Tuesday 07 / January / 2025
What are the biggest threats and challenges facing the world? Are the United States of America, Israel, neo-Nazis, or nuclear bombs the great threats and challenges? The answer to all of this is none of that. Nuclear war could have positive consequences for the world and its people.
According to the American and European mentality, unlike Muslims, they do not mind exterminating the world’s population by exposing them to weapons of mass destruction. They expect that a nuclear war is likely to kill three-quarters of the world’s population and that it would be a positive approach to alleviate the burden of uncontrolled population growth. Certainly not all peoples of the world would agree to such a cruel act. If they executed this scenario, I would call them maniacs.
In my opinion, the biggest threat is the demographic time bomb, or in other words, rapid population growth in almost every country in the world. Take Oman and India as examples. Before 1970, the Sultanate’s population ranged between 600,000 and 700,000 people. Today, at the beginning of the year 2025 the population of the Sultanate has become 5 million people, which means that it has increased seven times or more in 54 years.
The population of undivided India in 1947 was about 390 million, and after partition, there were 330 million people in India, 30 million in West Pakistan, and 30 million in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Today, India’s population is 1.450 billion, which exceeds that of China. India is, therefore, the most populous country in the world, with a population of one-sixth of the world’s population. I can’t imagine what life will be like in India a hundred years from now.
Let us now look at the world population in 2024 and what it could be in 2037. On 31st December 2024, the Oman Observer magazine reported the following statistics related to the world’s population: (The world population will reach about 8.156 billion people in 2024, an increase of about 8 million people over last year (8.023 people), according to estimates by the German World Population Foundation. The United Nations expects that the world population will exceed nine billion people in 2037. While the world population is likely to rise to 10 billion people in the second half of this century). This means that the world’s population increases by about a billion people every 12.5 years, but the 12.5 figure will gradually fall below that period. The number of increases in births is about 22,000 births per day, according to the magazine’s statistics.
Imagine what the situation of food, the global economy, and unemployment will be like 100 years from now? In America and the West, it is believed that if a planet similar to Earth is not discovered, there will be no choice but to provoke a nuclear war that is expected to destroy three-quarters of the world’s population. There is no doubt that the option of nuclear war would not be acceptable to any country or individual in the world, yet it is possible for any country possessing such a weapon to use it without asking permission from any source. As for the distribution of the Earth’s population on a discovered planet that has the same environment as Earth, if it exists, what is the means to transport humans from Earth to there? There is no doubt that this project is considered a failure. What is the alternative solution to combat global population growth?
It is time to seriously consider and plan for strict birth control measures within the limits of the number of deaths, i.e. the number of births should not exceed the number of deaths. Each country should implement this strategy separately, and complete the easy and cheap technology to convert seawater into drinking water and agricultural products, which will make more land available for agricultural products for survival and continuation of life for the next few hundred years.
I expect that many countries will have no choice but to adopt socialist policies, whether they like it or not, as is the case in Cuba today, where the state controls and all profesionals, skilled and unskilled workers are employed in the public sector including barbers, taxi drivers and others who work in similar professions.
Everyone receives a salary that covers only the family expenses. This is how Cuba has survived the harsh and draconian economic sanctions imposed by the United States since the 1959 revolution.
Such a situation will face the inhabitants of the Earth after a hundred years, and this is a reality whether they accept it or not, as the inhabitants of the world will have no other choice, unless there is an improvement in the cultivation of food crops and an increase in the production of fresh water.
* The author is Corporal Sultan’s Armed Forces (Retired).
This is a translation of the Arabic article translated by the author and published on 1.1.2025 in the Times of Oman’s sister magazine Al-Shabiba.
