patrick.net
An Antidote to Corporate Media
1,191,356 comments by 13,860 users - DhammaStep, richwicks, The_Deplorable, UkraineIsTotallyFucked online now
invite responseComments 1 - 11 of 11 Search these comments
Serious research has actually been done on this before, with estimates ranging from between 10 and 20 billion peak.
The number could go as high as 100 billion if certain efficiency gains are realized.
Population concentration and age imbalance are a bigger problems than total population.
TMAC54
2011 Dec 14, 1:36pm
How many people can Earth support?
This chart shows that we are going to learn the hard way !
Depends how they eat I suppose. If everyone was veggie the world could support multiples more. Farming to produce feed for cows ends up producing about 5 - 10 percent of the food it could if the crops went directly to people instead of to grow animals.
Depends how they eat I suppose. If everyone was veggie the world could support multiples more. Farming to produce feed for cows ends up producing about 5 - 10 percent of the food it could if the crops went directly to people instead of to grow animals.
We have no shortage of food in the world, just poor distribution. It doesn't really matter much what the diets are.
marcus
2011 Dec 14, 10:16pm
I don't understand the question. We know that even 7 billion is substantially disturbing to the ecosystems. How much do we want to insist on saving coral reefs or rain forests, or various animal and fish populations ? OR do we care ?
I would argue that since there is obviously some answer to the question, that is that there is a finite max, we should level off or decrease WAY before we get there. Why wait until nature forces the issue ? And we should think rather in terms of health and longevity of the planet, and ultimately maximizing instead the number of humans that can exist over the long term, and the quality of that existence.
Eg. 7 billion indefinitely is way better than 50 billion for a few centuries or a millenia.
But then we would rather destroy everything rather than starting to plan population growth in some sort of fair and intelligent way (as a planet), giving up major freedoms.
elliemae
2011 Dec 14, 11:52pm
Just when we get the world populated, darwin kicks in and gives us a plague of sorts.
Dan8267
2011 Dec 15, 1:01am
How many people can Earth support?
That depends on:
1. What technologies are available. Goes up with time.
2. What natural resources are left. Goes down with time.
3. How polluted the Earth is. Goes up with time.
4. What you consider "support". If you lower your standards, you can raise the support figure. By some standards, the Earth does not support it's present population.
Huntington Moneyworth III, Esq
2011 Dec 15, 1:34am
My dream is a world populated with over 200 billion humans living in abject poverty. These underclass wretches would toil 20 hours a day in filthy and unsanitary conditions so that my standard of living increases.
At 200 billion souls, we would no longer need healthcare, as replacement sods would appear as soon as the sick perished. The crush of impoverished humanity would eliminate wasteful attempts at social and political change as the underclass struggled endlessly on Maslow's bottom rung.
Food would not be an issue. I would feed the underclass Monkey Chow. If it's good enough for a damn dirty ape, it's good enough for the underclass.
bmwman91
2011 Dec 15, 2:32am
As others have said, it really depends on the quality of life that you want. Personally, I think that we have too many people as it is. A world without open spaces and with every corner pillaged for resources is a pretty sad place. We are still fairly far from that, and it would be good to stay that way.
In my opinion, "how many people can Earth support," sort of comes down to a "what is the meaning of life," discussion. There are lots of answers to those questions, and which one you get depends on who you ask.
An excellent book is "An Edible History of Humanity." Thomas Malthus and his ideas start coming up later in the book, once you get to the industrial revolution in England. While he was "wrong" a couple of times, it was only because technology allowed food production to leap ahead just as the time came for his predictions to come true. Interestingly, the last chapter of the book discusses much more recent history and population growth trends in educated, first-world countries. The author predicted that as India and China start to approach a certain education & modernization threshold, their population growth will naturally taper off and stabilize. Overall, and I need to grab the book to check, the author predicted a sort of population equilibrium somewhere between 8B and 10B people. It seemed like a prediction something along the lines of, "sustaining 8B-10B people will require new advances in technology. Those advances will have a certain collective education requirement. At that collective education level, individuals will be over a certain threshold where they regulate how many children they have, and collectively, population growth will be kept constant due to self regulation." Of course, it is just speculation. Only time will tell what we will do with ourselves.
TMAC54
2011 Dec 16, 1:28am
population growth will be kept constant due to self regulation
Corporations (& churchs) depend on GROWTH. We are now paying much more for cars and fuel since we became enlightened of environmental concerns. Corporations just passed those costs on to the customer. They can not pass on the cost while controlling population growth ? They are in control right ?
Just when we get the world populated, darwin kicks in and gives us a plague of sorts.
One bad Apple DOES spoil the whole bunch if they're packed too tight .
Air travel will allow plagues to spread at 500 miles per hr. Hopefully it would be like a bullet to the base of the skull.
A recent post on birth control go me thinking, how many people can Earth support? While some would argue that there are too many people in the world even today, we really do not utilize our natural resources very effectively. For example if the world invested less resources into there military's, we could build solar plants in the desert, pumping stations could pump the water from the oceans into the desert, then the solar panels could boil the water purifying it into drinkable water. This water then could be irrigated to grow crops. Some of the solar panels would generate electricity others would just be used to boil the water. Since roughly 1/3 of the land on Earth is desert, in theory, we could easily double the worlds food production capacity. Actually only 6.1% of the earths surface is used to grow food currently, a 10% increase in crop land, which includes raising cattle and other livestock and growing cotton for clothing would give 150% production output increase. People of course need more than just food, water and clothing. They need places to live, resources would be needed to build homes, transportation and other infrastructure. My point is better utilization of the worlds resources could easily support 20 or even 30 billion people without destroying the planet ecologically.
Of course the question is how many people can the earth suppose. So cut those rain forests down, wildlife is something only found in Zoo's. Utilizing all of the world resources for just humans 60 billion would be obtainable. Live stock eating too much of our crops? Well we can't have that, limit the amount crops your allowed to feed to livestock, a cheese burger is something only the wealthy can afford on a rare occasion, that gives us enough food to feed another 10 or 15 billion people.