The “Population Bomb” went pssssssst.

It did not explode. It just ended. And not with a bang, not even with a whimper. More like the sound coming from an old stretchy balloon. According the United Nations experts, the population explosion is officially over, and this from the meddling institution that helped get the whole thing going in the first place.

The U.N. Population Division, official statisticians for the U.N., hosted an expert meeting at U.N. headquarters a few weeks ago and announced their projections for population growth have been wrong. Population-control alarmists have been predicting since I was in the first grade that the world would soon run out of everything — food, natural resources, even space. College dorm posters from 25 years ago showed a planet so full that some were forced to live on overcrowded beaches.

This population scare was the engine that drove aggressive population-control programs in the poor brown, black and yellow nations. The population bomb also drove the push for radical acceptance of abortion and environmental extremism. Even the United Nations now accepts that this scenario wasn't true — not all of the United Nations, but one very influential branch.

What U.N. population experts are now saying is that the fertility rate in a number of countries is substantially lower than thought. So low, in fact, that the United Nations is now projecting the world will see a billion fewer people by the year 2050 than previously expected. We're currently at 6 billion. They had projected we would swell to 10 billion; now they are down to 9 billion.

The Population Division first sounded this alarm at a meeting in 1997, when it was reported that more than 60 countries were no longer replacing themselves. Most of these countries are in the developing world. Subsequent reports put the below-replacement group much higher, heading north of 80 countries, and including countries both rich and poor.

Dr. Joseph Chamie, head of the U.N. Population Division, is an unbiased statistician. I do not know what his position on abortion is. I suspect he is in favor of it. In any case, Chamie is alarmed about the impending fertility downturn. In fact, he is in something of a rolling debate with other U.N. agencies that love abortion, support it and pay for it, those who believe the world is awash in a dangerous contagion: people.

Chamie sees things differently. He issued a report last summer that flatly contradicted the dominant anti-natal ethos of the United Nations. His “World Population Monitoring Report 2001” asserts that, even though population has grown, food production and natural resource extraction have kept ahead of it. He also says that population growth may affect the environment, but that environmental degradation is more complicated than a single factor. He even said declining populations harm the environment.

I see a remarkably empty that we could use a few planet and know more friends.

It is on fertility rates and demography that Chamie raises an alarm and raises the hackles of population controllers. Chamie says the crisis is not impending. He reports that Russia shrank by 800,000 people last year. He says the crisis is here. Two years ago he hosted a meeting that looked at the crisis of aging populations, including the prospect of intergenerational competition for financial resources. Now he fears something more. What happens when populations begin not just to age, but also to fall?

So alarmed at this development, the Population Division held an expert meeting last year to consider solutions to the huge demographic and economic dislocation occurring because of an aging and dying population. Their single solution was massive immigration to the developed world from the developing world, something that most countries view as unacceptable. And new numbers show even the poor south is now experiencing below-replacement fertility.

The larger question is this: Once the ethos of small families is bred into us, how is that changed? We know that having children shows a remarkable generosity. This kind of generosity was once commonplace. It seems to have been replaced with a desire for European vacations, single-malt scotch and SUVs. They told us to have just enough children to replace ourselves, and no more.

In order to get there, a kind of greed had to be instilled. Once the greed for things is instilled in the human heart, how is it changed? Why have only two children? Why not one? Why not none? What policy-makers have discovered is they do not know how to get couples to put the brakes on fertility decline. They do not know how to stop couples from stopping having children. A few years ago Sweden, yes Sweden, offered tax incentives for increased family size. It worked only briefly.

I am frequently asked how many people the world can hold. What a crazy question. How in the world can I know? How can anyone know? It is really not our business anyway. All I know is that when I fly anywhere in the world and I look down from on high, I see a remarkably empty planet and know that we could use a few more friends.

Now, it seems, even the United Nations is catching on to this.

Austin Ruse, president of U.N. watchdog C-FAM (Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute), welcomes comments at austinruse@c-fam.org.