We cannot strive for a continuous growth of the population since the earth's resources are finite. Someday we will have to stop, or regress; it's just that every generation does not want to be the one with more retirements and pensions over the shoulders of the working class.
Contrary to the fear mongering media, in almost all countries in the world now population growth is declining, and world population will plateau or fall in the next 50-100 years.
You can see this on the world population growth graphs now.
If you look at it stricly statistically, Earth's population will plateau at around 10-11bn people. We can easily feed that many people, and it won't be massively more than now in terms of environmental impact.
Yes, we need to learn to be sustainable more, but the trends are good and I'm pretty sure we will find a way to sustainably live as 10bn people on Earth.
We will most likely run into huge societal problems from declining populations very soon, rather than from growing ones.
It's the ecological footprint of each person that's a concern. You can feed 10 billion people, but people don't want to just not starve. We already overshoot the resources Earth can regenerate in a given year in July, and that regeneration capacity and our ability to organize will fall apart faster and faster. Imagine if the rest of the Earth's population would be allowed to live like people in the United States.
- About 690 million people globally are undernourished.
- The proportion of undernourished people in the world has declined from 15 percent in 2000-2004 to 8.9 percent in 2019.
- The rate of stunting (children too short for their age as a result of chronic malnutrition) fell from 33 percent of children under age five in 2000 to 21.3 percent in 2019.6
I mean yes theoretically everything is easy, but somehow in practice just does not work, maybe it will some day in future... they say hope dies last ...
One example I saw: countries that were the main drivers of population growth, India and China, are seeing drops in fertility rates.
Wider afield, increasing access to education drops desired family size (I guess gives people other options for “growth” than literally having more children). And education levels in populous developing countries are rapidly increasing.
11 people per minute is 5.7 million a year. That's less than 0.1% of the population.
The inefficiency losses from production to meal (about 1/3 waste) and the unequal global distribution of food are the important factors not our ability to sustainably produce enough.
Another problem is population growth in areas that lack the necessary environmental/climate properties to sustain themselves.
During almost 2 years of Covid 4.2 million people died (2m per year) and people are terrified across world, but I have a filling that mentioning 0.1% you are trying to say that 5.7 million death due starvation (roughly population of Ireland each year) is not much?
Yes, I know stats, about waste, and also how half of planet undernourished, and half of planet is obese. Yes, if this is perfect world we would not have global warming, inequality, wars, we would not have extinction of animal and plant species, destruction of ecosystem... wealth would be distributed more fairly and we would already live in multiple planets. So, we do not live in that world, we live in world where people turn head on the other side when see someone on the street ask them for just a bit of food ...
I'm arguing that bringing up that 0.1% of the population is starving isn't a relevant point in regard to how much population we can actually feed. It was an answer to your original comment.
Your answer is derailing the discussion to a moral debate about the worth of lifes.
I do not know do you understand that Stalin had same pattern of thinking?
By that logic why not having 40bn people, I mean there is plenty of calories, we do not have to all eat each day, every other day will do...
The entire conversation only has sense in context of life and quality of life of those people, along with all other beings in ecosystem, as idea of the entire article is benefit for having more people for the sake of economy.
There is technical level so what is maximum. Maximum amount of caries with minimum amount of calories needed to survive = 40bn.
There is other side if there is one involuntary death due to starvation, there is no point of growing bigger population, as it is shitty civilization anyway and it does not deserve to exist.
Even in pure technical level calculation does not work, as we need to include all issues and loses, we cannot auto-magically say things will solve themselves.
It is necessary to include waste, and continuation of the food waste, then global warming (droughts, floods, pollution), then loss of top soil, issue with nitrogen fixation, issue with energy production, collapsing of marine life, supply chain ...
Much worse famines happened in the past with smaller populations. We can easily feed this many people - perhaps if we didn't spend so much trying to outbomb other fellow humans?
> We cannot strive for a continuous grow of the population since the earth's resources are finite.
True, but the US is in the enviable position where it has enough resources to support a substantially higher population. The US has the second highest amount of arable (cultivated land) in the world, second only to India. However, its population is only one quarter of India's.
I'm not arguing that the US should increase its population to that extent, and I'm not arguing that having 1.3B people living in a country the size of India is a good thing. However, the US could maintain population growth for significantly longer than other countries.
I don't think the current numbers factor in water requirements, which can and will throw around these numbers quite a bit. India's farm protests are sourced in water problems to a significant degree.
This will likely balance out, as losses from certain regions that will be adversely impacted by climate change (e.g., Florida) will be offset by gains in other states (e.g., Virginia). There will be some detrimental impact, see Quaye et al (2018) "Climate Change Impacts on Farmland Values in the Southeast United States" for where I'm pulling this information from, but it won't be completely devastating.
