World Population Growth
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
Poverty is falling dramatically right now, and is falling faster than the UN ever predicted. It is quite likely that we can feed 7bn people.
We have 80 years to come up with the technology to feed another 4bn by 2100. And population will probably fall after that. That sounds doable to me. Food technology is making huge gains, if we have lab grown meat at almost a tenth of the cost, imagine how much easier it becomes to feed everyone.
Why the pessimism? I know everyone's facebook feed is full of the world ending, but the situation isn't actually that bad.
We could probably feed a lot more, if we crammed everyone into small cages and fed them like factory farmed animals.
The question is why you would want so many people living like that? You are already indirectly pointing out that meat will be off the menu for future generations and I am sure there will many other things that will need to be sacrificed as the population increases (for example, fish populations don't sound like they are keeping up with demand). And at some point there are going to be some hard limits on how many people can be fed.
It can certainly be a palatable diet, the wide variety of vegetables can be kept. It will be hard to convince Asians to eat much less rice though.
that's an odd thing to focus on. Moving people off meat & cheese would do a whole hell of a lot more than moving people off rice.
There's also some interesting work being done on growing rice in brackish water which could turn some unarable land to arable.
Water is also not a problem, we are surprisingly good at treating water, can even turn saltwater into freshwater given sufficient energy.
• Can you do it without taking away resources from other species and destroying their habitats?
• Will every person have enough space, physically as well as socially?
• Will all people have access to all the comforts of human technology?
• Will they all be able to contribute to human society?
• Will they be allowed to attain happiness, contentment and acceptance even if they cannot, or choose not to, contribute anything?
• Will everyone be able to find a partner?
• What is the endgame of the human species, anyway?
Of course we're biologically-rigged to believe that multiplying indefinitely is justifiable, but what's beyond that?
You worry too much. 500 years ago humans didn't have any advanced technology and they felt pretty comfortable. Now just look at all these homeless people. Do you think they have all the comforts of human technology?
People should have opportunities to advance within the society but not everyone wants that anyway. So as always there will be cool jobs and boring jobs.
Population growth will only accelerate technology. Would you prefer 1 developer working on 1 project or 1000 working on 1000 projects?
How do you know that
If you look at historical records of slavery, for example, you'll find "most people prospered", the people dying in cages weren't writing journals.
Maybe instead of struggling to feed another 4bn people, we should be trying to educate girls and women and give them the tools they need to control their own reproductive choices.
I'm not sure humanity has the maturity to do that.
It never hurts to be cautious, but total pessimism isn't warranted either.
Not sure what you're referring too.
People like to trot this 'not a zero-sum game' line out all the time as if it is somehow meant to make us feel better about the grave imbalance of wealth we have currently on this planet.
We already have the resources to feed and cloth everybody to a good standard, but it would require some sacrifices on the part of many wasteful developed nations, which they simply will never do.
Plus, if you want everybody to have a modern quality of life even within the confines of a developed nation, some greedy people are going to have to start paying more in wages and taxes and accept that the social contract and safety nets are the only thing between themselves and an angry mob.
True. But it might be temporary. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day
The late Dr. Hans Roslings' book Factfullness is a fantastic antidote to the negativity facing us. Before you go on, please take this quick quiz to see if you are smarter than a chimp: http://forms.gapminder.org/s3/test-2018
The first time I took the quiz, I got 2 right out of 13 questions. I did much worse than a chimp would have.
Factfullness is an easy read and well worth the time. In fact, you can read it for free here: https://archive.org/stream/FactfulnessByHansRosling/Factfuln...
Bill Gates gave the book out for free too; that's how important he thought the book was.
Factfullness goes into much greater detail (with MANY sources) on why and how the world we live in is actually getting much better.
Question 11 says none of the species have become more endangered since 1996 - except that whilst the general classification for black rhino hasn't changed from "Critically Endangered", three subspecies were declared extinct in 2011. Which is definitely more endangered, surely.
https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_...
1) I controversially think the world is currently underpopulated. Yes, as a species we need to get our pollution and resource management under control, but we need to do that at any population size. Once pollution and water is properly handled with technology, there should be enough landmass to handle 20B+ people. That's 10 billion extra potential scientists and artists to propel our species forward.
2) I am terrified that the idea that populations stabilize once a certain level of development and women's education is reached is false and not culturally universal. It seems like a very important untested assumption. If it isn't true, and we continue to see exponential population growth in developed second world countries but not in first world countries, I think that the disruption to the status quo and fear of aggression could lead to massive global wars of the kind we've never seen before.
