8 ms·

No Population Bomb

76 points by pstadler 14y ago

jsmcgd 14y ago
Interesting article but a bizarre conclusion. We may not encounter another population bomb but we are in the process of living through one right now. "The longest period of exponential population growth for any organism… ever. " If that doesn't describe a population bomb, nothing does.
- rimantas 14y ago
  It can describe the bomb that went off a long time ago.
- rpicard 14y ago
  I think the term "population bomb" as it is used here means reaching a critical point in the population where it because a kind of natural disaster characterized by famine and other problems that result from running out of natural resources, etc.
rimantas 14y ago
Check out another talk by Hans Rosling where he visually demonstrates that 10 billion figure: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies.html http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies.h...
reasonattlm 14y ago
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/09/overpopulation.php http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/09/overpopulation.ph... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3192186/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3192186/ "For example, we applied the cohort-component method of population projections to 2005 Swedish population for several scenarios of life extension and a fertility schedule observed in 2005. Even for very long 100-year projection horizon, with the most radical life extension scenario (assuming no aging at all after age 60), the total population increases by 22% only (from 9.1 to 11.0 million). Moreover, if some members of society reject to use new anti-aging technologies for some religious or any other reasons (inconvenience, non-compliance, fear of side effects, costs, etc.), then the total population size may even decrease over time." ----- In the long term, there's no reason not to expect further exponential growth once human psychology and physiology are removed from the picture as the main drivers of whether or not population expands. The earth could support vastly more people than it does even with today's technology. Once it is possible to create intelligences very rapidly, and when there are non-human intelligence creators involved in the picture, I'd expect to see a vast explosion of sentience and colonization.
- kzrdude 14y ago
  I see a quote where the estimated possible population is basically derived directly from the land area required for habitation alone which is rubbish. We need to account for resource use as in food, energy, fertilizer, freshwater etc. I hope you'll feel refreshed to hear about a different resource peak than the usual, here's about limited phosphorus for fertilizer: http://phys.org/news/2013-04-phosphorus-essential-lifeare.html http://phys.org/news/2013-04-phosphorus-essential-lifeare.ht...
  - youngerdryas 14y ago
    Technology races ahead faster and faster while population flattens out yet lots of people insist on doom against reason. It is a psychological problem.
    - graeme 14y ago
      Technology requires support from resources. You can't respond to claims that our resources are limited merely by arguing that we will develop more technologies that use resources.
      - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
        We have enough uranium mined to last us about 1 or 2 thousands year. Now, with energy we can do things like desalinate water and make fertilizer. The only reason we don't do more nuclear power now is because there are cheaper options.
        wombleton 14y ago
        The argument is not that we will suddenly be unable to desalinate water and so forth, it's that the price will rise to put more people into starvation. Claiming that all that will happen is the price (for energy, food, water, soil, maintaining biodiversity, etc) will rise is exactly the problem.
salmonellaeater 14y ago
"If current economic development trends continue we should expect the average person's income in India and China (for example) to reach the same levels of the U.K., U.S.A., and Japan by 2048." This is within my expected lifetime, and my children will be at the peak of their careers during that time. It will be a different world. I'm reminded of Yancy Fry Sr.'s advice to Fry: "Someday, you may face adversities so preposterous, I can't even conceive of them."
- wololo 14y ago
  Seems facile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_income_trap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_income_trap, etc.
szeevim 14y ago
Really informative article. But comparing us to regular organisms is certainly a mistake. I do believe the UN conclusion is correct by 2050 our birth/death rate will match and a decrease in population.
kzrdude 14y ago
Population drives consumption and resource use. The clock has been ticking since the population exceeded the estimated ecological carrying capacity of the earth. In this sense, the population today puts us in a much more urgent situation than it would otherwise be.
cpursley 14y ago
I wonder if the lower frequency in nation-state warfare is an effect of increasing education levels of females?
- nolok 14y ago
  No, it is an effect of the cold war and nuclear weapons. Oh and also, no war in western europe because germany/france/uk beating the others wouldn't mean automatic world domination anymore, so we teamed up against the big guys.
- jcnnghm 14y ago
  That's a nice thought, but it is probably not the cause. "There is a steep positive slope in the numbers of battle deaths between 1816 and 1914 and a steep negative slope between 1945 and 1997." [1] Obviously, something happened in 1945 that changed everything. This change can be almost entirely explained by the United States acquisition of nuclear weapons, and the subsequent policy decision in the United States with respect to war and isolationism. Prior to WWII, US foreign policy was one of isolationism, where the United States largely ignored other nations politics and conflicts. This policy is very cost effective as long as war is avoidable. Unfortunately, neither WWI or WWII were, and both were massively costly. In the wake of WWII isolationism was abandondoned, in part because the United States was the only nation with nuclear arms. The United States decided to take an active role in stabilization, largely through the use of nuclear deterents to prevent interstate conflict between major powers, and smaller, more frequent "stablization" conflicts. Evidence for this is first seen less than three years after WWII ended, with the Berlin blockade, where the Soviet Union attempted to force the west into giving up control of Berlin by blocking supply access. This led to the delivery of 2,236,406 tons of supplies over 278,228 flights in eleven months (the Berlin airlift), which was enabled directly by the United States threat of Nuclear retaliation against the soviets. The United States publicly moved B-29 bombers to Britain to discourage the Soviet Union from interfering with the airlift. Had this deterent not existed, it's entirely possible that the situation would have escelated. Less than five years after WWII ended, with the outbreak of the Korean war, the pattern is reinforced. Before the start of the war, the United States produced 120 MK-III "Fat Man" nuclear weapons yielding 18-49 Kt, and started production of MK-4 1-30 Kt bombs, of which it produced 550 by May 1951. Interestingly, all of the Mk-III's were retired in 1950, and the MK-4's were retired in 1953 because the pace of development was so fast. The US deployed additional B-29's to