When we believe about futurism , often we imagine cut - bound applied science like bionic arms or weather machine for colonizing Mars . But if we really want to make it for another few 100 , we ’re going to take something that Iran has already bring forth .
To read Iran ’s find , we need to go back in prison term to 1993 , when President Obama ’s science adviser John Holdren was endeavor to figure out how bighearted the public ’s universe could get before there was a major vigor crisis . A respected environmental scientist , Holdren offer up a famous scenario found on the world ’s population at that time .
Peak Population
At that time , Earth held 5.5 billion mass ( compared to today ’s 7 billion ) , who consumed 13 terawatts of energy annually . Of course , they were not ware equally : the great unwashed in the developing public consumed on average 1 kilowatt per person , while people in the highly-developed world consumed 7.5 . Holdren paint a picture that given current universe ontogeny rate , the public would need 8 times more free energy to fire its 14 billion people by the remnant of the twenty - first one C . Which would mean entire prostration of the ecosystem , peak oil , and in all probability both .
That sounded crazily horrific , so Holdren asked what would happen if the population only boom to 10 billion , and everybody had equal access to Department of Energy . Even if everybody only used on average 3 kilowatts , the world would still need 30 terawatts of vigor annually by the goal of the twenty - first 100 .
The result ? The Ehrlichs and Daily find that the most the planet could bear at that level of vigour exercise would be 2 billion citizenry , roughly the world ’s population in the 1930s .

Iran’s Simple Solution
Confronted with issue like that , it ’s tempting to bemuse up your hand and give up on human race ’s hereafter . How could we ever get the populace ’s universe back down to 2 billion from its current 7 billion ? Actually , it can be done — and it ’s been done before , on a smaller scale .
A few years before Holdren described his universe scenario , there was already one country in the world whose leadership were deeply disquieted about the economic and environmental costs of spring up universe . In Iran , during the 1980s battle with Iraq , the Ayatollah Khomeini plant new government regulations that encourage women to have as many tyke as they could to construct a “ Twenty Million Man Army . ” As a result , Iran ’s universe grow from 37 million the great unwashed in 1979 , to 50 million in 1986 . This was , according to journalist Alan Weisman , “ the gamy rate of universe increase the existence had ever seen . ”
Weisman , the author of The World Without Us , writes about Iran ’s incredible growth in his late book about overpopulation , calledCountdown . By the ending of the 1980s , government workers in Iran ’s budget authority realize that the nation was headed for a major economical crisis , not to mention a resourcefulness crisis . The palmy universe was set to outstrip the country ’s resources . But after a series of secret meetings with the Ayatollah , a grouping of demographers , budget experts , and the wellness diplomatic minister managed to convince their loss leader that something needed to be done , and it had to be done fast .

They ask to bring Iran ’s population back down to manageable levels . And so , after the state of war ended in 1988 , the Ayatollah give his blessing to Iran ’s Ministry of Health to set up a family planning program that would revolutionize his country .
It started with a slogan : “ One is good . Two is enough . ” This became the rallying cry in mosques , and in the many family provision clinics set up by the Ministry of Health . Workers with the Ministry , many of them women , were dispatched to every city in Iran , as well as even the midget village . They had one authorisation , which was to offer free contraceptive method — from condoms to sterilisation subprogram — to any individual who want them .
Nobody was forced to apply contraceptives , nor were there any limits rank on how many children citizenry could have . But women flock to the health care workers . Battered by the warfare , facing economical hardships , most women opted to be unsex after having two child . Others wanted to carry on their instruction after being reveal to the family preparation year offered in local healthcare center . More and more women determine to read , and more went off to college . By 2012 , 96 percent of women in Iran could read — up from about 33 percent in 1975 . And at least a third of governing actor were women .

Best of all , the population increment had reversed . In 2000 , Iran ’s birthrate reached alternate floor of 2.1 kid per woman . In 2012 , the average woman had 1.7 youngster . After checking on these number using an independent mathematical group of demographer , the UN was so impressed that Iran ’s health curate was grant a United Nations Population Award .
Photo by Vihad Salemi / AP
Even when a raw governing regime came to power in Iran , and tried to wheel back these healthcare policies , the population numbers stay to overlook down to sustainable levels . Too many women had become educated and enter the manpower — it was out of the question to restart the policies that head to the babe explosion of the 1980s .

no matter of what happens next , we have grounds that in one generation , a magnanimous and religious land like Iran was capable to lower its pace of universe growth enormously . And it was accomplished using one , mere technology : contraceptive method . That , couple with crime syndicate provision education , reversed their runaway universe growth .
If we desire to fend off an environmental crisis by lowering the world ’s universe , we now have good evidence that it can be done without coercion . All we have to do is make contraception freely available to anyone who want it . That may try out to be a lot cheap in the tenacious run than endeavor to find those 30 terawatts of major power year after yr .
ContraceptionFuturismPopulationScience

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