Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs.

Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand.

Marketing tools that get your products out there. Integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time.

From startups to scaleups, online, in person and on the go shopify is made for

entrepreneurs like you sign up for your one dollar a month trial at shopify dot com slash setup

it's tuesday september 13th, 2022. I'm Jackson Bird. Today, we're approaching overpopulation.

Or we're in danger of population decline. It depends who you ask. As we prepare to pass

8 billion humans on Earth, a look at the history of population anxiety, and

thoughts about where we go from here. Plus, a visually appealing compostable alternative to

Currig cups and espresso pods, and a vital Muppet-related updates. Here's some cool stuff for your ride home.

On November 15th, this year, the United Nations has predicted that the global population

will hit 8 billion. Eight billion of us all alive at the same time. And I remember in middle school geography classes

when we learned that the population was a mere 6 billion. That felt like so much back then.

And now we are about to hit 8 billion. How many will it be in a few decades? Will we keep

growing in size as we long have, or will some catastrophe drastically reduce

the population? And what about all these reports of people having less children and population

decline in some nations? Should we be striving for more people or less people? BBC Future recently

explored all of these questions and more, pointing out first

and foremost that these questions are anything but modern. One of the earliest textual examples of

fretting over the population of humanity comes from the Atrahasis, an epic poem from ancient

Babylon, telling one of the earliest great flood stories that would come to feature in many cultures, most famously for some in the Old Testament.

The Atrahasis was written about a thousand years before that. The Atterhasis, written on tablets rediscovered in the 1980s, is a creation story story featuring multiple gods creating humans as worker bees.

...