Britain, with bombs, to discourage the Soviet Union from entering the Korean War. When the Chinese entered the war, MacArthur intended to deploy nuclear weapons against the Chinese, in part to distrupt supply lines with radioactive fallout, and planned to destroy China until it surrendered. MacArthur also made clear that he intended to use nuclear weapons against China if they crossed the 38th parallel, and this was communicated to them. MacArthur was relieved in part because of these plans, and his belief that the power to order the use of nuclear weapons was his, and not the President's. Ridgway, MacArthur's replacement, was authorized to use nuclear weapons in the event of major air attacks originating from outside Korea, and china was directly notified of such. The United States entered the war pre-emptively, then used the threat of nuclear weapons to prevent others from doing so, and to prevent the escaltion of the war. It is not difficult to imagine that without these stabilizing actions either the Berlin airlift of the Korean war could have quickly escelated into World War 3. In 1954, just after the Korean war, the first thermonuclear weapon (5-7Mt) was deployed, marking an end to interstate war between major powers. The highest yielding thermonuclear weapon the US ever deployed, the 25 Mt Mk-41, entered service in 1960, but by that point, the line in the sand had already been drawn. Since 1945 US policy has been clear, it will interfere in foreign affairs, using economic sanctions, conventional war and nuclear deterents to prevent costly large scale conflict. The direct result of this has been stabilization, a long-term decline in war deaths, and the end of interstate war between major powers. It will be interesting to see what happens as this strategy is abandoned as the survivors of WWII die off, and memory of why the US spends so much on its military fades. Hopefully enough time has gone by that a return to hostilities seems unthinkable; no doubt if there is a return, major hostilities will be massively costly in terms of life, money, liberty, and safety. 1: The Declining Risk of Death in Battle Bethany Lacina, Nils Petter Gleditsch and Bruce Russett International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Sep., 2006), pp. 673-680
ddlatham 14y ago
Is there an ideal long term human population level for the planet? If so, what is it? Will we need to create more incentives to have children to maintain it?
coldarchon 14y ago
If someone thinks there will be no population bomb clearly has missed all the rape incidents in India caused by mass abortions of female fetuses. And he clearly has not understood the situation in third world countries. In Sudan 100 years ago lived 1.8 million people, now there are 48 million people. The territory has not changed, modern fertilizer only allowed a 6 times higher production and there is huge desertification of the soil. And yet this country is considered as being in need for food every year, while we don't send them wood to cook their food. The population bomb? One day the population in Sudan will be too big to provide enough wood or food and yes the population there will collapse. This artcle wasn't interesting, it was one-dimensional.
Joeboy 14y ago
> We are slowing down population growth because of education, gender equality, the rural-to-urban transition, and birth control. Apart (afaik) from rural-to-urban transition, all of those are heavily promoted by people who are concerned about population growth.
- sirmixalot 14y ago
  Don't forget abortion and euthanasia. I'm breathing better already.
  - rdl 14y ago
    I was amazed to learn that the abortion rate per 1000 pregnancies in the US (in 2008 or 2010) was 138 (for white women) and 501 (for black women) (and somewhere in between for hispanic, native american, etc.) I intuitively thought it was like 10-20/1000. So I think abortion is doing pretty well for itself. Euthanasia really needs to step up its game, though.
    - sirmixalot 14y ago
      No worries. The ACA will drain cash from medicare fast enough to make it a socialist sacrament by 2025 here in the USA. But we're getting our butt kicked by startups in the Netherlands and China.
      - rdl 14y ago
        Another two planks of CoE's platform seem to be doing well, too. Fortunately sodomy is now pretty popular and increasingly legally accepted, and unfortunately suicide is very high, particularly among young people (so it affects the largest number of quality adjusted life years, as well as preventing future reproduction). Cannibalism seems to be a non-starter, though. Other than bath salts induced crazy people.
    - jellicle 14y ago
      Your rates are too high by one order of magnitude. http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss6108a1.htm http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss6108a1.htm
kingkawn 14y ago
Anything called "The Ratchet" I have a hard time taking seriously.
- pjscott 14y ago
  ... he said, on "Hacker News".
kstenerud 14y ago
While the author is correct in terms of population growth, he has missed one critical point. We are heading into a population bomb not because of continued explosive population growth, but rather because of dwindling energy reserves. Industrialization and fossil fuels are what have allowed the population to exponentially grow this far. But now that energy is more expensive to extract, food is becoming more and more expensive. We're already seeing food riots in the poorer nations, and that trend will continue to grow, leading to a massive energy shock and die-off never seen before. This trend could be slowed by massive adoption of alternative energy, but the only currently viable alternative energy (nuclear) is not likely to be exploited in a meaningful way any time soon, considering political and weaponization concerns. If we're really lucky, we'll discover a solar energy tech + energy storage system efficient and cheap enough to see us through before too many people die off, but that's a big "if".
- benihana 14y ago
  Malthus said the same thing - that we wouldn't be able to produce enough food because of whatever reason. And yet we humans found some way to continue living and producing food just fine. We increased our food yield and continue to do so. We found creative solutions to our problems with our available resources and there isn't any reason to think that we'll sudden lose the capacity to do this because of peak oil or lack of alternative fuels, neither of which were concepts in Malthus' time.
  - kstenerud 14y ago
    Malthus said that our population would eventually outgrow our capacity to produce food. What I'm saying is that we've already outgrown our future ability to produce food, and are now in a race against time to stabilize our energy supply before the population bomb goes off. And unless we do come up with a novel source of cheap energy, it WILL go off.
    - roflc0ptic 14y ago
      I read things like this because I so desperately want there not to be a population bomb, but the crux of their argument is waving their hands and saying "human ingenuity will take care of it." In essence it's a faith based argument cloaked in scientific jargon. The only answer shy of taking state power and forcing powering down (deeply improbable) is building resilient local communities and food systems.
rdl 14y ago
