Worrying Population Graphic

This animation (placed at the head of TheBottleneck) shows the global, exponential increase in potential users for my latest software product:

It would be nice if someone could gloss this. Does it really mean to show that within twenty years from now we'll have paved over the North American prairie, Russian steppe, Mongolian and Arabian deserts, etc. etc? Apparently not: the original source is a paper in The Social Contract (see http://www.igc.apc.org/desip/populationmaps.html); it seems that each "dot" (size unspecified) represents one million people.

If there's one thing that needs careful thought, surely population pressure is it. Does this map help us do that, I wonder? If the increasing black area can be taken to mean anything, what could it be but the proportion occupied so far of some predetermined maximum possibly population of the Earth. If so, fair enough. If not, then this presentation, especially the way the animation shows the black tide of humanity welling up from south-east Asia, is at the very least disingenuous.

I took the last frame of this image, drew a white line along the Rio Grande, separated the border of North America from the black Canada/US blob, and cut off the Carribean. I then measured the area of the entirely black blob remaining. I got 617 pixels. I do not believe the assertion the map thus makes that the combined population of the US and Canada is 617 million.

Yah; right now it's just aboot 350 mil. for the two together. Neither is growing as fast as developing countries. I doubt the two together could get past 400 million by 2020 even if it weren't for TheBottleneck.

Don't confuse Mercator projections with one that would show an accurate representation of area. -- BillSmargiassi?

Disquieting, yes. Disingenuous? Well, let's see what else we can find ...

Ah, that's more like it.

And then there's this:

Looks like the largest high growth area is sub-Saharan Africa. Of course, that part of the world already has a HumanSterilizationVirus in action.

It occurred to me last year, while walking around the poorer (though by no means poorest) part of a south-Asian city, that there seems to be a strong correlation between high population density and people being able to sleep in the streets without freezing to death. That's pretty obvious after the fact, but it would still be a mystery to me had I not seen in going on.