Again, I'm not saying that this is a good thing, and I'm only talking about cropland and not the impact of climate change on costal population centers (it will be devastating).
Alternatively, we may become an interstellar species and circumvent these problems for an entirely different set. I find it unfortunate that our milieu's become so thoroughly pessimistic as to the continued, unbounded prosperity of our race--I feel as though it engenders a sort of defeatism.
>Alternatively, we may become an interstellar species and circumvent these problems for an entirely different set.
Don't see it.
The "manned mission to Mars" merchants will sell the dream of that trip for decades to come (they have already backtracked. Which, even when eventually is done, it would be a crude, Apollo-style affair, for a handful of people and equipment, not some sci-fi travel destination.
Anything further, and the hurdles are so many (plus "small" things like the speed of light limit and so on), that the only realistic thing would be "generation ships" going to some unknown place that might or might not have a habitable planet.
And that of course is only feasible with major major leaps in technology which we don't seem to be making, including several "invent a whole new paradigm" style solutions.
Heck, the reality is we haven't even been able to send a manned mission outside of LEO for 49 years now. Heck, basic infrastructure like roads and schools is in ruins, and people imagine being able to fund space exploration. Rather, bet on more decline.
People want to leave Earth because "it's bounded", but at the same time think that our capacity for space travel/inventions/bearing manufacturing costs/etc is somehow "unbounded", or at least easily handles us being an interplanetary species.
Space has at most cubed resources relative to time (we can only explore a sphere assuming non arbitrary FTL travel). Population growth is exponential.
Even with space as a resource the math doesn't work out.
You'd just keep the pyramid scheme running for a few hundred years with the 1% elite inhabiting earth, and the current cheap workforce of the third world inhabiting the astroid belt.
It's important to be realistic. We are not an interstellar species, we build infrastructure for cars and we can't even afford the maintenance bill on it.
Even in space we could not afford an exponential growth. You would want to pace yourself before you can afford to reach other stars, then other galaxies. Eventually there will be nowhere to run.
You do realise there are probably more habitable planets than there are human beings right now? You seem to have no concept of how big the universe is.
I'm not saying we are going to populate the entire universe at any point, but your statement here is just ridiculous.
>You do realise there are probably more habitable planets than there are human beings right now?
Which is neither here, nor there. Speed of light, and around thousands of required technologies missing, many of those huge leaps over what's available today, make their existance (assuming we even knew where they are) moot.
And even if they were known what? You'll carry 8-10 billion people there for trips taking 10s or 100s of years with light speed? Or we're talking about some "generation ship" with some handful of humanity selected for it?
And how would that help the rest?
We haven't send a man out of LEO for 50 years, might as well forget those "habitable planets".
> You do realise there are probably more habitable planets than there are human beings right now?
I don't realise that, for one. It certainly isn't part of the shared knowledge or common sense, so I don't think the way you have expressed yourself is fair.
I thought we had only discovered a relatively small number of planets, most of which were relatively large gas giant types, and that claims to large numbers were based on speculation. That knowledge could be very much out of date by now. What is the current state of knowledge?
What is the definition of a habitable planet? If it's just "an earth-size planet that is so close to a stable star", I don't think it's really fair to call that habitable. If there's no life on the planet already, it would be a great deal of effort to make it ready for human habitation, wouldn't it? There will be rock but no soil, so we need to start with simple life forms for a long time before we can get human food to grow. Is there any reason to suppose that a lifeless planet would have a breathable atmosphere? Or if the planet is Venusian or in a snowball phase, we probably couldn't do much on a useful timescale. Again, I don't actually know what the state of knowledge in that field is, so I'm betraying my ignorance rather than trying some kind of "gotcha".
If we only need one planet at a time, I guess it's okay. But if we're talking about exponential growth, then we will need an exponential number of planets. We will "use up" the second one much faster than the first, and the third much faster than the second, and we'll probably need the fifth when we're starting the fourth and so on. There will come a time when we either need to slow down, or the difference between some technical and practical definition of "habitable planet" becomes relevant.
Even with a constant entropy production rate there would be nowhere to run eventually. The Universe is a closed system.
So you would always want to be thermodynamically efficient, which appears to also produce lifelike behavior. "Any system built to have nonzero memory has to be predictive to operate at maximal energetic efficiency."
There are quite a few reasons to be pessimistic about space travel to new worlds. Never say never, but astronomy is no job for the impatient. It certainly won't help with our more immediate problems.
Look at the other poor planets in our solar system and those beyond the solar system are solidly beyond our reach.