Even if you believe in the "growth rate leveling off as women are educated" thing, it still means in 30 years the world's population is going to be more concentrated in countries and cultures which today lag the most in virtually everything I like. Even within the US, few of the people I respect in tech have children (or want children), and then they do, it's 0-2. I'd far rather live in a world with 10b Elon Musks, where each was contributing a huge surplus, vs. 3b sub-today's-median-ability, though, so it's not absolute numbers which matter.
- twoodfin 14y ago
  What difference does that really make? Plenty of people today doing what you like had parents who didn't. If people you respect in tech don't have children, it'll be someone else's children that get to do the cool stuff in the next generation. It's not as if the demand for new technology is going to decrease as a few hundred million Chinese (hopefully) hit the middle class in a couple of decades.
  - rdl 14y ago
    I sort of believe people are able to overcome their circumstances in 1-2 generations after being removed from a sufficiently toxic environment, but I largely disbelieve that a statistically significant number of the people alive today in e.g. Afghanistan, or born over the next 20 years there, will be positive contributors to the world. There are outliers (who GTFO, are western educated, and either don't go back, or go back essentially from a western frame of reference), and there are cultures themselves which improve over a generation (Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Korea are the best examples from the 1900s; they went from serious problems post-WW2 to world leaders today). I believe China might accomplish that, but I don't have much confidence in a lot of other countries, including those with very high populations or current growth rates (and high inequality, largely supported by natural resources). And I think much of the US is regressing -- the son of a random unemployed Detroit person is less likely to become a first-class member of society today than the son of a factory worker was 30-50 years ago.
    - twoodfin 14y ago
n1ghtm4n 14y ago
"All this means that on the scale of hundreds of years our population growth may actually look like a very steep sigmoidal curve. But of course, in 2050 our planet and species will look very different than it currently is. There is a limit to what our models can predict about the future population. It could be that the human population plateaus and stabilizes. However, in a world with more energy, more geopolitical stability, advanced A.I., and a larger extraterrestrial presence, our species demographics may begin to change in unexpected ways. For now, we may simply be relieved that Malthus and Ehrlich were wrong. We will not encounter a population bomb." So we can't predict the future, but the other guys' 50-year predictions "were wrong" [sic] and my 50-year predictions are right. Did I get that right? His argument can be summarized as "Everything will probably work itself out. Trust me, brah. I'm a futurist."
quattrofan 14y ago
Its not population that's the problem per se, its the average consumption of that population. The majority of which right now don't consume anywhere near as much as we do in the developed world, but its changing, and fast. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2013/apr/12/escalating-consumption http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2013/apr...
michaelochurch 14y ago
I agree with the conclusion-- we won't face a population explosion-- but... Malthus was right and wrong. He was wrong about economic growth being linear (even then, it was a 0.5% per year exponential increase that just looked linear). The Industrial Revolution kicked in and now economic growth is (for the first time ever) faster than population growth. That change happened around 1850; until that point, per-person economic improvement was virtually nonexistent because population gobbled up any gains. Economic growth has been faster-than-exponential as long as there have been humans. If you treat biological complexity or energy capture as the analytic extension of "economic growth" that goes back to the origin of life ~3.8 billion years ago: a faster-than-exponential curve that just happened to be very slow (but always getting faster) for 3.7999 billion years. Now, we're also seeing population growth rates drop, due to causes cited by OP. Malthus was right insofar as the stronger countries of Europe (Great Britain, Germany, Russia) spent the next 150 years viciously outsourcing their Malthusian catastrophes (probably without need to do so) to the weaker ones (Ireland, Poland) and other parts of the world. Malthus didn't actually predict starvation. He predicted moral malfeasance (with his religious beliefs, this included birth control, although I wouldn't call that malfeasance) driven by population pressure, and that happened. Humans are a mix of r-selective and K-selective impulses. Psychopathy is what happens when the r-selector within us is unchecked by K-selective conscience/fairness modules. The reason it is more common in men is that it conferred a stronger r-selective advantage in men (who could possess harems and "fan out") than in women (who are limited to about one child per fertile year, and 30 fertile years in a life). Also, if you look at the "corporate paternalism" as more than metaphor, most people work in r-selective get-big-or-die gambits or large companies that have a lot of employees (children) but don't invest anything in them. Very few people work in K-selective enterprises that grow more slowly but invest in their people. I don't think one can say, for sure, that the K-selector has won outright. I think that contest between the two sets of impulses still exists. Much of how humans have imagined good and evil comes from the conflict (perhaps a neuroevolutionary arms race) between the r- and K-selective selves.
- nwzpaperman 14y ago
  Financial--debt-asset--growth is exponential. Individual persons don't consume real resources geometrically, but linearly over a lifespan. Population does grow geometrically, so that is the underlying driver for geometric production and resource consumption. Unfortunately, there are a lot of service/non-producing cash-flows diluting the value of popular macro economic benchmarks like GDP and corporate benchmarks like EBITDA. As CS engineers dominate this place, it should be standard practice to examine, both, the input and output sides of any system during load analysis.
shin_lao 14y ago
The author is correct, however he misses an important point: how painful population stabilization will be for some of us.
speeder 14y ago
I like this subject. Both relating to too much, and too few people... First, regarding absolute human numbers, we do have too much, mostly because we are rapidly using up fossil resources (not only fuel, but also fertilizers), and some important ones already peaked (phosphorous for example). But I don't believe that making your population decline fixes things, it only create other problems, the solution for the problem that I mentioned last, is develop more technology. Malthus was right on his diagnostic, wrong in the solution (please, stop blabbering that Malthus is some stupid dude that is wrong, even on school I heard that, more than once, by several different teachers in several different grades), Malthus was absolutely correct in his calculations, he only did not accounted for the mining of phosphorous (that is one of the major enablers of green revolution). Now we are running out of phosphorous and energy, and our food will return to levels Malthus calculated, unless we figure new tech, I hope someone does so soon. Now regarding declining fertility levels... This is a problem too. In history, there are several accounts of prosperous