Imagine the dinosaurs have just been wiped out and a race of interstellar super-beings have placed a hot wager on the table: Who’s next?

If I were an interstellar super-being, I probably would’ve lost the bet. It would take someone much cleverer than me to peg the walking apes that eventually popped up in Africa, the ones who lost all their hair. Honestly, I would’ve sprung for something with a few more fangs, or at least a rockstar-level pelt.

But here we are, a mere few hundred thousand years after becoming recognizably Homo-sapien, and we are already far and away the most audacious species the Earth has ever had to contend with. We simply cannot be stopped.

Where before we used to stay politely on habitable ground, we have now crawled our way into every inhospitable crevice this planet has to offer, from the Sahara Desert to Antarctica, to the Mariana Trench in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. As if that weren’t enough, we’ve made it into outer space (surely that’s cheating), figured out how to split atoms (that can’t possibly be fair), and, in blatant disregard for one of nature’s most basic fundamental functions, we’ve beaten evolution entirely.

Well done. Honestly. But it’s time to acknowledge if we’ve packed out of Mother Nature’s house, we have to learn to start looking after ourselves before the planet becomes a hopeless bachelor pad far beyond the reach of Febreeze or good intentions. Let’s face it, it’s getting a little crowded.

In October of last year, the United Nations announced the world’s population has officially crossed seven billion. To put this in perspective, if you were to start counting now at a relatively fast clip and keep counting all the way until you reached seven billion, it would take you nearly 60 years. Throw in any naps, teatimes, or bathroom breaks and the task quickly becomes entirely hopeless. Luckily, there are more helpful things to be doing with your time.

Every day, bright, young thinkers in colleges and offices around the country put their minds toward tackling the big world problems—hunger, energy efficiency, AIDS, ocean acidity, rural healthcare and earthquake-proof construction. It may be a cynical thought, but it’s worth wondering what point there is in saving our world if it is then just going to collapse under its own success. The harsh truth is that we have flourished so well as a species that we are now bumping against the ceiling of Earth’s carrying capacity.

So I have a question for the next generation of innovators and problem solvers: What can we do about it?

Population growth solutions are often discussed in terms of curbing it as quickly as possible. While this is undoubtedly a noble goal and should by all means remain a priority, what happens in the meantime? As the future closes in, we need to find ways not only to decrease our impact, but to increase Earth’s bounty as well.

How will we continue to grow enough food once we’ve run out of farm space? What infrastructures can we design to ensure that quality of life doesn’t crumble under increasing metropolitan density? Who will be the first to devise an ingenious solution to the water problem?

It could be you.

The time of the expert is over. The time of the cloud is here. In today’s information age, groundbreaking ideas pop up and meld together from every corner of society. No longer restricted to a single genius, they are born out of the conglomerated musings of scores of minds. And ideas (even small ones) are large boulders that may take a little nudging down the hill, but once they are rolling they can’t be stopped.

So think about it. Talk about it. Tweet about it. Will your blog post set the chain reaction that saves the world? Crazier things have happened.

We have done the impossible so many times before (let me remind you that the only monkeys who have ever made it into space are the ones we put there). With enough brilliant human minds put together, I have no doubt this problem can be solved too.

Hari Rai Khalsa is a Stanford 2011 Graduate in Anthropology