With a current world population of 6.8 billion, projected to be 9 billion by 2050, what will our lives be like in another fifty years? Our consumption is causing scarcity of resources, food production is struggling to meet demand, almost everything we do destroys delicate ecosystems and our greenhouse gas emissions keep growing.
Meanwhile, we all believe in a basic human right to reproduce. This UTSpeaks presents a diverse panel of UTS experts to speculate on a future where overpopulation may be the key force impacting every aspect of human life.
Bio
Dexter Dunphy
Dexter Dunphy joined the University of Technology Sydney in January 2000 as Distinguished Professor.
His main research and consulting interests are in the management of organisational change, human resource management and corporate sustainability. He also has a special interest in comparative management, particularly in East Asia where he has travelled widely. His research is published in over 60 articles and 15 books, including the Australian best sellers (with Doug Stace) Under New Management: Australian Organisation in Transition, and Beyond the Boundaries: Leading and Re-creating the Successful Enterprise (also with Doug Stace). Dexter's most recent book is The Sustainable Corporation: Organisational Renewal in Australia (co-authored with Andrew Griffiths). Dexter has consulted to over 150 private and public sector organisations in Australia and abroad.
His consulting includes advising on major organisational transformation and transitions, design of human resource strategies and systems, 'trouble shooting' and conflict resolution. He has also thirty years experience in working with senior executives, managers and other professionals in enhancing their managerial skills through executive workshops, consulting and counselling.
Derek Eamus
Derek Eamus is a plant physiologist and ecophysiologist who has worked mostly on tree species for the past 15 years. For the decade 1990-2000 he worked on savanna ecophysiology, through the CRC for Tropical Savannas and the Northern Territory University.
He has been keen to have projects that integrate measurements over several spatial scales. For example, his lab has undertaken measurements of leaf scale processes (photosynthesis and transpiration) and leaf scale attributes (specific leaf area, foliar Nitrogen content, cost-benefit analyses of leaves); tree-scale processes and attributes (whole tree water-use; growth rate, allometric relationships; hydraulic architecture and xylem embolism); stand scale processes and attributes (canopy exchange of water and CO2; leaf area index) and catchment scale processes (vegetation and groundwater interactions).
He was recently appointed to the Chair of Environmental Sciences at UTS where he continues his interests in plant physiology and ecophysiology, working at cellular, whole organism and ecosystem scales.
Peter Manning
Manning was invited to the UTS Journalism Faculty in 2001 as an Adjunct Professor following a distinguished 30-year career in Australian journalism. He had been Head of Current Affairs at the Seven Television Network (1997-2000), Head of ABC Radio National (1993-5) and head of ABC Television News and Current Affairs (1989-92).
Between 1985 and 1989 Manning was Executive Producer of the prize-winning "Four Corners", specializing in investigative reporting. Prior to that, he had been a television, radio and print reporter in ABC television and radio, the "Sydney Morning Herald" and "The Bulletin" He was trained at John Fairfax and Sons Ltd.
In 2004, he joined the Faculty as a member of the academic staff as a Senior Lecturer. He taught Investigative Journalism, Advanced Print Features, Television Journalism. In the same year he undertook a Doctorate of Philosophy examining representations of Arabic and Muslim people in Sydney's media.
Jill McKeough
Professor Jill McKeough has been Dean of the Law Faculty at UTS since 2005 and has extensive university leadership and management experience. From 2002 McKeough was a Professor of Law at the University of New South Wales and held the positions of Head of School, Associate Dean (Undergraduate) and Director of Postgraduate Students.
McKeough has written and taught primarily in intellectual property (copyright, designs, patents, trade marks, confidential information, biotechnology and indigenous cultural heritage) as well as torts, commercial law, consumer protection, legal system and legal history. McKeough has written a number of books, three of which have been published in up to four editions. Her research, including scholarly articles and government reports, has resulted in major policy developments and law reform.
Michelle Rumsey
Michele Rumsey is the Director of Operations and Development for the WHO Collaborating Centre for Nursing, Midwifery and Health Development at UTS.
Paul Willis
Paul Willis has had many weird and wonderful jobs over the past 10 years including a stint as the Curator of Vertebrates at the Macleay Museum in the University of Sydney and a couple of years touring Australia with a life-size inflatable Tyrannosaurus rex as part of a primary school education program.