civilizations that had declining fertility, and all of them collapsed (usually when fertility reached around 1.3 per women). Several of the current western world problems are related to that, the need of external wars to keep some income flow (alright, no major powers are at war... between themselves, but how much wars US, France, etc... are involved with other smaller countries and forces? Even Brazil that is not developed is currently participating in a occupation force in Haiti and in civil war, although the media refuse to count the latter), debt problems, specially coming from welfare programs and wars, economies that are following their population numbers (thus we have Japan for example with economy declining with the same speed that their population is), and a increase in far right and far left party powers (example: brazillian military dictatorship apologists never been stronger, Greek far-right went from having no votes in parliament to 7%, and a estimated 35% in next election, Japan also has a new far-right nationalist party that got some respectable votes, the rise of Tea Party in US and Democrats steering leftward...) And some groups, know of all this, and have a plan to take over when they can... The most famous one being Al Quaeda (that is the Arab translation of the name of Isaac Asimov books The Foundation, and it was known that Bin Laden was fan of the series). Al Quaeda is clearly aiming to teach their followers to keep a high fertility rate, so that they can conquer developed nations when they collapse under their own bureaucracy and population decline. All those advocating that to fix the first problem I mentioned (peek resources), don't realize that by doing that, other nations still have population increasing, some of them will collapse because of it and cause further problems for everyone (and most likely will ignore the attempts of developed nations to stop their own population decline), and other nations are increasing in population on purpose, knowing well of its military effects, and will use it against any fool that voluntarily decline his population and ends struggling to keep itself up.
tunesmith 14y ago
I spent some time a year ago or so reading Limits To Growth and Thinking In Systems by Donella Meadows - according to those theories, 8-9 billion is too high anyway. Their best case scenario is less than that, with everyone eventually settling into a standard of living that is about analogous to eastern European countries today (which is lower than the standard of living in the US).
richardjordan 14y ago
The argument that 'everyone has been wrong so far' is not a solid one. The green revolution was basically pouring oil (pesticides) and pumping natural gas (fertilizer) into the fields. As oil flow rates are peaking this is an increasingly costly process, and as EROEI lowers on what's left we run into more problems. Same for NPK inputs - they are getting harder and more expensive (both $$ and energy) to extract. To a lesser degree (but of growing concern) all resources - we now mine 3-5% ores where we once mined 70% ores for example. Exponential curves don't go on forever in the real world. Ideas don't replace energy, nor do they replace resources. Saying it hasn't happened yet so those who are worried about it are wrong is naive and logically flawed.
- ars 14y ago
  Oil is not pesticides and natural gas is not fertilizer. (Why do you think they are?) Both of those are energy, and you need energy to make pesticides and fertilizer - but you need ANY energy, it doesn't matter what kind. So even if oil flow rates were peaking (which they aren't), it wouldn't matter as long as we had another source of energy, and we do.
  - Thrymr 14y ago
    Most of the hydrogen used in the Haber process (to produce ammonia for fertilizer) comes from methane (natural gas). Most of the hydrocarbons used to produce commercial pesticides come from petroleum. They are not just energy sources, they are raw materials.
    - ars 14y ago
      They only get hydrogen that way because methane is also an energy source. It would be trivial to replace it with water plus external heating if you had some other energy source. You can get hydrocarbons anywhere, petroleum is convenient, but certainly not required. The raw material of fertilizer is nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, and sulfur. Methane is none of those - it's just a carrier for nitrogen. Same with pesticides, they are organic molecules so need hydrocarbons, but you can use any hydrocarbon, from trees, grass, whatever. Oil is cheap, so they use it, but it would not be a big problem if you had to use something else.
martinced 14y ago
The population bomb has already been reached. 7 billion is way too much. We simply cannot continue to eat cows at that rate. Worse: if we want to stay at 7 billion the "poor" countries won't be able to raise their standard of living. We already bombed: too many cows farting, too many fossil fuels being extracted. We're already killing bees, potentially disrupting the gulf stream (up to the point where it's expected to be so problematic for planes in as few as 25 years that planes shall need to use safer, and longer, aerial routes). We're already seeing people trying to push "protein from eating insects" in the western world: simply because we're way past the limit with cows. We're also killing too many trees. "No more population bomb", I agree with that. But we already bombed and it's gonna get ugly.
jimworm 14y ago
Plants of the Devonian period would like a recount on "the longest period of exponential population growth for any organism... ever" competition.
sopooneo 14y ago
Could someone clarify what the author means by "Women in developed affluent countries tend to have 2-3 children (or 0-1 children)"? Does he mean that in some countries the range is 2-3 and in others 0-1? Or is it that there are two peaks in the histogram?
rsheridan6 14y ago
There's no reason to believe that current prognostications about the future will be any more accurate than past ones, and many reasons to believe that they aren't. The demographic transition can be viewed as a failure of our adaptations, made during times when birth control and sex education were unavailable, and children were useful workers instead of expensive luxuries, to the modern world. Some people's adaptations have failed harder than others. The people who have 0-1 kids are being selected out; those who have more than 2 are expanding. Future generations will be descended from the latter group, not the former. Unless you believe that fertility is completely invulnerable to selection, genetic or memetic, this must lead to increased fertility, just as selecting for bigger dogs would lead to bigger dogs. There are already groups which are immune to the demographic transition - Hasidic Jews in the middle of NYC who have ~8 kids per couple, for example - and there's no reason to believe that they're going to change. And if evolution did turn out to be false and the demographic transition turned out to be permanent, there's no reason to believe that fertility rates would magically converge at 2.0 (replacement rate). If they stayed below replacement rate, eventually the human race would go extinct. That's a far more dire prediction than any Malthus ever made. If they started going up again, is there any reason to believe that they would stop at 2.0? And having read Malthus, I'd also bet that the author never has.
craniumrat2 14y ago
Anyone have an idea how this thesis correlates with climate change? Any idea how climate change will affect population growth?

