Hacker News Reader

Umm, can you cite something supporting your assertation that Earth's carrying capacity is 100 million humans?

Take the population today, and remove modern agriculture. Take the food supply down to what it would be per-acre without fertilizer. Then lower it again for lack of irrigation in many areas. That's a start.

I think the point is that "100 million" is an extremely suspicious round number, and smacks of pulling a number out. It could be an "Everest" number (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00031305.1982.104...), but that seems highly unlikely.

Well according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_human_population), world population in 1800 was estimated at one billion. It was estimated at 400m in 1000 AD.

So yeah, not sure where that 100 million comes from.

You'll have to remove more than "modern" agriculture, considering that the world population passed 100 million over 2500 years ago [1].

[1] https://www.census.gov/population/international/data/worldpo...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com