In 2001, The UN predicted that the world's population would max out at about 10 billion in the middle of the next century, growth having gotten progressively slower for the previous century or so. It would then start to fall slowly. The reason for this is that education, contraception and especially urbanisation all contribute to people having smaller families, even in the poorest countries.
Although this is an encouraging thought, and contradicts some of the worst doom and gloom predictions of, for example, the environmental movement, it still raises the question, "can 10 billion humans survive on one planet?"
Well, can they?

We have already exceeded our "natural" population limit quite a while ago. This overshoot was supported by continual usage of petroleum based energy in which we structured our societies around. The moment we are unable to continue living in this template of civilization that we have built for ourself, there will be a rather large die-off unless we adapt quickly to new methods living.

Centralized food production is not going to be feasible anymore unless we have an efficient means of transporting these goods to our cities which are rather far away from where the food resources are.

So to answer your question; yes 10 billion can be supported only if we have the energy to maintain it.

Well, we have to say goodbye to diesel-driven container ships. An interesting replacement might be Flettner ships that use a little electricity to propel a system of rotors which then serve in lieu of the sails of a sailing ship, with a Flettner ship being far superior in terms of maneuverability at low winds or in harsh weather. So, in effect, we would be going back to a more reliable type of sailing ship again.

For land transport we should rely more on electricity-powered trains than diesel-guzzling trucks. Trucks can be propelled by hydrogen fuel cells.

I think the basic technology is there, only it will have to become more effective (and cost-effective) very fast.

It will only become cost effective when you have more demand for it. When they have more potential buyers, they can afford to lower their pricing and decrease their profit margins.

I wish more companies could do what Sony did with the Playstation 2 and 3; lose money on the initial sale and make it up later with other goods and services. I could stand buying a hydrogen fuel cell car for a somewhat lowered price, then signing a contract saying that I exclusively refuel and get repairs from the original manufacturer. I wonder if anyone has ever done something like that before...

The "demand" for this technology in this case will only come when it is more efficient than petroleum based fuels. You simply can not force a change in market in such a manner.

Or when petroleum gets too expensive, at which point there could arise a sort of "efficiency pyramid": For occasions where efficiency is of the essence expensive petroleum products are used because there's nothing comparable available yet, and for occasions where efficiency is less critical (say, getting around town in a slow, yet expensive fuel-avoiding electrical car) consumers may opt for a little less efficiency in exchange for actually being able to afford it, this more widespread use of ecological technology then serving to prompt companies to make them more efficient because of the competition.

State-funded or public-funded research institutes like MIT or, in Germany, the Fraunhofer Society, are also on the forefront of more environmentally friendly technology. Sure you can't force it on the market, but the development of such technology doesn't depend on the private market alone.

Oh, I wasn't talking about the development. Only the widespread commercial usage of said techology (which is ultimately what matters in this situation).

Grocery stores are already beginning to get local produce and meat again. This is probably healthier, and it may even help alleviate allergies. It's getting to be cheaper than trucking it in from somewhere else.

We may (if things get bad enough) see a huge drop in the number of pre-packaged foods unless they are produced locally as well.

My wife and I are starting to stockpile enough food live for a year incase supply lines are cut off from high fuel prices. We also are planning to grow some of our own produce, and we may even get some chickens for eggs. I would also like to stock up on ammo...so nobody will be stealing my chickens.

Regardless, it's about time for an epidemic. Conditions are more than right for one. I think it will be a flu or cold virus that's resistant to current medicines.

I think the U.S. government needs to help citizens get solar panels for their homes and small businesses. That would be a huge help to the environment. If enough of them were used, we could shut down all of the coal-burning power plants, which produce most of the pollution.

Bio-diesel and thermal depolymerization can be used as a stop-gap until fuel cells and hydrogen fuel become widely available.

Bio-diesel is not the answer as long as it is being made from corn (at least with current production methods). How many gallons of fuel does it take to transport, plant, fertilize, harvest, transport, process, and transport all of that from seed to fuel station?

Corn based bio-fuel is highly inefficient. Pure cane sugar is much better to use and even then that is not the best solution.

Sorry, as it stands now we really don't have anything that is on the level of efficiency in terms of EROEI and portability as petroleum based fuel. Maybe soon.

Some south american country (Brazil?) has been using sugar cane ethanol for years now. They make processing it more efficient by placing a refinery next to every sugar processing plant. The husks from the sugar cane, which would normally be discarded anyway, are delivered literally a few hundred feet to the refinery to be turned into ethanol.

Yeah I've read quite a bit about bio-fuel in the past years. Essentially I'd label myself as an unofficial "amateur" peak-oil analyst because it's nearly grown to be an obsession of mine to find out any and everything related to it for quite a while now.