76 points by pstadler 14y ago

Interesting article but a bizarre conclusion. We may not encounter another population bomb but we are in the process of living through one right now. "The longest period of exponential population growth for any organism… ever. " If that doesn't describe a population bomb, nothing does.

rimantas 14y ago
It can describe the bomb that went off a long time ago.
rpicard 14y ago
I think the term "population bomb" as it is used here means reaching a critical point in the population where it because a kind of natural disaster characterized by famine and other problems that result from running out of natural resources, etc.

rimantas 14y ago

Check out another talk by Hans Rosling where he visually demonstrates that 10 billion figure: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies.html http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies.h...

reasonattlm 14y ago

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/09/overpopulation.php http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/09/overpopulation.ph... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3192186/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3192186/ "For example, we applied the cohort-component method of population projections to 2005 Swedish population for several scenarios of life extension and a fertility schedule observed in 2005. Even for very long 100-year projection horizon, with the most radical life extension scenario (assuming no aging at all after age 60), the total population increases by 22% only (from 9.1 to 11.0 million). Moreover, if some members of society reject to use new anti-aging technologies for some religious or any other reasons (inconvenience, non-compliance, fear of side effects, costs, etc.), then the total population size may even decrease over time." ----- In the long term, there's no reason not to expect further exponential growth once human psychology and physiology are removed from the picture as the main drivers of whether or not population expands. The earth could support vastly more people than it does even with today's technology. Once it is possible to create intelligences very rapidly, and when there are non-human intelligence creators involved in the picture, I'd expect to see a vast explosion of sentience and colonization.

kzrdude 14y ago
I see a quote where the estimated possible population is basically derived directly from the land area required for habitation alone which is rubbish. We need to account for resource use as in food, energy, fertilizer, freshwater etc. I hope you'll feel refreshed to hear about a different resource peak than the usual, here's about limited phosphorus for fertilizer: http://phys.org/news/2013-04-phosphorus-essential-lifeare.html http://phys.org/news/2013-04-phosphorus-essential-lifeare.ht...
- youngerdryas 14y ago
  Technology races ahead faster and faster while population flattens out yet lots of people insist on doom against reason. It is a psychological problem.
  - graeme 14y ago
    Technology requires support from resources. You can't respond to claims that our resources are limited merely by arguing that we will develop more technologies that use resources.
    - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
      We have enough uranium mined to last us about 1 or 2 thousands year. Now, with energy we can do things like desalinate water and make fertilizer. The only reason we don't do more nuclear power now is because there are cheaper options.
      - wombleton 14y ago
        The argument is not that we will suddenly be unable to desalinate water and so forth, it's that the price will rise to put more people into starvation. Claiming that all that will happen is the price (for energy, food, water, soil, maintaining biodiversity, etc) will rise is exactly the problem.

salmonellaeater 14y ago

"If current economic development trends continue we should expect the average person's income in India and China (for example) to reach the same levels of the U.K., U.S.A., and Japan by 2048." This is within my expected lifetime, and my children will be at the peak of their careers during that time. It will be a different world. I'm reminded of Yancy Fry Sr.'s advice to Fry: "Someday, you may face adversities so preposterous, I can't even conceive of them."

wololo 14y ago
Seems facile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_income_trap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_income_trap, etc.

szeevim 14y ago

Really informative article. But comparing us to regular organisms is certainly a mistake. I do believe the UN conclusion is correct by 2050 our birth/death rate will match and a decrease in population.

kzrdude 14y ago

Population drives consumption and resource use. The clock has been ticking since the population exceeded the estimated ecological carrying capacity of the earth. In this sense, the population today puts us in a much more urgent situation than it would otherwise be.

cpursley 14y ago

I wonder if the lower frequency in nation-state warfare is an effect of increasing education levels of females?

nolok 14y ago
No, it is an effect of the cold war and nuclear weapons. Oh and also, no war in western europe because germany/france/uk beating the others wouldn't mean automatic world domination anymore, so we teamed up against the big guys.
jcnnghm 14y ago
That's a nice thought, but it is probably not the cause. "There is a steep positive slope in the numbers of battle deaths between 1816 and 1914 and a steep negative slope between 1945 and 1997." [1] Obviously, something happened in 1945 that changed everything. This change can be almost entirely explained by the United States acquisition of nuclear weapons, and the subsequent policy decision in the United States with respect to war and isolationism. Prior to WWII, US foreign policy was one of isolationism, where the United States largely ignored other nations politics and conflicts. This policy is very cost effective as long as war is avoidable. Unfortunately, neither WWI or WWII were, and both were massively costly. In the wake of WWII isolationism was abandondoned, in part because the United States was the only nation with nuclear arms. The United States decided to take an active role in stabilization, largely through the use of nuclear deterents to prevent interstate conflict between major powers, and smaller, more frequent "stablization" conflicts. Evidence for this is first seen less than three years after WWII ended, with the Berlin blockade, where the Soviet Union attempted to force the west into giving up control of Berlin by blocking supply access. This led to the delivery of 2,236,406 tons of supplies over 278,228 flights in eleven months (the Berlin airlift), which was enabled directly by the United States threat of Nuclear retaliation against the soviets. The United States publicly moved B-29 bombers to Britain to discourage the Soviet Union from interfering with the airlift. Had this deterent not existed, it's entirely possible that the situation would have escelated. Less than five years after WWII ended, with the outbreak of the Korean war, the pattern is reinforced. Before the start of the war, the United States produced 120 MK-III "Fat Man" nuclear weapons yielding 18-49 Kt, and started production of MK-4 1-30 Kt bombs, of which it produced 550 by May 1951. Interestingly, all of the Mk-III's were retired in 1950, and the MK-4's were retired in 1953 because the pace of development was so fast. The US deployed additional B-29's to Britain, with bombs, to discourage the Soviet Union from entering the Korean War. When the Chinese entered the war, MacArthur intended to deploy nuclear weapons against the Chinese, in part to distrupt supply lines with radioactive fallout, and planned to destroy China until it surrendered. MacArthur also made clear that he intended to use nuclear weapons against China if they crossed the 38th parallel, and this was communicated to them. MacArthur was relieved in part because of these plans, and his belief that the power to order the use of nuclear weapons was his, and not the President's. Ridgway, MacArthur's replacement, was authorized to use nuclear weapons in the event of major air attacks originating from outside Korea, and china was directly notified of such. The United States entered the war pre-emptively, then used the threat of nuclear weapons to prevent others from doing so, and to prevent the escaltion of the war. It is not difficult to imagine that without these stabilizing actions either the Berlin airlift of the Korean war could have quickly escelated into World War 3. In 1954, just after the Korean war, the first thermonuclear weapon (5-7Mt) was deployed, marking an end to interstate war between major powers. The highest yielding thermonuclear weapon the US ever deployed, the 25 Mt Mk-41, entered service in 1960, but by that point, the line in the sand had already been drawn. Since 1945 US policy has been clear, it will interfere in foreign affairs, using economic sanctions, conventional war and nuclear deterents to prevent costly large scale conflict. The direct result of this has been stabilization, a long-term decline in war deaths, and the end of interstate war between major powers. It will be interesting to see what happens as this strategy is abandoned as the survivors of WWII die off, and memory of why the US spends so much on its military fades. Hopefully enough time has gone by that a return to hostilities seems unthinkable; no doubt if there is a return, major hostilities will be massively costly in terms of life, money, liberty, and safety. 1: The Declining Risk of Death in Battle Bethany Lacina, Nils Petter Gleditsch and Bruce Russett International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Sep., 2006), pp. 673-680

