for those who have not seen it, the "Global population growth, box by box" by the late Hans Rosling is (IMO) a more entertaining introduction on the same subject.
The sheer mass of people that India and China has. If they wanted to, they could send a fraction of their population to pretty much any country and double the head count. It would be a pretty effective method to invade peacefully.
India's started doing it too. The situation with Indian foreign students in Australia/NZ right now closely resembles that with Chinese ones in the 1990's, so I predict the high immigration that happened with Chinese then will happen with Indians soon.
Biggest challenge for our planet, yet almost nobody is talking about it. IMHO it is just ridiculous to attribute famines to a 1 degree temperature rise, while at the same time ignoring the fact that due to population growth the available land per capita has decreased dramatically within the last few decades.
> IMHO it is just ridiculous to attribute famines to a 1 degree temperature rise, while at the same time ignoring the fact that due to population growth the available land per capita has decreased dramatically within the last few decades.
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).
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.
Maybe, but that wasn't my point in the original post. The famines that are taking place today are attributed to the temperature rise so far, and that is clearly below 1 degree.
Just for comparison, in Bangladesh the population has quadrupled since the 1950s.
Bangladesh is not suffering of famines? Africa is suffering of famines, and the land use is far from saturated.
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.
I hear it brought up semi-regularly and always with the "no one is talking about this" bit.
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).
And yet the single biggest factor in prevention of famines was the green revolution.
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"
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.
The current population uses more resources than sustainable each and every year, and does so at increasing rate. Species, habitats and forests are going at unprecedented rate. We show no signs at all of handling soil, pollution and water properly.
Yet you conclude there's not enough of us ruining the place yet?
No signs at all? All green technology, efficiency improvement and conservation initiatives globally add up to zero in your book? Most reasonable people agree there's much more to be done, perhaps that we're only beginning to scratch the surface of what should be done, but to dismiss it is absurd. We should celebrate and applaud initiatives that are heading in the right direction - for example, UK power plants recently went 5 days with zero coal burning emissions, the longest coal free streak since the industrial revolution.
All those people in India/China/Brazil/Indonesia want single family detached homes with a yard for their kids and a garage for their cars, and absent a force restricting them from it, they’re going to trend towards it as they get richer.
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.
I don't have a good source, other than experience of myself, family, and friends. But once people's kids reach school age, I don't see families sticking around inner cities unless they can afford private school and a nice big apartment, or they're too poor to move out to suburbs where they can stretch out and have some space. The world is urbanizing, but perhaps that is also one of the causes of declining birth rates, as it's not as desirable to raise a family in small, urban apartments.
Not zero, but miles from enough. It's a game of brinkmanship with real action pushed far into the future.
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.
Real government action harms the greatest consumers of resources most, those people have the resources to buy politicians.
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.
Yes, but that's because large percentage (70% what I can remember) came from nuclear power plants. If it hadn't been for the "green" movement who spent past 30 years fighting "dangers" of atomic energy maybe we would have been in totally different place and we wouldn't have to worry about global warming, air pollution, etc.
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.
Problems are soluble. This is the first time our species has encountered this problem, and will solve it or we will die. I think we will solve it. Regardless, we need to solve it at 8 billion or 20 billion. The thing that will solve it is people, and we need more of them and more of them working on the problem.
I've read that the education of women seems to be the thing which has the biggest impact on lowering birth rates in developing nations. Educated women can work better jobs and leave the home more. I'd guess that part of it is also basic sex education about reproduction and contraception, as well as delaying when they start having children if they're still in school.
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.
The late, great Christopher Hitchens spoke frequently about this subject -- and it's as good an introduction as any to the hypothesis.
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.
In Western countries that place a high value on equality (Europe/US) and countries with strong authoritarian governments (China). I think it's a big untested assumption to assume that what happened in Norway will happen in India and Nigeria.
It's already happened in India, and is well underway in Nigeria:
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.
I don't believe having 10 billion extra potential scientists would improve outcome. Division of labor is always the hard part, there isn't a shortage of smart people.
>2) relation between women's education and total fertility
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.
>Probably good half of them are boomers afraid of their super save investment in real estate turning not so hot in the end.
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.
Imagine that this was another species (species H), and we look at the development as biologists:
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.
Fails short, because for all species but humans, reproduction/offspring is kind of the main goal in life.
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.
Natural populations are indeed either exponentially growing or death-limited.
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.
> a biologist would expect species H to eventually overcome these changes, and resume expeonential growth in phase 3.
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"
Not all cultures and peoples are equal. The inherent and social capability to conduct cutting-edge science is not widespread. Historically it seems that only Europeans, Asians, and for a time Middle Easterners have been able to make significant and lasting contributions.
The notable missing piece here is Africa - which is where a significant part of population growth is occurring.
Overpopulation is such a hard conversation to have. I think a lot of people get scared that even talking about it will lead to calls for a genocide and therefore want to not even begin talking about it.
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.
