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Wow! Probably similar numbers for concrete. It's exponential growth. The thing about exponential growth is it can't continue for too long. As observers of Moor

Wow! Probably similar numbers for concrete. It's exponential growth. The thing about exponential growth is it can't continue for too long. As observers of Moore's Law will understand, eventually you run out of resources or into other physical limits. However, I'm quite confident that we can keep innovating and growth will continue in one form or another. I don't think Elon Musk is correct that human population will collapse. All it takes is one subgroup to keep reproducing above the replacement rate, and after enough generations they will come to dominate and overall growth will continue. It's pretty much the law of life - expand to consume all available resources, be that food, space, energy, oxygen, whatever. You see it in bacteria, in fish, in mammals large and small, and of course in humans. There will be lot's of challenges there, and lots of need for innovation so we can handle growth without destroying our remaining wild spaces and ecosystems on which we depend. Humans haven't figured out how to grow sustainably yet.

istjohn 4y ago
> All it takes is one subgroup to keep reproducing above the replacement rate, and after enough generations they will come to dominate and overall growth will continue. Consequently, religion is going to thrive. Everyone else stops reproducing once they reach a certain standard of living.
- eloff 4y ago
  Perhaps that's the point. Religion is universal across human cultures, it must serve some, as yet unknown, evolutionary purpose to be so universally widespread. I doubt that historical purpose was higher birth rates, but it certainly is now. Since it seems to grant such a huge advantage to evolutionary fitness, it will thrive, even dominate.
jvm___ 4y ago
This is from a 2014 Forbes article. "According to his blog, between 2011 and 2013, China consumed 6.6 gigatons of concrete – that’s more than the U.S. used in the entire 20th century. Look at what the U.S. built between 1901 and 2000: all those skyscrapers, the Interstate, the Hoover Dam, the list goes on and on but all that concrete only amounted to 4.5 gigatons."
worldsayshi 4y ago
>the law of life A pet tinfoil hat theory of mine is that most organisms ought to have some built in fail safe mechanism that causes populations to regulate themselves before a catastrophic overpopulation collapse. Because if it didn't have it it would be more likely to die out, so there should be a strong evolutionary pressure towards getting it. So maybe the population growth stagnation we're seeing is due to us seeing the writing on the wall and pacing ourselves, more or less voluntary/consciously. Also, for it to make sense in a game theory sense everyone that shares the niche needs to switch it on more or less simultaneously and it has to be embedded in the genome in a way that makes it very hard to remove by random mutation.
- friend_and_foe 4y ago
  Well, there is a mechanism that largely prevents this, but it isn't genetic. Say you're a rabbit, and you have a bunch of rabbit babies, and they eat all the grass and leave less grass growing. Their babies will die young and the population will stabilize around necessary resource availability. What happens is increasing infant mortality and starvation. The interesting thing is, you never actually get to a global state of overpopulation, you get osculating population numbers between generations that are very stable. The stabilization of human population now is the same phenomenon, but also has to do with technological advancement. As standard of living rises for a population, they become accustomed to abundance. This abundance is different from times past, in the past the more children you had the more labor you had so the more abundance you had. This created more pressure to reproduce than to reduce the number of mouths you need to feed. Since resource availability is becoming decoupled from availability of human labor the opposite incentive now dominates, and people naturally reduce reproduction to maintain personal comfort. This has the emergent, not deliberate effect of doing the same for the larger population.

istjohn 4y ago

> All it takes is one subgroup to keep reproducing above the replacement rate, and after enough generations they will come to dominate and overall growth will continue. Consequently, religion is going to thrive. Everyone else stops reproducing once they reach a certain standard of living.

eloff 4y ago
Perhaps that's the point. Religion is universal across human cultures, it must serve some, as yet unknown, evolutionary purpose to be so universally widespread. I doubt that historical purpose was higher birth rates, but it certainly is now. Since it seems to grant such a huge advantage to evolutionary fitness, it will thrive, even dominate.

jvm___ 4y ago

This is from a 2014 Forbes article. "According to his blog, between 2011 and 2013, China consumed 6.6 gigatons of concrete – that’s more than the U.S. used in the entire 20th century. Look at what the U.S. built between 1901 and 2000: all those skyscrapers, the Interstate, the Hoover Dam, the list goes on and on but all that concrete only amounted to 4.5 gigatons."

worldsayshi 4y ago

>the law of life A pet tinfoil hat theory of mine is that most organisms ought to have some built in fail safe mechanism that causes populations to regulate themselves before a catastrophic overpopulation collapse. Because if it didn't have it it would be more likely to die out, so there should be a strong evolutionary pressure towards getting it. So maybe the population growth stagnation we're seeing is due to us seeing the writing on the wall and pacing ourselves, more or less voluntary/consciously. Also, for it to make sense in a game theory sense everyone that shares the niche needs to switch it on more or less simultaneously and it has to be embedded in the genome in a way that makes it very hard to remove by random mutation.

friend_and_foe 4y ago
Well, there is a mechanism that largely prevents this, but it isn't genetic. Say you're a rabbit, and you have a bunch of rabbit babies, and they eat all the grass and leave less grass growing. Their babies will die young and the population will stabilize around necessary resource availability. What happens is increasing infant mortality and starvation. The interesting thing is, you never actually get to a global state of overpopulation, you get osculating population numbers between generations that are very stable. The stabilization of human population now is the same phenomenon, but also has to do with technological advancement. As standard of living rises for a population, they become accustomed to abundance. This abundance is different from times past, in the past the more children you had the more labor you had so the more abundance you had. This created more pressure to reproduce than to reduce the number of mouths you need to feed. Since resource availability is becoming decoupled from availability of human labor the opposite incentive now dominates, and people naturally reduce reproduction to maintain personal comfort. This has the emergent, not deliberate effect of doing the same for the larger population.