I don't buy the overpopulation argument. There is good evidence to suggest that after 2050 the human population is going to decline and might reach as low as 2 billion people in the very long term.
After 2050? How many would have to die from diseases, hunger and political tensions (countries grabbing for resources) until then? What impact will 40 more years of population increase?
Well, that is the point. Human nature is such that population has always stabilized slightly above carrying capacity (being the amount of population that the ecosystem+technology can sustain).
We always slightly overshoot (carried by technology), and stabilize by those things you are mentioning (hunger, war, diseases, infant mortailty, ...). We just slightly overshoot not because of restrain, but because it is physically impossible to overshoot too much, since mortality increases very strongly (exponentially?) once we are above carrying capacity.
A civilized society would stabilize its numbers slightly below carrying capacity, so that suffering can be minimized and quality of living vastly improved. The more gap we allow between carrying capacity and actual population, the better our quality of life would be. But I guess we are not there yet.
>We always slightly overshoot (carried by technology), and stabilize by those things you are mentioning (hunger, war, diseases, infant mortailty, ...). We just slightly overshoot not because of restrain, but because it is physically impossible to overshoot too much, since mortality increases very strongly (exponentially?) once we are above carrying capacity.
In order to make sense of the importance of anything in time, I remove the constants and just check for the differences.
So, if we "always slightly overshoot" and stabilized by "hunger, war, diseases, infant mortailty, ...", the fearful thing is that in this particular era we also have:
(1) An astounding number of people in "third world" countries.
(2) Mass ecological harm.
(3) Global warming and continuous extreme weather conditions, like successive breaking of the records for the hottest summer temps recorder (whether one believes it's connected to (2) or not, which I do).
(4) Weapons that can wipe out the population or even the rock we are standing in several times over (from bio to nuclear).
Comments
I don't buy the overpopulation argument. There is good evidence to suggest that after 2050 the human population is going to decline and might reach as low as 2 billion people in the very long term.
The decline would be due people having fewer children…
After 2050? How many would have to die from diseases, hunger and political tensions (countries grabbing for resources) until then? What impact will 40 more years of population increase?
Well, that is the point. Human nature is such that population has always stabilized slightly above carrying capacity (being the amount of population that the ecosystem+technology can sustain).
We always slightly overshoot (carried by technology), and stabilize by those things you are mentioning (hunger, war, diseases, infant mortailty, ...). We just slightly overshoot not because of restrain, but because it is physically impossible to overshoot too much, since mortality increases very strongly (exponentially?) once we are above carrying capacity.
A civilized society would stabilize its numbers slightly below carrying capacity, so that suffering can be minimized and quality of living vastly improved. The more gap we allow between carrying capacity and actual population, the better our quality of life would be. But I guess we are not there yet.
>We always slightly overshoot (carried by technology), and stabilize by those things you are mentioning (hunger, war, diseases, infant mortailty, ...). We just slightly overshoot not because of restrain, but because it is physically impossible to overshoot too much, since mortality increases very strongly (exponentially?) once we are above carrying capacity.
In order to make sense of the importance of anything in time, I remove the constants and just check for the differences.
So, if we "always slightly overshoot" and stabilized by "hunger, war, diseases, infant mortailty, ...", the fearful thing is that in this particular era we also have:
(1) An astounding number of people in "third world" countries.
(2) Mass ecological harm.
(3) Global warming and continuous extreme weather conditions, like successive breaking of the records for the hottest summer temps recorder (whether one believes it's connected to (2) or not, which I do).
(4) Weapons that can wipe out the population or even the rock we are standing in several times over (from bio to nuclear).