It's a hard conversation because of the mechanics of how the human species works. If one group of people decides to take action and promote infertility, it will simply be replaced by the neighboring group of people who continue having high fertility. We have only globally enforced infertility or mass death of fertile populations as our long term options. It's depressing. If any group continues being highly fertile, they will inherit the earth. The authority necessary to prevent high fertility among all people is dystopian beyond belief.
A lot of advanced economies have low, or even negative, birth rates and they don't have repressive policies nor have even particularly tried to make things that way. So there may be positive ways of encouraging a low birth rate without the need for harsh enforcement.
You would have to take some form of positive action, for example improve women's rights, to do so. But the problem is that this will reach only the more open minded parts of the population, which again will result in the other part (often religious fundamentalists or simply less educated parts of the population) inheriting the earth. It's a grim situation.
Right. Malthus gets the last laugh in the end, doesn't he? The carrying capacity of the Earth is finite, and even if you're able to educate and incentive 99% of the population into holding fertility constant, that other 1% will grow to dominate the population, since selection pressure operates on whatever it is inside of us that makes us want to have more or fewer children.
The only alternative is ongoing state control over reproduction, and even that just delays the inevitable.
The Amish don't seem particularly interested in this effect: they're growing rapidly. Same thing with the Haredi. This effect whereby "all high growth populations have eventually slowed their population growth as gdp capita and mean years of schooling increased" is a temporary phenomenon we observe while natural selection does its work and selects for those who are able to resist the fecundity-reducing effects of modernity --- people like the Amish and the Haredi.
I don't understand all the negativity in other posts in this thread.
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.
The development (demographically and otherwise) in many first-world countries basically means many people will have to go back to a standard of living comparable to the one our parents/grandparents had in the 70's, and we won't accept it because other parts of the world are seeing improved conditions.
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.
Farming is also mostly an energy problem. Assuming cheap energy, you can create hydroponics that scale vertically. Highrise farms, and they could consume electricity during off-peak times when it is extremely low cost.
Water is also not a problem, we are surprisingly good at treating water, can even turn saltwater into freshwater given sufficient energy.
>> Will all people have access to all the comforts of human technology?
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?
I don't doubt that people can be content with agrarianism, but worth remembering the inherent bias in recorded history towards the rich -- before the 19th century it seems very few people could read and write. Textual records are views of people who were relatively wealthy. I think that's true across cultures?
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.
Humans can adapt to sleeping soundly next to a literal pile of garbage and feces (homeless drug addicts that I’ve seen in some third-world cities) but that doesn’t mean they “feel comfortable.”
I don't understand your optimism at all, considering the consequences of pollution and global warming will likely create violent changes and huge migration movements around the world that will lead to a lot of conflicts and wars.
Perhaps the issue is what people really want, not the number of them. Trump proved that at this time people don't really care much about pollution/climate change(at least the majority). One guy in the US may pollute the environment more than 10 in Norway so it's not about the number of people but about the choices of each individual and the community as a whole(i.e the government)
I think your maths is flawed, unless the 10 in Norway can produce negative pollution that outweighs them and the over-consuming others (in your example from USA), AND produce other environment preserving actions (reducing acidity of the oceans, preserving species diversity, inhibiting climate change, etc.) then we're still going to continue to force our own early extinction.
The situation for the environment is that bad; far worse, in fact, than most media is willing to honestly report. The Earth is undergoing a mass extinction event, as nonhuman species are pushed out to make more room for humans and our emissions.
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.
If we can't sustain the current population without destroying the environment now, how are we going to do it with more people at an ever increasing average quality of life? This kind of attitude is how we got into this climate change mess in the first place.
You're looking at it from a zero-sum perspective when in actuality the ever steady march of science and technology means our situation is anything but zero-sum.
It never hurts to be cautious, but total pessimism isn't warranted either.
It doesn't matter what advances science makes. We have the technology right now to stop global warming, feed everyone, etc. But we aren't doing it, and this hand wavey attitude is part of that problem. I'm not pessimistic about the situation, I'm just treating it seriously like it deserves.
It is zero-sum if you are talking about the proportions of overall wealth that go to different demographics at any given time.
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.
I agree, the negativity is unreasonable. Yes, there are very big issues facing our species. But I think we're showing a good track record in fixing those issues. Not a great record, but a good-nuf one.
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.
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.
That’s a lot of people consuming at 21st century rates.
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.
There are enough resources for everyone as long as we invest in education and technology. I don't even count resources we could exploit from other planets. We also need to be careful with the nukes...
The population growth may become an issue for our grand-grand children. I believe we will long gone by then.
"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.
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:
99 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadhttps://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_...
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...
Or starvation? Nope, the west is already spending billions preventing this.
Political instability? Nope, the west is already spending billions and taking in millions of refugees to prevent this.
What kind of catastrophe is left that couldn't just happen to us as well?
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"
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_&...
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.
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.
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.
The population growth may become an issue for our grand-grand children. I believe we will long gone by then.
"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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_pyramid