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World Population Growth
- dang 7y agoA discussion from 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12691669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12691669
- riffraff 7y agofor those who have not seen it, the "Global population growth, box by box" by the late Hans Rosling is (IMO) a more entertaining introduction on the same subject. https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_...
- avefilip 7y agoThe fact that there was 3 billion people in 1960 is mind-blowing to me.
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoYes, that's almost in my lifetime.
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoJust exponential growth being exponential. Find the doubling time by dividing 70 by that tiny percentage yearly growth. I really wish the politicians wittering on about seeking constant growth - whether population or GDP - could comprehend it.
- k__ 7y agoIn Germany, we have 83 million people and the world population grew multiples of that in my lifetime. That's just baffling. I mean, the "new" people are more than enough to sustain multiple own countries...
- mihaifm 7y agoAlso mind blowing: 6.5% of all the people who have ever lived are alive now. That's 1 in 15 humans who have ever walked the Earth, being alive now.
- xhgdvjky 7y agoholy crap
- zimbatm 7y agoThe sheer mass of people that India and China has. If they wanted to, they could send a fraction of their population to pretty much any country and double the head count. It would be a pretty effective method to invade peacefully.
- shard972 7y agoInvade? Don't you mean culturally enriching?
- jarfil 7y agoSeems like by 2100, Nigeria will be the third "population power" in the world: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/projected-population-by-country https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/projected-population-by-c...
- vorg 7y agoNigeria won't have 800 million people by 2100, nor Africa 4.4 billion. There'll be some catastrophe well before then.
- shard972 7y agoYou mean like Ebola? Because the west is already spending billions preventing this. Or starvation? Nope, the west is already spending billions preventing this. Political instability? Nope, the west is already spending billions and taking in millions of refugees to prevent this. What kind of catastrophe is left that couldn't just happen to us as well?
- point78 7y agoChina is already doing that
- vorg 7y agoIndia's started doing it too. The situation with Indian foreign students in Australia/NZ right now closely resembles that with Chinese ones in the 1990's, so I predict the high immigration that happened with Chinese then will happen with Indians soon.
- jansan 7y agoBiggest challenge for our planet, yet almost nobody is talking about it. IMHO it is just ridiculous to attribute famines to a 1 degree temperature rise, while at the same time ignoring the fact that due to population growth the available land per capita has decreased dramatically within the last few decades.
- mrpopo 7y ago> IMHO it is just ridiculous to attribute famines to a 1 degree temperature rise, while at the same time ignoring the fact that due to population growth the available land per capita has decreased dramatically within the last few decades. These are two different problems that both need solving, and I'm sure some people in Africa are trying to tackle the population growth problem. If you're on HN right now, I'm sure you are more concerned with the temperature rise problem (by the way, 1 degree? We already passed that).
- jansan 7y agoWhen did we pass 1 degree (Celsius)?
- mrpopo 7y agoTechnically, we didn't pass it completely (0.8C). https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ 2016 reached 1C of warming anomaly relative to 1951-1980 average, but was exceptionally hot. But there are enough greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and feedback loops in action so that, even if all human activity stopped right now, the 1C bar will be easily toppled, and depending on prediction models, the 1.5C is probably already unavoidable as well.
- jansan 7y agoMaybe, but that wasn't my point in the original post. The famines that are taking place today are attributed to the temperature rise so far, and that is clearly below 1 degree. Just for comparison, in Bangladesh the population has quadrupled since the 1950s.
- Mizza 7y agoI have two conflicting thoughts about this: 1) I controversially think the world is currently underpopulated. Yes, as a species we need to get our pollution and resource management under control, but we need to do that at any population size. Once pollution and water is properly handled with technology, there should be enough landmass to handle 20B+ people. That's 10 billion extra potential scientists and artists to propel our species forward. 2) I am terrified that the idea that populations stabilize once a certain level of development and women's education is reached is false and not culturally universal. It seems like a very important untested assumption. If it isn't true, and we continue to see exponential population growth in developed second world countries but not in first world countries, I think that the disruption to the status quo and fear of aggression could lead to massive global wars of the kind we've never seen before.
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoThe current population uses more resources than sustainable each and every year, and does so at increasing rate. Species, habitats and forests are going at unprecedented rate. We show no signs at all of handling soil, pollution and water properly. Yet you conclude there's not enough of us ruining the place yet?
- Wintamute 7y agoNo signs at all? All green technology, efficiency improvement and conservation initiatives globally add up to zero in your book? Most reasonable people agree there's much more to be done, perhaps that we're only beginning to scratch the surface of what should be done, but to dismiss it is absurd. We should celebrate and applaud initiatives that are heading in the right direction - for example, UK power plants recently went 5 days with zero coal burning emissions, the longest coal free streak since the industrial revolution.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoAll those people in India/China/Brazil/Indonesia want single family detached homes with a yard for their kids and a garage for their cars, and absent a force restricting them from it, they’re going to trend towards it as they get richer. Actually, best hope might be concentrating all jobs in very urban areas and making it costly to get into relationships/have children so women themselves opt out of it and drop the birth rate as they wouldn’t be able to afford the amenities they want.
