US Population Passes 300 Million

The U.S. Census Bureau has announced that at 7:47 am this morning (6:47 Central), the 300 millionth American arrived - be it via natural birth or running across the border near El Paso. Or perhaps he was a Russian who parachuted from a flock of migrating geese. Either way, the official U.S. population has exceeded yet another milestone, and the Census Bureau is refusing to name a person as the honorary recipient.

The Census Bureau keeps a running population of the United States using advanced and updated death, birth, and immigration rates. Currently, the population adds another person every eleven seconds, and with that rate, the total passes 300 million this morning.

Unlike in the late 1960s - when Life magazine scrambled around hospital records and figured out that Robert Woo of Atlanta was our 200 millionth resident - no one will be officially designated as the milestone baby. However, most experts have speculated that whoever it is, there is a very good chance it is a Latino, if that truly means anything.

Regardless, with the number of people now living in, or otherwise citizens of, the United States so high, questions are likely to be raised about how many people is too many people? Populations have expanded exponentially over the last two centuries. The United States population only hit 100 million in 1915. Now, experts are saying it will likely be at 400 million by 2040. Granted, other nations such as China, India, and Brazil have higher population densities that ours, but when will our standard of living be unsustainable, or even threatened?

Skeptics and population control advocates have already warned that we must begin to counterbalance these issues against the desires of economists who seek constant expansion. The hard questions, they say, must be asked. Is our environmental damage increasing? Will we have enough healthy food to sustain a large population? Laugh not, for Germany, Russia, and a handful of other places have faced food shortages when they otherwise thought they were well taken care of.

The answers to these questions may not be known today, but the questions still need to be asked. After all, the air in a balloon probably feels it has plenty of room to expand - until it bursts.

The world population right now is around six and a half billion people. We are in the middle of the largest sustained exponential growth of human population in history, largely thanks to medicine.

In terms of overall population, the United States is currently third, well behind China and India, and ahead of Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Russia. The population density of the United States is much lower than any of those, but it is also by far the most advanced country on the list, demanding a more consistent and higher standard of living. Also to be noted is that most of the United States' raw population increase comes from immigration (primary and secondary), unlike the other nations, whose rises come from births.

The United States' 300 million people constitute roughly five percent of the Earth's population. The Census Bureau also released statistics which say that the average U.S. familial unit has decreased over the last 100 years from 4.5 members to 2.6, while life expectancy has risen sharply from 54 years to 78 years.