You can see this on the world population growth graphs now.
If you look at it stricly statistically, Earth's population will plateau at around 10-11bn people. We can easily feed that many people, and it won't be massively more than now in terms of environmental impact.
Yes, we need to learn to be sustainable more, but the trends are good and I'm pretty sure we will find a way to sustainably live as 10bn people on Earth.
We will most likely run into huge societal problems from declining populations very soon, rather than from growing ones.
- The proportion of undernourished people in the world has declined from 15 percent in 2000-2004 to 8.9 percent in 2019.
- The rate of stunting (children too short for their age as a result of chronic malnutrition) fell from 33 percent of children under age five in 2000 to 21.3 percent in 2019.6
https://www.actionagainsthunger.org/world-hunger-facts-stati...
I mean yes theoretically everything is easy, but somehow in practice just does not work, maybe it will some day in future... they say hope dies last ...
Wider afield, increasing access to education drops desired family size (I guess gives people other options for “growth” than literally having more children). And education levels in populous developing countries are rapidly increasing.
It is interesting you said that especially as Oxfam recent study says that each minute 11 people dies of hunger while planet has 7.8bn people.
https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/oxfam-11-people-...
The inefficiency losses from production to meal (about 1/3 waste) and the unequal global distribution of food are the important factors not our ability to sustainably produce enough.
Another problem is population growth in areas that lack the necessary environmental/climate properties to sustain themselves.
Yes, I know stats, about waste, and also how half of planet undernourished, and half of planet is obese. Yes, if this is perfect world we would not have global warming, inequality, wars, we would not have extinction of animal and plant species, destruction of ecosystem... wealth would be distributed more fairly and we would already live in multiple planets. So, we do not live in that world, we live in world where people turn head on the other side when see someone on the street ask them for just a bit of food ...
Your answer is derailing the discussion to a moral debate about the worth of lifes.
By that logic why not having 40bn people, I mean there is plenty of calories, we do not have to all eat each day, every other day will do...
The entire conversation only has sense in context of life and quality of life of those people, along with all other beings in ecosystem, as idea of the entire article is benefit for having more people for the sake of economy.
There is technical level so what is maximum. Maximum amount of caries with minimum amount of calories needed to survive = 40bn. There is other side if there is one involuntary death due to starvation, there is no point of growing bigger population, as it is shitty civilization anyway and it does not deserve to exist.
Even in pure technical level calculation does not work, as we need to include all issues and loses, we cannot auto-magically say things will solve themselves.
It is necessary to include waste, and continuation of the food waste, then global warming (droughts, floods, pollution), then loss of top soil, issue with nitrogen fixation, issue with energy production, collapsing of marine life, supply chain ...
True, but the US is in the enviable position where it has enough resources to support a substantially higher population. The US has the second highest amount of arable (cultivated land) in the world, second only to India. However, its population is only one quarter of India's.
I'm not arguing that the US should increase its population to that extent, and I'm not arguing that having 1.3B people living in a country the size of India is a good thing. However, the US could maintain population growth for significantly longer than other countries.
Again, I'm not saying that this is a good thing, and I'm only talking about cropland and not the impact of climate change on costal population centers (it will be devastating).
You give humans too little credit.
There is no idea too stupid for humans to strive for and murder/subjugate each other over.
Have a look at any history book of any culture in any century for some ideas.
Don't see it.
The "manned mission to Mars" merchants will sell the dream of that trip for decades to come (they have already backtracked. Which, even when eventually is done, it would be a crude, Apollo-style affair, for a handful of people and equipment, not some sci-fi travel destination.
Anything further, and the hurdles are so many (plus "small" things like the speed of light limit and so on), that the only realistic thing would be "generation ships" going to some unknown place that might or might not have a habitable planet.
And that of course is only feasible with major major leaps in technology which we don't seem to be making, including several "invent a whole new paradigm" style solutions.
Heck, the reality is we haven't even been able to send a manned mission outside of LEO for 49 years now. Heck, basic infrastructure like roads and schools is in ruins, and people imagine being able to fund space exploration. Rather, bet on more decline.
People want to leave Earth because "it's bounded", but at the same time think that our capacity for space travel/inventions/bearing manufacturing costs/etc is somehow "unbounded", or at least easily handles us being an interplanetary species.
Even with space as a resource the math doesn't work out.
You'd just keep the pyramid scheme running for a few hundred years with the 1% elite inhabiting earth, and the current cheap workforce of the third world inhabiting the astroid belt.
Even in space we could not afford an exponential growth. You would want to pace yourself before you can afford to reach other stars, then other galaxies. Eventually there will be nowhere to run.
Even a tiny fraction of our galaxy is large enough that you can run your entire lifetime and then some. That is also part of the problem...
You do realise there are probably more habitable planets than there are human beings right now? You seem to have no concept of how big the universe is.
I'm not saying we are going to populate the entire universe at any point, but your statement here is just ridiculous.
Which is neither here, nor there. Speed of light, and around thousands of required technologies missing, many of those huge leaps over what's available today, make their existance (assuming we even knew where they are) moot.
And even if they were known what? You'll carry 8-10 billion people there for trips taking 10s or 100s of years with light speed? Or we're talking about some "generation ship" with some handful of humanity selected for it?
And how would that help the rest?
We haven't send a man out of LEO for 50 years, might as well forget those "habitable planets".
I don't realise that, for one. It certainly isn't part of the shared knowledge or common sense, so I don't think the way you have expressed yourself is fair.
I thought we had only discovered a relatively small number of planets, most of which were relatively large gas giant types, and that claims to large numbers were based on speculation. That knowledge could be very much out of date by now. What is the current state of knowledge?
What is the definition of a habitable planet? If it's just "an earth-size planet that is so close to a stable star", I don't think it's really fair to call that habitable. If there's no life on the planet already, it would be a great deal of effort to make it ready for human habitation, wouldn't it? There will be rock but no soil, so we need to start with simple life forms for a long time before we can get human food to grow. Is there any reason to suppose that a lifeless planet would have a breathable atmosphere? Or if the planet is Venusian or in a snowball phase, we probably couldn't do much on a useful timescale. Again, I don't actually know what the state of knowledge in that field is, so I'm betraying my ignorance rather than trying some kind of "gotcha".
If we only need one planet at a time, I guess it's okay. But if we're talking about exponential growth, then we will need an exponential number of planets. We will "use up" the second one much faster than the first, and the third much faster than the second, and we'll probably need the fifth when we're starting the fourth and so on. There will come a time when we either need to slow down, or the difference between some technical and practical definition of "habitable planet" becomes relevant.
Even with a constant entropy production rate there would be nowhere to run eventually. The Universe is a closed system.
So you would always want to be thermodynamically efficient, which appears to also produce lifelike behavior. "Any system built to have nonzero memory has to be predictive to operate at maximal energetic efficiency."
Look at the other poor planets in our solar system and those beyond the solar system are solidly beyond our reach.
Without sustainable politics/culture, the population will need endlessly to new locations. Space colonization would just postpone the need.