Will Human Population Collapse This Century?

Real Clear Science ^ | 11/01/2023 | Ross Pomeroy

[ProtectOurFreedom]

“hands and brains to provide for themselves”

True, of course. That’s what enabled going from 1 billion to 8 billion in a short amount of time. But you need inputs — arable land, water, nutrients, ores, air, etc. Do you think these are infinite?

Can the globe support 25 billion souls? 50 billion? 100 billion?

No matter how clever you are, with no inputs you have no life. Maybe the ore inputs will come from asteroid mining. But water and air?

The issue is exponential unbounded growth vs the “logistic curve” which is asymptotic to some limit. It’s also whether, as you approach that limit, the systems will turn chaotic and possibly suffer some massive collapse.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Yes.See #21.

[StAnDeliver]

Luddites and Freeptards.

[Alas Babylon!]

Even so, and to answer your questions, yes, up to perhaps 100 billion.

But the population will never get that large, because people (women) just don’t want to have more than couple of kids. Kids are very expensive. As even the third world is better fed and cared for medically, the number of births per women crashes to less than 2.

If you love data and analysis, watch Doctor Hans Rosling’s Ted Talk, where he explains it all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E

And outer space is full of ice. Which is frozen H2O. Which = water, fuel and air to breathe.

[T.B. Yoits]

Man continually makes advancements aiding in growing and delivery food. People have an obesity problem, not a starvation problem.

-Crop rotation
-Dried preserves
-Irrigation
-Storage
-Canning
-Vacuum Sealing
-Refrigeration
-Fertilizer delivery systems
-Mechanical harvesting
-Food Preservatives
-Irradiation
-Transportation technology and infrastructure to move food from growing regions to regions in winter dormancy
-etc.

[marktwain]

The book basically said the same thing — that the earth has a carrying capacity for human life and things could go awry quickly leading to population collapse.

This is the basic premise. It is a false premise.

Humans have the unique ability to increase the carrying capacity of the earth.

Humans also have the unique ability to expand their population and life to other places outside of the earth, and to access resources outside of the earth.

It is highly likely the human ability to unlock carbon from where it has been sequestered in the earth's crust,and to increase the amount of fixed nitrogen in the earth's ecosystem, have already increased the carrying capacity of the earth significantly.

The "carrying capacity" of the earth is not a constant.

[DIRTYSECRET]

Human population collapse. It’s been tried before. It’s called genocide. Done on a local level. People get in the way. Start with Jooz. Then there’s the city slickers(Pol Pot). Tutsies/Armenians.

There’s religion, economics, politics. Whatever comes up.

The world’s population will get older. That’s when the next ‘correction’ comes into play. Too many old folks out there. Think death panels and assisted. suicide.

[dangus]

The population will plunge, but because of anti-family economic policies, not ecological collapse. Every society outside of Africa is already facing massive population loss. Yes, even India. Even Bangladesh.

[sergeantdave]

Neurotic gloom and doom is a common trait among left wing so-called “scientists.” They embrace a high level of guilt, worry, fear, and depression.

Religion can fix that.

[Sequoyah101]

Too bad they don’t come that way. I would not care for a planet that crowded no matter how smart they were.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

In engineering, you use an operating envelope to understand systems. You understand where the limits are for a system and do not operate the system above those limits. Aircraft are a good example.

Can the earth support one trillion people? What is the earth’s operating envelope?

In the end, it doesn’t matter how ingenious humans are if they keep reproducing exponentially. The exponential growth from 1800 to today was made possible by human ingenuity. But where will you get the resources to support a trillion people?

[Sirius Lee]

But water and air?

The Hydrologic and Oxygen Cycles: Lean it. Live it.

[marktwain]

Can the earth support one trillion people? What is the earth’s operating envelope?

Non-sequitur.

Of course there are limits to how many people the earth can support. So what?

As others have noted, no one expecting the earth's human population to keep expanding exponentially. In fact, most estimates are the earth's population will stabilize and decrease over the next hundred years.

[cgbg]

Fly from DFW to El Paso—and then tell me how crowded we are...

;-)

[Sequoyah101]

Seriously? I’ve lived out there. No thanks. Nothing grows there worth mentioning. It does not sustain life. There is no water not even underground. That is why it is good air drilling country. If there is water it is usually brackish at best. There are lots of places like that. They are uncrowded for a reason and should remain that way.

[Glad2bnuts]

It would be easy to pare the US down to about 250 million, send home the illegals and their babies. Easily there are 100 million here, if you count the babies they made since being here. There were 25 million illegals when GW was RINO in Chief.

[Glad2bnuts]

We never should have sent food to starving countries. The law of nature and God says, if you don’t work, you don’t eat. Countries that couldn’t even dig a well, make mosquito nets, or grow and harvest food, deserve to go extinct.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

I was reading some theory about six months ago that said feeding starving African babies was the worst thing we could have done. It caused the African population to explode and now they have FAR MORE people to feed — and cannot do it.

It would have been a brutal thing to do, but the argument was that it would have been a far more humanitarian thing to do long-term than causing the African population to explode.

[cgbg]

“Nothing grows there worth mentioning. It does not sustain life. There is no water not even underground.”

They used to say that about Phoenix...lol.

Metro Phoenix population today: 4.8 million