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>Personally, I think that limit is much closer to 1 trillion people living on the earth than it is to 1 billion people. Honestly, you can think whatever you wa
by fiblye 9y ago
>Personally, I think that limit is much closer to 1 trillion people living on the earth than it is to 1 billion people.
Honestly, you can think whatever you want. But what people want to think and what's actually true often don't line up, and they certainly don't here.
Wikipedia says that the total land mass of Earth is about 150,000,000 km^2. Do you really think a global population density of 6666 people/square kilometer on every single piece of land on earth is in any way sustainable? That's a population density that exceeds Tokyo. Japan's population is heavily dependent on food imports to sustain itself. When the whole world is denser than Tokyo, where is the food going to come from?
- OscarCunningham 9y agoThat's 150m^2 per person. If everyone lives in skyscrapers then living space isn't much of that, and 150m^2 is (in the best case) enough for one person's food. So it might be that this scenario is impossible for other reasons, but I don't think mere land area is a problem.
- goatlover 9y agoYou mean if every meter of the planet was covered with skyscrapers? Not sure how that's remotely realistic. And it sounds incredibly dystopian.
- OscarCunningham 9y agoNo, the opposite. I mean you could use skyscrapers to make people's living space take up a much smaller proportion of the land area, leaving the rest free for farming.
- fiblye 9y agoWhere exactly would the resources for enough skyscrapers to house a trillion humans come from? The world is facing a sand shortage already with not even 1% of that imagined population.
- OscarCunningham 9y agoSure whatever. I'm just saying land area isn't the problem.
- triplesec 9y agoExcept it is. At least half the world's land is unusable for agriculture, and often for habitation. And transport had to be btaen into account for area. And that leaves no space for any wilderness, forests etc. Which is impossible ecologically. Your theoretical arguments here have no practical value.
- empath75 9y agoLand usable for agriculture is a significantly smaller percentage than that.
- stale2002 9y agoMuch of the world is empty, undeveloped land right now, and cities take up a very small percentage of land. Double the amount of cities in the world, from 1% to 2% of land usage, and that's 5 billion more people that the world can support. For food well, we currently only use a very small percentage of the sunlight that hits the earth, and energy = food. Especially if lab technology for growing food gets much better. Yeah, it is unsubstantiated sci-fi predictions but taking about these Sci-fi scenarios in detail is kinda missing the point. The point I was trying to make, is that the whole "resources are finite" is a dumb argument because it doesn't say at all how close we are to that limit. Someone's 1 billion people carrying capacity prediction is just as valid as my unsubstantiated 1 trillion people prediction. And if you are predicting that doomsday overpopulation scenario is right around the corner, you better provide some damn good evidence, because all the current evidence shows that humans are doing better than they ever have been in the history of the world. Evidence for us hitting the carrying capacity of the planet would be things like "hunger is increasing and quality of life is going down in these overpopulated places". But so far this is not happening.