In 1992-93, Willis spent nearly 9 months in Bonn, Germany, as part of an exchange program where he drank too much beer and measured lots of dead crocodiles. The music in this period is completely forgettable.
In early 1997 Willis landed a traineeship with the ABC as a Science Broadcaster and has been annoying people with a microphone ever since. His radio achievements so far include The Correx Files for Triple J, a regular talkback segment with Angela Catterns on the metro stations and articles for The Science Show, Earthbeat and The Health Report.
First of all, nuclear power plants are far from being safe. There are around 7 incidents per years in Europe. The fact that most of them go unnoticed doesn't mean that they are not happening. Energy providers do not want you to know about it. Forsmark in Sweden was shut down 3 minutes before meltdown. And they have been very fortunate that auxilliary power came to life 3 minutes before it was too late. Until today, the engineers don't know, why the aux-power at Forsmark has restarted. This is the ingenuity by which hyper-dangerous technology is run.
Have you ever considered to ask for WHAT the power is used? We are wasting 80& of it to fill the wallets of the power providers. Around 70% gets of the energy gets lost on its way to transformation. Light, cooking ovens, heating systems, air condition, etc. All build in a way to waste as much energy as possible.
Another point is the energy-intense processing of uranium. Nobody seems to take the energy into account when talking about the efficiency of uranium fuel. In my opinion 50% of the energy bound to a uranium pellets (around 20 tons of coal) has been invested to create the pellet. Nobody mentions that.
Last but not least the uranium reserves would barely cover 2050's demands, because all effectively extractable uranium will be gone by 2040.
Geo-thermal is the way to go. The earth provides power in our reach in zetawatts dimension. One year of our planets heat in the upper crust would provide fuel for 7 billion people and for 10,000 years. And you can harvest it everywhere on the planet, making villages and cities independent from energy delivered from outside. This is what I call modern.
I agree with you. Given the ancient technology of using steam, nuclear power plants are not modern. Safety regulations are embarrassingly blind to 80% of possible failures.
Our inability to cope with the consequences of a disaster is the second problem. A third issue is the imposibility to store nuclear waste for 200 million years in a safe place. Nobody knows what political circumstances will pop up within the next 5 years. How could one know what will happen in 500 or 10,000 years? Anyone who claims to know that nuclear waste dumps are safe is simply mad.
If one want to heat water it'd be much cheaper and safer to use geo-thermal energy. There is a reactor in the core of our planet. Why not using this one? Geothermal energy also makes the transport of energy via cross-conutry lines obsolete. Each city or village can have its own power plant. The exhaust consists of water-steam. No radioactivity, no fire, no danger. In my opinion there is absolutely no case for nuclear power. Nuclear power plants is a male madness. They just want to have it - at any price.
Actually, modern nuclear power plants are quite safe. All new plants are designed so that they are incapable of the kind of spectacular failures they are associated with in the public perception.
However, I would agree that we don't need nuclear power, since conventional renewable sources can more than meet energy demand, and a combination of different technologies allows stable baseload power to be maintained.
There are a lot of interesting ideas in this programme, but nanotechnology and human-applied biotechnology were conspicuous by their absence. Plus, it seems like a device that could interface globally with the nervous system would have deep implications in other fields, not least in artificial intelligence and reverse-engineering of the human brain.
A resurgance of religious fundamentalism seems peculiar, especially since free flow of information has been seen to encourage non-religious and liberally religious viewpoints.
I disagree about having nuclear power for the future. The power plants age, and they can have accidents that affect the planet world wide with radiation. So, let the young people develop a safe and sustainable technology. And as far as women being better educated throughout the world, that is great, but not to reduce world population. The men are the ones who should get vasectomies or take pills to slow down their swimming sperm which are the ones that impregnates the egg. The collapse itself, rather than nature, will come by the electrosmog pollution and the diseases it causes to all living things. Best...natural, organic foods, make sure that chip is not a metal, as then you will become EHS presenatly due to the radiation from non-ionizing radiation. A lot of the concepts are interesting for the year 2050...but ask the younger generation for their ideas please.
What a pile of trash! Be very careful when people automatically assume that more humans equals devastation and misery. Humans are now seen in the west as a virus that needs to be erradicated, the problem is that Africa has the fastest growing poulation so they will be the first to get a bullet in the head not the west.
member. 
