You’re in a conversation and someone says, “The Earth is overpopulated. At this rate, we’re going to run out of food and resources.”

What would you say?

Panic-stories like this get a lot of attention, drawing largely from a host of ” The End is Nigh!” prophecies of Paul Ehrlich in the 1970s, but none of Ehrlich’s doomsday predictions came true.

No worldwide famine. No catastrophic scarcity of resources. In fact, Ehrlich’s models have been repeatedly debunked.

Nevertheless, the idea that the population is booming at an unsustainable rate still holds the public’s imagination.

So the next time someone says that the Earth is overpopulated and we’re all about to starve, remember these three things:

First, there’s plenty of food and natural resources to go around.

Second, the population is not locked into a pattern of exponential growth.

Third, there are actually too few people on Earth to sustain countries’ economies and the global standard of living.

Click on the video to hear the entire conversation, or go to WhatWouldYouSay.org to see more like it.