ddlatham 14y ago

Is there an ideal long term human population level for the planet? If so, what is it? Will we need to create more incentives to have children to maintain it?

coldarchon 14y ago

If someone thinks there will be no population bomb clearly has missed all the rape incidents in India caused by mass abortions of female fetuses. And he clearly has not understood the situation in third world countries. In Sudan 100 years ago lived 1.8 million people, now there are 48 million people. The territory has not changed, modern fertilizer only allowed a 6 times higher production and there is huge desertification of the soil. And yet this country is considered as being in need for food every year, while we don't send them wood to cook their food. The population bomb? One day the population in Sudan will be too big to provide enough wood or food and yes the population there will collapse. This artcle wasn't interesting, it was one-dimensional.

Joeboy 14y ago

> We are slowing down population growth because of education, gender equality, the rural-to-urban transition, and birth control. Apart (afaik) from rural-to-urban transition, all of those are heavily promoted by people who are concerned about population growth.

sirmixalot 14y ago
Don't forget abortion and euthanasia. I'm breathing better already.
- rdl 14y ago
  I was amazed to learn that the abortion rate per 1000 pregnancies in the US (in 2008 or 2010) was 138 (for white women) and 501 (for black women) (and somewhere in between for hispanic, native american, etc.) I intuitively thought it was like 10-20/1000. So I think abortion is doing pretty well for itself. Euthanasia really needs to step up its game, though.
  - sirmixalot 14y ago
    No worries. The ACA will drain cash from medicare fast enough to make it a socialist sacrament by 2025 here in the USA. But we're getting our butt kicked by startups in the Netherlands and China.
    - rdl 14y ago
      Another two planks of CoE's platform seem to be doing well, too. Fortunately sodomy is now pretty popular and increasingly legally accepted, and unfortunately suicide is very high, particularly among young people (so it affects the largest number of quality adjusted life years, as well as preventing future reproduction). Cannibalism seems to be a non-starter, though. Other than bath salts induced crazy people.
  - jellicle 14y ago
    Your rates are too high by one order of magnitude. http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss6108a1.htm http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss6108a1.htm

kingkawn 14y ago

Anything called "The Ratchet" I have a hard time taking seriously.

pjscott 14y ago
... he said, on "Hacker News".

kstenerud 14y ago

While the author is correct in terms of population growth, he has missed one critical point. We are heading into a population bomb not because of continued explosive population growth, but rather because of dwindling energy reserves. Industrialization and fossil fuels are what have allowed the population to exponentially grow this far. But now that energy is more expensive to extract, food is becoming more and more expensive. We're already seeing food riots in the poorer nations, and that trend will continue to grow, leading to a massive energy shock and die-off never seen before. This trend could be slowed by massive adoption of alternative energy, but the only currently viable alternative energy (nuclear) is not likely to be exploited in a meaningful way any time soon, considering political and weaponization concerns. If we're really lucky, we'll discover a solar energy tech + energy storage system efficient and cheap enough to see us through before too many people die off, but that's a big "if".

benihana 14y ago
Malthus said the same thing - that we wouldn't be able to produce enough food because of whatever reason. And yet we humans found some way to continue living and producing food just fine. We increased our food yield and continue to do so. We found creative solutions to our problems with our available resources and there isn't any reason to think that we'll sudden lose the capacity to do this because of peak oil or lack of alternative fuels, neither of which were concepts in Malthus' time.
- kstenerud 14y ago
  Malthus said that our population would eventually outgrow our capacity to produce food. What I'm saying is that we've already outgrown our future ability to produce food, and are now in a race against time to stabilize our energy supply before the population bomb goes off. And unless we do come up with a novel source of cheap energy, it WILL go off.
  - roflc0ptic 14y ago
    I read things like this because I so desperately want there not to be a population bomb, but the crux of their argument is waving their hands and saying "human ingenuity will take care of it." In essence it's a faith based argument cloaked in scientific jargon. The only answer shy of taking state power and forcing powering down (deeply improbable) is building resilient local communities and food systems.

