According to the U.S. Census Bureau's World Population Clock, global population surpassed the milestone of 6.5 billion people last week. And while population growth rates are declining in the industrialized world, they are still ballooning in the regions that can least afford it. India, now the second most populous nation, is expected to surpass China in 2050.

“On average, 4.4 people are born every second,” according to a Live Science article. “The population on Earth today is nearly four times the number in 1900” – meaning tremendous new pressures on the planet’s resources have arisen in just one century. Here’s another staggering statistic from Wikipedia: “Approximately one fifth of all humans that have existed in the last six thousand years are currently alive.”

All this can be seen in a positive light, however: An article in The Ottawa Citizen says that the planet is managing to cope better with the population pressures than expected my many experts. Doomsayer Paul Ehrlich, for instance, predicted in his book, The Population Bomb, that scads of people would starve to death in the 1970s and 1980s. Thomas Malthus, published a 1978 Essay on the Principle of Population predicting that even that first billion people on earth spelled disaster. Don’t assume, however, that mounting population pressures won't become crippling in the future.

Photo credit: Canada.com, The Associated Press