Yet you conclude there's not enough of us ruining the place yet?
Actually, best hope might be concentrating all jobs in very urban areas and making it costly to get into relationships/have children so women themselves opt out of it and drop the birth rate as they wouldn’t be able to afford the amenities they want.
Source? The world’s population is urbanising. That trend shows no sign of slowing.
Also, is that going to be common across all cultures?
Certainly UK is dropping coal quickly, and I'm not dismissing that. Yet government has made onshore wind, and domestic solar far more difficult. They're promoting biomass - via imported mature cut wood, and encouraging gas. Drax is still our biggest emitter and an environmental mess. Farming is continuing to ignore decades-long warnings of soil decline, forests globally are still being clear cut and burned for cattle or palm oil. Recycling has become "export the problem and forget about it".
Wind, solar and electric vehicles have become viable, yet despite that, overall emissions are still increasing. So beginning to scratch the surface is about right. Real government actions are still avoided.
It ain't going to happen easily when the rich-and-powerful's self interests are served by maintaining a foil, a semblance, of environmental concern.
Great, you're recycling the plastic food trays your meat is shipped half-way around the World in. Now, ditch the car and use public transport; change your company marketing processes to prefer economy to profit ... oh that's right, you're too important to have to do those sorts of things.
The current - and still ongoing - UK coal-free run, has been on the back of gas (30%), wind(25%) and nuclear(20%). Overall figures as obviously wind and solar can vary widely on individual days. Biomass and solar, and a little bit of hydro make up the rest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_Kingdom#/...
Almost 11 days without coal: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2019/...
Do you have a source for that claim? What I see is that more and more species are put under protection, which wasn't the case e.g. in 19th century.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20027423
His "wife has several degrees in math, accounting, business, statistics" according to another article he wrote:
https://qz.com/248623/how-to-talk-to-your-adult-children-so-...
His kids all went off to college, married likewise, and are now popping out grandkids at an astonishing rate. His youngest kids are still in college, and already his 12 kids have given him 18 grandkids. That is 1.5 each, after an average of about 7 years post-college life. If that keeps up, it'll be about 4.5 each in that generation, which is a regression to the mean but still quite large for modern America.
So yes, culture (or DNA) matters more than education.
Do a web search on, say: christopher hitchens empowerment of women
... and watch a few videos where the explanation is eloquently and humorously laid out, along with some reasons why certain parts of various societies are not keen on it happening.
Hasn't it pretty well tested as countries have industrialized in the last century?
1. India's fertility rate decreased from 5.91 to 2.33 from 1960 to 2016.
2. Nigeria's fertility rate has decreased more slowly, but that reflects the lower state of development in Nigeria. It's moving along the same curve as all the other developing countries moved along. The countries around Nigeria that have developed further have seen the same dramatic drops in fertility rate that countries elsewhere in the world have seen.
https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...
Going by this map from 2018 [1], we can safely call it tested and confirmed in pretty much every country where women's education is the rule rather than the exception. Even India is marked as under 3. And the charts I've been shown recently (unfortunately can't find the link right now) were showing downward trends for several middle eastern countries too.
I'm not quite sure it's a healthy tread overall; there's just too many conflicting voices on that. Probably good half of them are boomers afraid of their super safe investment in real estate turning not so hot in the end.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fertility_rate_world_map_...
It's not just about that; many boomers are justifiably worried about what will happen to them when they grow old and can't take care of themselves. The real-estate investments were probably supposed to fund their own vision of their last years and now they're realising they might be stuck with no money, no family to support them, while sitting in some prime real estate that nobody wants.
In hindsight, I do wonder what the hell my grandparents' generation was thinking back in the day; one would think that they would have realised that women taking part in the work force, legalized abortion and proper distribution of contraceptives would result in lower birth-rates, but no, they had to build a house of cards with nothing to keep it standing except for constant population growth.
Phase 1) Species H is a very successful species, and the population is growing exponentially.
Phase 2) The rapid growth is introducing harmful elements into the environment: - Poisons that harm fertility directly (Birth Control) - Social changes that negatively affect natural reproductive behaviours (including, but limited to porn and increasing autonomy for females) - Various poisons that reduce general health (such as sugar).
Note that these changes to the enviornment do not include any of the main causes that normally cause a limitation to a population size, such as: - Lack of resources, primarily food - Predation by other species - Competition by more successful species.
Unless the population size started to approach an evolutionary bottleneck size (a few thousand individuals left), a biologist would expect species H to eventually overcome these changes, and resume expeonential growth in phase 3.
