I've always thought that the way to look at human population is to pretend you're looking at a population of some other species, say beavers. Beavers are a goo

I've always thought that the way to look at human population is to pretend you're looking at a population of some other species, say beavers. Beavers are a good analogy because beavers live in social communities and their dam construction activities have significant effects on local ecosystems, generally positive from the standpoint of species that like lakes. With that thought in mind, let's look at global human distributions: https://neo.gsfc.nasa.gov/view.php?datasetId=SEDAC_POP https://neo.gsfc.nasa.gov/view.php?datasetId=SEDAC_POP The thing that pops out is that humans don't appear to like living in deserts and polar regions, and dense forest/jungle doesn't seem that popular either. Given that humans evolved on the African savannah, perhaps this is related to some deep-seated genetic preference for living in valleys and grasslands with nice views? Note also there's a tendency to congregate in many coastal areas, likely related to the ability to harvest food from the ocean. From time to time in history, there have been attempts to 'green the deserts', all of which have come to not much - the book 'Cadillac Desert' is a nice discussion of these efforts in the American West, which have created a few tenuous pockets of humanity in places like Las Vegas, Phoenix, Salt Lake City: https://xkcd.com/2399/ https://xkcd.com/2399/ All communities that rely on mining water from aquifers are tenuous in nature and will quite likely dry up and blow away once the aquifer is exhausted. I'm still waiting for the first Dune stillsuit to be manufactured ('feces are processed in the thigh pads' being a drawback). Consumption of water distilled from human urine is still not that popular, either. As far as the fossil-fueled global warming issue, let's take California which is emmitting on the order of 400 million tons of fossil-sourced CO2 equivalents per year with a population of about 40 million people. If we go to the other end of the scale, sub-Saharan Africa has about 1.1 billion people, and according to World Bank data that region is emitting on the order of 900 million tons of fossil-sourced CO2 equivalents per year... assuming this data is roughly correct, the avg Californian is emitting about 15X per year as the avg sub-Saharan African (a lower spread than I expected actually). California could reduce its fossil fuel consumption to 1/15th of present usage while maintaining a steady, well-shaped population distribution by deploying renewable energy, storage and electric vehicles at scale. This, needless to say, is more likely than a 15-fold population reduction. And, similarly, sub-Saharan Africa could also meet its entire entire needs without fossil fuels, sitting right on the equator as it does. From this climate-centric perspective, population is not really the problem, as long as it stabilizes soon. There is of course another issue, i.e. leaving space for other species to live in, aka preservation of wilderness, which is generally preferable to wall-to-wall humans packed front-to-rear across the entire planet, in my opinion.