Ah, time to crunch the numbers again...
149M sq km total land
15M sq km farmland
7000M people (soon)
So by dividing current farmland by population and rounding the result up a bit, each person gets a plot 47x47m for 603 sq ft for living and the rest for farmland. Assuming half the land is rank (unusable) wilderness, that roughs out to an optimistic carrying capacity of 33000M people.
But that’s not taking into account high-efficiency farming or compact housing.
So methinks the alarm has been prematurely sounded. We’re still a ways from 33 billion occupants, and between technology and nature methinks that issue will be...adjusted.
Those are good numbers; quite enlightening. I sometimes point out to those that complain about overcrowding of the planet that Paris, France appears to be a quite livable city, with 2 million people living on about 40 square miles inside their “beltway”, a limited-access highway that surrounds the metro area. That’s about 50,000 people per square mile. That would indicate that EVERYONE on earth could live comfortably in a SuperCity inside the border of Texas (at what might be an even lower population density), allowing the entire remaining area of the earth to be devoted to farms, parks and wildlife preserves.