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The physical size of the Earth will never increase, yet human's ability to multiply ourselves is infinite in theory. Something gotta give. Going by evolutionar
by netwanderer3 7y ago
The physical size of the Earth will never increase, yet human's ability to multiply ourselves is infinite in theory. Something gotta give.
Going by evolutionary theory, that means the more our total population increases the smaller average human body size must shrink, so we would consume less input resources and produce less waste individually. Same reason why giant dinosaurs went extinct yet little cockroaches survived. Those T-Rex'es required massive calories consumption to sustain themselves, yet there was no longer enough resources in the environment to fuel them.
The problem is for any of those biological changes to take place and for human to evolve (assuming the evolutionary theory is true), that process will be a slow and gradual one, likely to take hundred thousands or even millions of years. Climate change certainly doesn't operate within even a remotely similar time frame. Once it hits, resources will become scarce so in the worst case if we cannot stop climate change, the only possible solution is to practice reducing average consumption level to minimum, or to forecast optimal numbers of the world's total population that can still be accommodated by the Earth at each level of damage produced by climate change, then find a way to relentlessly control that number to keep it within limit.
I sincerely hope we will never have to come to that scenario as countries which own nuclear power will possess massive advantages over others.
- scott_s 7y agoHumans are not predicted to grow infinitely. As areas industrialize, more people have less children. Projections I have read predict we will level off at about 12 billion people by 2100. But the areas of the world now with less population growth (such as the US) also consume much more resources than the areas with higher population growth. So resource consumption is a big problem. But I think it's not helpful to frame it as a "population" problem, as we expect the population to level off.