rdl 14y ago

Even if you believe in the "growth rate leveling off as women are educated" thing, it still means in 30 years the world's population is going to be more concentrated in countries and cultures which today lag the most in virtually everything I like. Even within the US, few of the people I respect in tech have children (or want children), and then they do, it's 0-2. I'd far rather live in a world with 10b Elon Musks, where each was contributing a huge surplus, vs. 3b sub-today's-median-ability, though, so it's not absolute numbers which matter.

twoodfin 14y ago
What difference does that really make? Plenty of people today doing what you like had parents who didn't. If people you respect in tech don't have children, it'll be someone else's children that get to do the cool stuff in the next generation. It's not as if the demand for new technology is going to decrease as a few hundred million Chinese (hopefully) hit the middle class in a couple of decades.
- rdl 14y ago
  I sort of believe people are able to overcome their circumstances in 1-2 generations after being removed from a sufficiently toxic environment, but I largely disbelieve that a statistically significant number of the people alive today in e.g. Afghanistan, or born over the next 20 years there, will be positive contributors to the world. There are outliers (who GTFO, are western educated, and either don't go back, or go back essentially from a western frame of reference), and there are cultures themselves which improve over a generation (Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Korea are the best examples from the 1900s; they went from serious problems post-WW2 to world leaders today). I believe China might accomplish that, but I don't have much confidence in a lot of other countries, including those with very high populations or current growth rates (and high inequality, largely supported by natural resources). And I think much of the US is regressing -- the son of a random unemployed Detroit person is less likely to become a first-class member of society today than the son of a factory worker was 30-50 years ago.
  - twoodfin 14y ago

n1ghtm4n 14y ago

"All this means that on the scale of hundreds of years our population growth may actually look like a very steep sigmoidal curve. But of course, in 2050 our planet and species will look very different than it currently is. There is a limit to what our models can predict about the future population. It could be that the human population plateaus and stabilizes. However, in a world with more energy, more geopolitical stability, advanced A.I., and a larger extraterrestrial presence, our species demographics may begin to change in unexpected ways. For now, we may simply be relieved that Malthus and Ehrlich were wrong. We will not encounter a population bomb." So we can't predict the future, but the other guys' 50-year predictions "were wrong" [sic] and my 50-year predictions are right. Did I get that right? His argument can be summarized as "Everything will probably work itself out. Trust me, brah. I'm a futurist."

quattrofan 14y ago

Its not population that's the problem per se, its the average consumption of that population. The majority of which right now don't consume anywhere near as much as we do in the developed world, but its changing, and fast. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2013/apr/12/escalating-consumption http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2013/apr...

michaelochurch 14y ago

I agree with the conclusion-- we won't face a population explosion-- but... Malthus was right and wrong. He was wrong about economic growth being linear (even then, it was a 0.5% per year exponential increase that just looked linear). The Industrial Revolution kicked in and now economic growth is (for the first time ever) faster than population growth. That change happened around 1850; until that point, per-person economic improvement was virtually nonexistent because population gobbled up any gains. Economic growth has been faster-than-exponential as long as there have been humans. If you treat biological complexity or energy capture as the analytic extension of "economic growth" that goes back to the origin of life ~3.8 billion years ago: a faster-than-exponential curve that just happened to be very slow (but always getting faster) for 3.7999 billion years. Now, we're also seeing population growth rates drop, due to causes cited by OP. Malthus was right insofar as the stronger countries of Europe (Great Britain, Germany, Russia) spent the next 150 years viciously outsourcing their Malthusian catastrophes (probably without need to do so) to the weaker ones (Ireland, Poland) and other parts of the world. Malthus didn't actually predict starvation. He predicted moral malfeasance (with his religious beliefs, this included birth control, although I wouldn't call that malfeasance) driven by population pressure, and that happened. Humans are a mix of r-selective and K-selective impulses. Psychopathy is what happens when the r-selector within us is unchecked by K-selective conscience/fairness modules. The reason it is more common in men is that it conferred a stronger r-selective advantage in men (who could possess harems and "fan out") than in women (who are limited to about one child per fertile year, and 30 fertile years in a life). Also, if you look at the "corporate paternalism" as more than metaphor, most people work in r-selective get-big-or-die gambits or large companies that have a lot of employees (children) but don't invest anything in them. Very few people work in K-selective enterprises that grow more slowly but invest in their people. I don't think one can say, for sure, that the K-selector has won outright. I think that contest between the two sets of impulses still exists. Much of how humans have imagined good and evil comes from the conflict (perhaps a neuroevolutionary arms race) between the r- and K-selective selves.

nwzpaperman 14y ago
Financial--debt-asset--growth is exponential. Individual persons don't consume real resources geometrically, but linearly over a lifespan. Population does grow geometrically, so that is the underlying driver for geometric production and resource consumption. Unfortunately, there are a lot of service/non-producing cash-flows diluting the value of popular macro economic benchmarks like GDP and corporate benchmarks like EBITDA. As CS engineers dominate this place, it should be standard practice to examine, both, the input and output sides of any system during load analysis.

shin_lao 14y ago

The author is correct, however he misses an important point: how painful population stabilization will be for some of us.