Humans have a lot of other interests, and having children comes with huge tradeoffs in "lifestyle". Also, they can actively avoid pregnancy. Which other species does that?
Edit: What would phase 3 eventually be, if you overcame all obstacles, but children still take away from other activities? I think this reason alone is enough that most people will be happy with roughly 2 children. Enough to fulfill the desire for children, leaving room for all other things in life.
The difference is that we've seen what "death-limited" means for humans, and we have the consciousness to be horrified by it. Infant and maternal death on the one hand, wars and massacres on the other, disease as an omnipresent risk. In the old R/K model, we've started at K-selection and moved even further in that direction.
Actually, what we have seen in experiments like these is complete societal collapse followed by population collapse. See John B. Calhoun's "Mouse Utopia" experiments. It might well be that we are the "beautiful ones"
The notable missing piece here is Africa - which is where a significant part of population growth is occurring.
https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...
These are two different problems that both need solving, and I'm sure some people in Africa are trying to tackle the population growth problem. If you're on HN right now, I'm sure you are more concerned with the temperature rise problem (by the way, 1 degree? We already passed that).
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/
2016 reached 1C of warming anomaly relative to 1951-1980 average, but was exceptionally hot.
But there are enough greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and feedback loops in action so that, even if all human activity stopped right now, the 1C bar will be easily toppled, and depending on prediction models, the 1.5C is probably already unavoidable as well.
Just for comparison, in Bangladesh the population has quadrupled since the 1950s.
Furthermore, most of the planet except Africa has a fertility rate below 2.5 already (Bangladesh at 2.4). The biggest reason for the population growth is due to the current population NOT dying of famines, diseases, etc. like they used to, and dying of old age instead. There is nothing to do to tackle the population growth, you would have to literally kill people.
Once you understand the nuance of the problem there is not much you can really do about it. And those things you can do (education, contraception, womens rights) are already on the top of every sane development agenda.
It just feels like a stalking horse for right wing sentiment that wants to use population as a way to bash liberals (not accusing you of that).
Then we should work on putting it on the insane agendas, too, or even better, get rid of the insane agendas altogether.
If for every person that is born there is a chance that they'll contribute to humanity in a way that improves us as a species by a healthy percentage, as opposed to a fixed amount, then by all means we should have more people and innovate our way out of this.
Honestly I grew up with a very Malthusian point of view and believed that I shouldn't reproduce due to overpopulation.
As I learned more I changed my view. The most recent book that influenced my thinking on this was "The wizard and the prophet"
I really wish the politicians wittering on about seeking constant growth - whether population or GDP - could comprehend it.
That's just baffling. I mean, the "new" people are more than enough to sustain multiple own countries...
See: https://www.amazon.com/Empty-Planet-Global-Population-Declin...
Historically mid UN projections never turn out to be true. They were either low variant or below that.
We’ve got to work to stabilizing pop to more sustainable levels where we don’t have further slash and burn land for farming and animal husbandry, resource exploitation at future rates, etc.
Obviously messing with population growth is fraught with problems of unintended consequences (ala China OCP), but we can do better to bring effective zero growth to places experiencing exponential growth. (Women’s) Education, empowerment, opportunity, etc. This goes a long way. As with carbon emissions it could help to set a year baseline, or better calculate an optimal pop given natural resources and set incentives to stabilize at those points.
"For the long period from the appearance of modern Homo sapiens up to the starting point of this chart in 10,000 BCE it is estimated that the total world population was often well under one million."
As others have often pointed out, as a large bodied mammal, we would expect humans to be roughly as successful as other widely dispersed large body mammals. And yet its thought that there were 100 million bison on the planet before human civilization arose. So there should have been 100 million humans on the planet. Why would there be so few humans, if other large body mammals were so plentiful? I'm inclined to think they are underestimating the number of humans on the planet in 10,000 BC, or there must be a good reason why there were so few humans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level
Plants are almost always level 1. Bison would be just a bit over 2. (a bit over because they may consume bugs, bones, etc.) Humans would usually be higher than that. The traditional Eskimo diet is nearly trophic level 5.
Due to loss of energy going from one level to the next, the biomass of creatures with high trophic level is limited:
The population growth may become an issue for our grand-grand children. I believe we will long gone by then.
There are a lot of positive things that can be done, for example educating women.
I'm not sure if anyone has seen these calls to action but it sounds like there are problems ahead with such a large population.
https://www.worldpopulationbalance.org/call-action-scientist...
The only alternative is ongoing state control over reproduction, and even that just delays the inevitable.