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Just a suggestion but wouldn't this thread be much more intriguing if the question were, how many humans will be around let's say 100 years from now? Mods maybe you can consider this change.

onlooker wrote:Just a suggestion but wouldn't this thread be much more intriguing if the question were, how many humans will be around let's say 100 years from now? Mods maybe you can consider this change.

There are a dozen population threads, surely one of those is suitable for your question.

I find this current thread topic much more interesting because it get at “Why are we here, what do we want to accomplish?”

Here is a good comprehensive look at land use worldwide and issues related to it from the UN. I have a problem with this ststement though "
The evidence presented in this first edition of the Global Land Outlook demonstrates that informed and responsible decision-making, along with simple changes in our everyday lives, can if widely adopted help to reverse the current worrying trends in the state of our land resources."
No way. Our population has grown too large and we are too wed to FF, for simple changes to make a difference now

https://global-land-outlook.squarespace ... /#the-bokk

"Two-thirds of people in the world will be living in cities by 2050 and the boom will be concentrated in India, China and Nigeria, according to United Nations estimates ... Tokyo is currently the world’s largest city with 37 million people, followed by Delhi with 29 million, Shanghai with 26 million, and Mexico City and São Paulo, each with around 22 million inhabitants. Cairo, Mumbai, Beijing and Dhaka all have close to 20 million inhabitants.

However, Delhi will overtake Tokyo in top spot by around 2028, the report said."

Delhi has 44C each day now in a relentless and extended heat-wave. Heat is forecast to increase in June, until monsoon sets in in beginning of July.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/ ... 50-says-un

I wonder about those numbers and especially about cities. In the Great Depression, the cities depopulated and the people dispersed throughout the rural food growing areas. the opposite of what is being predicted.

Cities are built and run with cheap FF energy, is my belief. They are "efficient" only when energy is cheap. You must expend energy to house the people in conditioned spaces, to provide illumination and network connectivity, to transport, preserve, and prepare food, to provide clean water and to dispose of wastes. All these things become very difficult with feeble distributed energy sources, in densely populated cities.

I believe that as energy costs increase, the cities will decline and decay.

KaiserJeep wrote:I wonder about those numbers and especially about cities. In the Great Depression, the cities depopulated and the people dispersed throughout the rural food growing areas. the opposite of what is being predicted.

Cities are built and run with cheap FF energy, is my belief. They are "efficient" only when energy is cheap. You must expend energy to house the people in conditioned spaces, to provide illumination and network connectivity, to transport, preserve, and prepare food, to provide clean water and to dispose of wastes. All these things become very difficult with feeble distributed energy sources, in densely populated cities.

I believe that as energy costs increase, the cities will decline and decay.

To play devil's advocate, liberals love to point out how the average energy use per capita in places like NYC is low compared to rural living, due to mass transit, small living spaces to heat and cool, etc.

So it would seem to be a mixed bag. But one thing is for sure, if gasoline is expensive like $5 an hour, driving a pickup truck a lot of miles in the boonies is NOT going to be cheap.

700 million, in China.

I was reading up on the One Child policy in Wiki and found some guy read LTG and other books and took it seriously. They calculated the max sustainable population to be 700 million, convienced TPTB to implement one child.

Wiki goes on to make a lot of comments and discussion but never comes back to the initiating thought process. So no telling on how they are doing in reaching that goal.

But what’s clear is that slowing growth is hard on the population. Degrowth would be murder.

For peak oil skeptics, the sky's the limit.

"What’s the Ideal Number of Humans on Earth?"
If humans were wise, several hundred millions eating vegan and not owning personal car would allow civilisation to last at least millions of years. But alas, since we try to expand as fast as possible without any consideration for our habitat, just like rabbits in Australia, the ideal number is 0.

Potable water is likely to become a limiting factor in more and more places quite soon:

worsening water crisis in India:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-44492994

600 million people facing acute water shortage, and 21 cities likely to run out of groundwater by 2020.

dohboi wrote:Potable water is likely to become a limiting factor in more and more places quite soon:

worsening water crisis in India:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-44492994

600 million people facing acute water shortage, and 21 cities likely to run out of groundwater by 2020.

Wow, there are so many solutions out there to our primary problem of over population!

The overshoot predator is on the prowl!

More on that situation here: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/06/ ... 54630.html

So what do we do about it? India is already hugely over populated, the answer lies in reducing population, but that’s not very PC.

We want everyone to live full happy enriching lives, but that does not look possible l.

Newfie wrote:So what do we do about it? India is already hugely over populated, the answer lies in reducing population, but that’s not very PC.

We want everyone to live full happy enriching lives, but that does not look possible l.

I think the point Ibon has tried to make is that Nature will do what we have been unable or reluctant to do: Control/reduce our population above all.
The point is the solutions were always unpalatable to us, so we are deferring to Nature thus

A good life for all within the planet’s means

A study led by the University of Leeds has found that no country currently meets its citizens’ basic needs at a globally sustainable level of resource use.

It is so painfully obvious that everyone CANNOT have the "good life"
but not even their basic needs taken care of in an environmentally sustainable fashion
https://www.leeds.ac.uk/news/article/41 ... nets_means

You who are putting your faith in "Nature" had best remember one thing. Mankind would have fallen back to roughly the same populations and restricted territories as the other primates had we not been blessed - or perhaps cursed - with intelligence.

We build conditioned spaces to live in, using materials harvested from nature, and energy. We grow crops and food animals, to the point where 97% of the animal biomass is humans and food animals. We jump on every virus and infectious bacteria with the hobnailed boots of advanced medicine. In short, humans have and will continue to subjugate Nature, transforming the natural environments for the use of humans.

There is no reason - none whatsoevr - to believe that any of this will change with the advancement of time. The steady accumulation of human knowledge continues, and the subjugation of Nature contines. The presence and persistence of humans, their greedy natures and desires, none of these things change very much as time passes. For example, I would rate the three most fundamental changes to human civilization as Agriculture (10,000BC), Fossil Fueled machines and energy (1500AD) and Digital Technology (1980AD). The nature of the apes that did these three things is still the the same. The level of accumulated knowledge is the difference.

The most likely probability is that things will continue much the same. If life gets more difficult for humans, humans will determine how to handle it, after booting Nature in the posterior and out of our way. We are on the cusp of another great advance in the subjugation of the Natural world, as groups of networked humans tackle and solve problems beyond the abilities of individual humans. Admittedly, I don't know if the fundamental nature of the netwok is as it is today, with cellphones and texting/tweeting/sound-bytes/videos, or the digitally interconnected human and AI minds of the future. Nor does that matter a whole lot, look at how much the world has changed since the advent of the network in the 1980s.

Nature has already lost, and may die. It could be, the only purpose of Nature all along was to produce humans.

Kaiser, your ideas are provocative and intellectually stimulating. I do believe though that an irreconcilable rift is reached in the trajectory as seen by you and others in contrast to what I and others see. I do not place so much faith in our intellect. Because as you have pointed out, we still are defined greatly by our primitive urges. Case in point, look at the extremely volatile juncture where we have arrived. And partly because of the technology our intellect devised and employed.

Humanity, needs to be humbled and needs to unite as one in good will. Our intellect and technology will never solve the acrimony among ourselves. That is a matter of embracing a calling to be kinder and gentler beings. And that comes from the heart