JCC Eight Billion People!

This is true...but they assume conditions on average.

More wars, famines, pandemics could break the models and change the results.

Or some new technological breakthrough could come along and rocket us into the 10s of billions.

 

From what I’ve learned - no.

Populations self adjust so overpopulation will most likely never be a problem.

Every community that has reached a certain low mortality rate begins having less children inside of two generations.

This phenomena seems to be so universal that there is even an estimated average population the world will eventually settle at. I forgot what it is.

France leads the way in all of this. The future of long living humans will see a population density similar to
France.

 

How so?

 

Conversations about overpopulation tend to be about how there are too many Chinese, Indian, or African people. In reality, the issue isn't how many people there are, but the overconsumption inherent in Western lifestyles.

 

Edit: oops

 

I'm doing my part!

I remember when world population reached 4 billion, so it has more than doubled in less than my lifetime.

 

I'll be doing my part someday-


--In adding several to it


...one day. Least I keep telling myself that

 

biodiversity collapse is accelerating. NYT ran an article about the number of animal species that have lost 50-60% of their remaining habitats just since 2001.

Bird populations are in rapid decline across the US and Canada across almost every habitat. Dozens of North American species have lost half their populations or more in my lifetime.

 

This.

Though most serious environmentalists don’t indulge in ridiculous “the poor brown people are multiplying too fast” speak, and ecofascism remains fringe (though with some worrying mainstream footholds in a few European countries, many of whom don’t realize that they’re parroting “lebensraum” talk from the Nazi era). Those idiots just tend to be the most strident, unfortunately. They tend to shove it into any conversation, no matter the topic.

 

Well the bird decline in North America is about the North American population. A near doubling of the human population corresponding with a near halving of the bird population.

 

Right, but it’s the rapacious appetite of the American consumer that’s at the heart of that. Presenting it as a simple numbers correlation ignores just how extreme a natural resource impact the American population has due to consumption habits.

 

no I don't think it ignores that at all. Most good articles about climate change for example address the outsize contribute of American per capita consumption. Population growth in the U.S. is more or less one tenth that of India. But per capita energy consumption in the U.S. is roughly ten times that of India. So that means that in terms of energy consumption, India's population growth rate and the U.S.'s population growth rate have more or less an identical global impact. That isn't exactly true in terms of environmental impacts that are highly localized, like water consumption and local impact on biodiversity.

 

Did you look at the global cooling that ensued after the Black Plague killed nearly half of the Old World's population?

 

It's a well known fact that the little ice age drove Europeans indoors where they spent all their time ****ing just to keep warm. So the population was able to recover in just a few centuries.

 

The Old World includes Asia, Arabia and roughly half of Africa in that instance (we just don't know enough about what went down in the half that wans't extensively connected to medieval trade and slave trade). Enormous surfaces of farmland were given back to nature across three continents in the wake of the Black Death. Global reforestation wasn't inconsequential, although, of course, it's hard to assess precisely how much that weighed against elevated volcanic activity that also played a part.

Global repopulation wasn't exactly a Europe-specific phenomenon either. Most of the global population has lived in Asia since Ancient times. Asia held 69% of the world's population as late as the 1800s, and its current relative decline isn't due to European demographics, but to the rising weight of Africa's population.

This isn't a "black and white" question. Please keep all ideologies out of it.

 

Don't worry about humanity ruining the planet for millions of years. We are finally getting fusion energy! Eventually! Maybe!

 

A new tech start up funded by Sifo-Dyas

 

I think twins are really to blame for overpopulation. We don't need two of the same person!!! And don't get me started on triplets!!!

 

Indian triplets are the worst!