Hope

When I was in school, as a child, we learned the population stats for the countries we studied. Hence Canada is home to 24 million people, right? That's an easy way to tell somebody's age... We had already passed the 30 million mark in the 2001 census and (gasp!) the number keeps changing.
As a kid, I sang "500 million of Chinese and me, and me". Not sure where that came from as there are over 1 billion Chinese. Has the population doubled since my childhood or did I learn the song from my mom and so the population would have doubled since her childhood? How far back do we go?
All this to muse on the 300 million people landmark that the US achieved last week. Is this something to celebrate? We are bombarded with doomsday scenarios of aging baby boomers eating up our resources. I read an analysis from EDC (Export Development Canada) refraining from catastrophic forecasts, instead asserting "... the doomsayers are discounting yet another important compensating force: technological progress. New technology means that the workers of tomorrow will produce more for themselves and for their retiring parents." They back that claim with numbers and projections of economic growth. As I am an optimist, it really resonated with me. I am tired of hearing of apocalyptic scenarios. It only shows lack of faith in the creativity and resilience of humans. I believe imaginative solutions will be created to address the challenges ahead in the same way that the population in Asimov's Foundation trilogy found a way to counteract "The Mule". Hope is at hand...