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I agree. I don't think the earth can support more than about 4B or so people. Our aquifers are drying up and they can take centuries to refill. Or they compress

I agree. I don't think the earth can support more than about 4B or so people. Our aquifers are drying up and they can take centuries to refill. Or they compress and will never fill again (but maybe new ones will instead). We have no real chance of changing human behavior so it seems like we just need less humans. I'm not suggesting laws but you can remove tax breaks for kids after the second. Have all you want, you just don't get the breaks. I think the earth is about to strike back and show us who is boss. Clean water, food monoculture, and antibiotics overuse are going to come home to roost and we'll quickly learn what a sustainable population is.

dredmorbius 7y ago
The long-term historical trend was far closer to 50-100m. There are very few historical large wild mammal populations remotely close to this. And historical, because we've reduced wild terrestrial vertebrate biomass by about 90% over the past 100-1000 years. There are about a half-million wild zebra, and maybe 12 million white-tail deer. The largest seal populations are estimated at about 8 million -- roughly the number of people in New York City. We're probably outnumbered by brown rates, roughly 11 billion. Even of domesticated cattle and pigs, totals are on the order of about a billion. The passenger pidgeon, two centuries ago, numbered 3-5 billion individuals. Today there are none. For most large terrestrial mammals, populations are in the 5,000 - 50,000 range. That's the population of a small to mid-sized town. For an entire species. Update: an Imgur photo gallery consisting of images with as many pixels per image as there are individuals in the population: https://imgur.com/gallery/9v4HV2p https://imgur.com/gallery/9v4HV2p