4 ms·
In lieu of German Tank serial numbers, Gott's original paper uses projections from Ehrlich and Ehrlich's 1990 Population Explosion paper that the world's popula
by ex3xu 7y ago
In lieu of German Tank serial numbers, Gott's original paper uses projections from Ehrlich and Ehrlich's 1990 Population Explosion paper that the world's population will top out at around 10 billion, then essentially cause a dumpster fire and crash and burn. Obviously extremely speculative stuff that's been sensationalized here.
- AstralStorm 7y agoWhy the dumpster fire and crash though instead of stability or expansion into space for example? Seems like a silly guess. Plus bad climate and famines and wars can stop it much earlier than those 10 billion.
- ex3xu 7y agoI can't get past the paywall to read the original Population Explosion paper that Gott uses, but the dumpster fire premise seems to comes from the assumption of tragedy-of-the-commons-style environmental degradation. The Wikipedia on Ehrlich offers the following comment: > When is an area overpopulated? When its population can't be maintained without rapidly depleting nonrenewable resources (or converting renewable resources into nonrenewable ones) and without degrading the capacity of the environment to support the population. In short, if the long-term carrying capacity of an area is clearly being degraded by its current human occupants, that area is overpopulated. I agree with you that it is questionable set of assumptions, though I think when considering some of issues humanity is facing in the realm of climate change and water shortages, it's not an entirely untenable hypothesis.