speeder 14y ago

I like this subject. Both relating to too much, and too few people... First, regarding absolute human numbers, we do have too much, mostly because we are rapidly using up fossil resources (not only fuel, but also fertilizers), and some important ones already peaked (phosphorous for example). But I don't believe that making your population decline fixes things, it only create other problems, the solution for the problem that I mentioned last, is develop more technology. Malthus was right on his diagnostic, wrong in the solution (please, stop blabbering that Malthus is some stupid dude that is wrong, even on school I heard that, more than once, by several different teachers in several different grades), Malthus was absolutely correct in his calculations, he only did not accounted for the mining of phosphorous (that is one of the major enablers of green revolution). Now we are running out of phosphorous and energy, and our food will return to levels Malthus calculated, unless we figure new tech, I hope someone does so soon. Now regarding declining fertility levels... This is a problem too. In history, there are several accounts of prosperous civilizations that had declining fertility, and all of them collapsed (usually when fertility reached around 1.3 per women). Several of the current western world problems are related to that, the need of external wars to keep some income flow (alright, no major powers are at war... between themselves, but how much wars US, France, etc... are involved with other smaller countries and forces? Even Brazil that is not developed is currently participating in a occupation force in Haiti and in civil war, although the media refuse to count the latter), debt problems, specially coming from welfare programs and wars, economies that are following their population numbers (thus we have Japan for example with economy declining with the same speed that their population is), and a increase in far right and far left party powers (example: brazillian military dictatorship apologists never been stronger, Greek far-right went from having no votes in parliament to 7%, and a estimated 35% in next election, Japan also has a new far-right nationalist party that got some respectable votes, the rise of Tea Party in US and Democrats steering leftward...) And some groups, know of all this, and have a plan to take over when they can... The most famous one being Al Quaeda (that is the Arab translation of the name of Isaac Asimov books The Foundation, and it was known that Bin Laden was fan of the series). Al Quaeda is clearly aiming to teach their followers to keep a high fertility rate, so that they can conquer developed nations when they collapse under their own bureaucracy and population decline. All those advocating that to fix the first problem I mentioned (peek resources), don't realize that by doing that, other nations still have population increasing, some of them will collapse because of it and cause further problems for everyone (and most likely will ignore the attempts of developed nations to stop their own population decline), and other nations are increasing in population on purpose, knowing well of its military effects, and will use it against any fool that voluntarily decline his population and ends struggling to keep itself up.

tunesmith 14y ago

I spent some time a year ago or so reading Limits To Growth and Thinking In Systems by Donella Meadows - according to those theories, 8-9 billion is too high anyway. Their best case scenario is less than that, with everyone eventually settling into a standard of living that is about analogous to eastern European countries today (which is lower than the standard of living in the US).

richardjordan 14y ago

The argument that 'everyone has been wrong so far' is not a solid one. The green revolution was basically pouring oil (pesticides) and pumping natural gas (fertilizer) into the fields. As oil flow rates are peaking this is an increasingly costly process, and as EROEI lowers on what's left we run into more problems. Same for NPK inputs - they are getting harder and more expensive (both $$ and energy) to extract. To a lesser degree (but of growing concern) all resources - we now mine 3-5% ores where we once mined 70% ores for example. Exponential curves don't go on forever in the real world. Ideas don't replace energy, nor do they replace resources. Saying it hasn't happened yet so those who are worried about it are wrong is naive and logically flawed.

ars 14y ago
Oil is not pesticides and natural gas is not fertilizer. (Why do you think they are?) Both of those are energy, and you need energy to make pesticides and fertilizer - but you need ANY energy, it doesn't matter what kind. So even if oil flow rates were peaking (which they aren't), it wouldn't matter as long as we had another source of energy, and we do.
- Thrymr 14y ago
  Most of the hydrogen used in the Haber process (to produce ammonia for fertilizer) comes from methane (natural gas). Most of the hydrocarbons used to produce commercial pesticides come from petroleum. They are not just energy sources, they are raw materials.
  - ars 14y ago
    They only get hydrogen that way because methane is also an energy source. It would be trivial to replace it with water plus external heating if you had some other energy source. You can get hydrocarbons anywhere, petroleum is convenient, but certainly not required. The raw material of fertilizer is nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, and sulfur. Methane is none of those - it's just a carrier for nitrogen. Same with pesticides, they are organic molecules so need hydrocarbons, but you can use any hydrocarbon, from trees, grass, whatever. Oil is cheap, so they use it, but it would not be a big problem if you had to use something else.

martinced 14y ago

The population bomb has already been reached. 7 billion is way too much. We simply cannot continue to eat cows at that rate. Worse: if we want to stay at 7 billion the "poor" countries won't be able to raise their standard of living. We already bombed: too many cows farting, too many fossil fuels being extracted. We're already killing bees, potentially disrupting the gulf stream (up to the point where it's expected to be so problematic for planes in as few as 25 years that planes shall need to use safer, and longer, aerial routes). We're already seeing people trying to push "protein from eating insects" in the western world: simply because we're way past the limit with cows. We're also killing too many trees. "No more population bomb", I agree with that. But we already bombed and it's gonna get ugly.

jimworm 14y ago

Plants of the Devonian period would like a recount on "the longest period of exponential population growth for any organism... ever" competition.

sopooneo 14y ago

Could someone clarify what the author means by "Women in developed affluent countries tend to have 2-3 children (or 0-1 children)"? Does he mean that in some countries the range is 2-3 and in others 0-1? Or is it that there are two peaks in the histogram?

rsheridan6 14y ago

There's no reason to believe that current prognostications about the future will be any more accurate than past ones, and many reasons to believe that they aren't. The demographic transition can be viewed as a failure of our adaptations, made during times when birth control and sex education were unavailable, and children were useful workers instead of expensive luxuries, to the modern world. Some people's adaptations have failed harder than others. The people who have 0-1 kids are being selected out; those who have more than 2 are expanding. Future generations will be descended from the latter group, not the former. Unless you believe that fertility is completely invulnerable to selection, genetic or memetic, this must lead to increased fertility, just as selecting for bigger dogs would lead to bigger dogs. There are already groups which are immune to the demographic transition - Hasidic Jews in the middle of NYC who have ~8 kids per couple, for example - and there's no reason to believe that they're going to change. And if evolution did turn out to be false and the demographic transition turned out to be permanent, there's no reason to believe that fertility rates would magically converge at 2.0 (replacement rate). If they stayed below replacement rate, eventually the human race would go extinct. That's a far more dire prediction than any Malthus ever made. If they started going up again, is there any reason to believe that they would stop at 2.0? And having read Malthus, I'd also bet that the author never has.

craniumrat2 14y ago

Anyone have an idea how this thesis correlates with climate change? Any idea how climate change will affect population growth?