and still charge $16-20 for a plate with not even 1/2 lb of meat on it.

The prospect of a world without an abundance of...

- Rock music/concerts
- Pleasant women
- Seafood

...makes me sad.

There's always farm raised fish.

I've been hitting the shrimp and salmon hard lately, also oysters (it's not crawfish season). Catfish is also a trash fish, love it all (I could live on seafood, but would miss chicken).

My GF loves tilapia and catfish.

I wouldn't touch it.

I eat salmon and tuna (fresh, not in a can).

Fried or blackened catfish is pretty darn good in my opinion.

But speaking of seafood and its alleged scarcity, I thought that was the purpose of the farm raised stuff? It makes sense to me. The more seafood you grow and raise on farms would hopefully mean less of it being taken from the oceans.

Tsk, tsk, tsk..

Always about "the children", and the people who use them as human shields...

Children themselves, who never emotionally or logically grew up...

People who say all life is "blessed", and then dictate how they should live or die...

I made no personal attacks here. I followed the rules.

But surely I'll be banned for speaking truth....

There used to be a restaurant here many years ago that would take a whole fresh catfish that's been gutted and scaled but still has its head, tail, bone and fins.

they would dip it in batter and flour it and tehn fry it.

It was so good!

Now you go to most restaurants and order fried catfish,

the catfish is a filet that's usually frozen and then thawed out.

Some places go even cheaper.

The catfish is already covered in flour and breadcrumbs, frozen, and then it's thrown into the deep fryer like frozen french fries.

.??.

What "truth"?
That non-sequitur of your prophecy of a third world war?

You may believe its inevitability, but that doesn't make it inevitable, or "the truth". Just another doomsaying prophecy.

Looks like it's going to be tilapia for dinner.

I'll just have a ham and cheese sandwich.

I don't eat trash fish.

"One man's trash..."
Barny Miller was fantastic. And Jack Soo was a BIG reason.

Still not PWEC. Congrats to us all. I will try to keep this short. I hope it is to the point.

HumanDrone mentioned the key words "Stewardship" and "finite". I agree, we exist within a finite source of resources. It is our duty to regulate how we consume these resources. I see this as the moral issue, but I think the quick calculations of population area are 2D. Did you consider that urban areas have an elevation dimension that is not calculated in the footprint?

To make it short, we (as a species) have to move to the stars.

My opinion:
Corruption, aka evil, is part of the human animal. No legislation, or psycho therapy can remove this from the animal. We are part of nature. Nurture is limited AND dictated by societal norms. It can not be eliminated and the basic existence is not willing to fight against it.

Even with moral values and constricted expanse, the human animal can not exist upon this sphere infinitely. It is my opinion that we need to continue to reach for the stars. This is the only insurance for unlimited expansion of the race (human!), both population and psychologically. If not, the cost will be the loose of unique and personal growth. The finite globe ensure the death of growth.

OG, I must be that type of person, I almost understand the post.

"always" = least common denominator of the argument.

"Children themselves, who never emotionally or logically grew up..."
That can be a valid counter point. My opinion is off subject, so I do not say at this time.

"People who say all life is "blessed", and then dictate how they should live or die..."
I believe they were trying to point to hypocriticle. ( I suck at spelling!)

If this derails the original discussion, please ignore or delete.

I fully agree with this. It will most certainly not happen in my lifetime but I can see humanity settling on the moon and maybe Mars within the next 200-300 years.