- drchewbacca 7y agoOverpopulation is such a hard conversation to have. I think a lot of people get scared that even talking about it will lead to calls for a genocide and therefore want to not even begin talking about it. There are a lot of positive things that can be done, for example educating women. I'm not sure if anyone has seen these calls to action but it sounds like there are problems ahead with such a large population. https://www.worldpopulationbalance.org/call-action-scientists-warning https://www.worldpopulationbalance.org/call-action-scientist...
- cowwithbeef 7y agoIt's a hard conversation because of the mechanics of how the human species works. If one group of people decides to take action and promote infertility, it will simply be replaced by the neighboring group of people who continue having high fertility. We have only globally enforced infertility or mass death of fertile populations as our long term options. It's depressing. If any group continues being highly fertile, they will inherit the earth. The authority necessary to prevent high fertility among all people is dystopian beyond belief.
- drchewbacca 7y agoA lot of advanced economies have low, or even negative, birth rates and they don't have repressive policies nor have even particularly tried to make things that way. So there may be positive ways of encouraging a low birth rate without the need for harsh enforcement.
- jansan 7y agoYou would have to take some form of positive action, for example improve women's rights, to do so. But the problem is that this will reach only the more open minded parts of the population, which again will result in the other part (often religious fundamentalists or simply less educated parts of the population) inheriting the earth. It's a grim situation.
- quotemstr 7y ago
- zpeti 7y agoI don't understand all the negativity in other posts in this thread. Poverty is falling dramatically right now, and is falling faster than the UN ever predicted. It is quite likely that we can feed 7bn people. We have 80 years to come up with the technology to feed another 4bn by 2100. And population will probably fall after that. That sounds doable to me. Food technology is making huge gains, if we have lab grown meat at almost a tenth of the cost, imagine how much easier it becomes to feed everyone. Why the pessimism? I know everyone's facebook feed is full of the world ending, but the situation isn't actually that bad.
- ahje 7y agoThe development (demographically and otherwise) in many first-world countries basically means many people will have to go back to a standard of living comparable to the one our parents/grandparents had in the 70's, and we won't accept it because other parts of the world are seeing improved conditions.
- collyw 7y ago> It is quite likely that we can feed 7bn people. We could probably feed a lot more, if we crammed everyone into small cages and fed them like factory farmed animals. The question is why you would want so many people living like that? You are already indirectly pointing out that meat will be off the menu for future generations and I am sure there will many other things that will need to be sacrificed as the population increases (for example, fish populations don't sound like they are keeping up with demand). And at some point there are going to be some hard limits on how many people can be fed.
- __HYde 7y agoWe don't need to do that. Earth could support a population of a trillion humans so a few 10s of billions is of little concern.
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- jakozaur 7y agoThere are some credible estimates that population on Earth will peak at 8.5-9 Bln. (2050-2070). See: https://www.amazon.com/Empty-Planet-Global-Population-Decline/dp/0771050887 https://www.amazon.com/Empty-Planet-Global-Population-Declin... Historically mid UN projections never turn out to be true. They were either low variant or below that.
- mc32 7y agoThat’s a lot of people consuming at 21st century rates. We’ve got to work to stabilizing pop to more sustainable levels where we don’t have further slash and burn land for farming and animal husbandry, resource exploitation at future rates, etc. Obviously messing with population growth is fraught with problems of unintended consequences (ala China OCP), but we can do better to bring effective zero growth to places experiencing exponential growth. (Women’s) Education, empowerment, opportunity, etc. This goes a long way. As with carbon emissions it could help to set a year baseline, or better calculate an optimal pop given natural resources and set incentives to stabilize at those points.
- thefounder 7y agoThere are enough resources for everyone as long as we invest in education and technology. I don't even count resources we could exploit from other planets. We also need to be careful with the nukes... The population growth may become an issue for our grand-grand children. I believe we will long gone by then.
- lkrubner 7y agoLeft unexplained is this rather large mystery: "For the long period from the appearance of modern Homo sapiens up to the starting point of this chart in 10,000 BCE it is estimated that the total world population was often well under one million." As others have often pointed out, as a large bodied mammal, we would expect humans to be roughly as successful as other widely dispersed large body mammals. And yet its thought that there were 100 million bison on the planet before human civilization arose. So there should have been 100 million humans on the planet. Why would there be so few humans, if other large body mammals were so plentiful? I'm inclined to think they are underestimating the number of humans on the planet in 10,000 BC, or there must be a good reason why there were so few humans.
- tropo 7y agoIt has to do with the trophic level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level Plants are almost always level 1. Bison would be just a bit over 2. (a bit over because they may consume bugs, bones, etc.) Humans would usually be higher than that. The traditional Eskimo diet is nearly trophic level 5. Due to loss of energy going from one level to the next, the biomass of creatures with high trophic level is limited: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_pyramid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_pyramid