I think if the population grows to a number like that they will colonize mars (in all seriousness)

Why colonize Mars when you have mountains and oceans, which are much more colonization-friendly?

To support the world population we all need to become vegetarians,the resources that are consumed in keeping lifestock for the meat industry is more resource intensive than growing vegetables in the same field

Oh please, not in this thread!

Anyway, the Earth has more than enough resources to support 10 billion people on it - what it doesn't have, however is resources enough to support the Capitalist lifestyle. We all may be forced to move to simpler lifestyles - or it'd be a complete dog-eat-dog society, with both incredibly abject poverty and vulgarly rich people. Death rates will probably be very high among the poor - but my guess is that birth rates will be equally high and the high death rate won't solve the population problem.

Now this isn't an argument against the Capitalist lifestyle - I don't really care about the environment, and I simply live to my convenience.

lol, I'm not a vegeterian myself, but its the truth sadly.

I also note that you go on about not living a capatilist lifestyle. Don't most people in third world countries live mainly off vegetables etc?

sure as long as there is enough food water and to go around.

And just as important, energy to transport that food and water.

Maybe we could support 10 billion if we all lived in mud huts and ate only vegetables and our dead. The sad truth is, the Earth can't sustain our current population (at least not without reverting to more efficient versions of primitive lifestyles, or MIRACULOUS advances in "eco-friendly" technology) for very much longer. But that's not to say that we won't hit 10 billion before we really face the consequences. As it stands now, it's only a matter of time before we literally choke out most or all life in the oceans with plastic debris. There are dozens, if not hundreds (or more) of trends in our behavior like that, that will in fact end the world as we know it if allowed to continue long enough, with the most obvious ones being the literal crowding out of massive percentages of the natural world. I won't take any kind of stab at the probability of extinction from the multitudes of "doomsday" scenarios, but it is a real possibility.

The only way I can really see opposition to drastic action to prevent the disasters that will come with a population of 10 billion humans as justifiable is if you 1)believe that we will achieve singularity/EUNICE/whatever else has been used to refer to that same basic concept 2)Trust that it will not be a tool of enslavement, and 3)believe that it will avert the aforementioned disasters.

I don't really care. I'm not going to be the one who sets a precedent - I'm enjoying living a 'capitalist' lifestyle and I'll stay at it. But if you ask me for solutions, that is it.



Not really - that's the case in India. However, in Africa - the diet is mostly meat. In fact, think about it - we wouldn't even need land to cultivate if we were just hunter-gatherers. Land and especially fertile land is running out, even the vegetarian diet puts the environment under pressure.

BTW, I am a vegetarian - but I don't extol the virtues of being a vegetarian.

In terms of occupying, yes, the earth can sustain 10 billion people. In terms of economics and environment, there probably are things to be concerned about and some things we don't know yet. A person brought up captialism, and there have been some economists who have looked into this area. The first that comes to mind is George Reisman who has a 1000 page tome on capitalism which he devotes portions of his book to the subject of population as well as resources, and I've also heard his lectures at mises.org. Another is Julian Simon, who I found on youtube. I'll have to go over them again before I choose if I want to present their material here.

Anyway, I believe the ultra-consumptionist lifestyles will certainly end, but capitalist production will not (since there is no reason for it to end).

Doesn't hunter-gatherer practices require more area per food unit than those who cultivate a land lot?

Eventually, like a Bell Curve, growth does reach a maximum in a confined space.

However, as good as this is, we also have to worry about the carbon footprints growing. As an example, China is becoming more wealthy, and has a growing middle class and a higher level of income, and while this is in a sense good because these people are getting better, with all this new money, they are buying cars, they're buying oil, delicacies like shark fin soup skyrocket and threaten our ocean's ecosystem which is a key component to our supply of oxygen, etc etc. Less population is a good thing, but we also have to think about, and prepare for the fact that the carbon footprint of all these nations and therefore, the overall negative impact on our environment is still looking to go up as these countries become industrialized.

I plan on getting a vasectomy in the next few moths. My lady and I do not want to bring children into this already bursting world. Crazy population! When do we start on Mars? That one's empty!

I'm reminded by a quote from the great love poet Sage Francis when he once said "Because I know that only stupid people increase the birth rates/ I'm just about dumb enough to hold up a sperm bank."


That quote is completely irrelevant, so anyways




I think that IN THEORY we could support a world population of 10 Billion, only if we have a.) enough energy, b.) enough land, and c.) the capacity for Earth to support the amount of damage going to be done in order to support 10 Billion people.

But I think that IN REALITY, we cannot support a population of 10 Billion, with our oil supplies running low, our reluctance to go back to Nuclear energy, and how badly, ecologically speaking, we are treating our environment. And even if we could support that large of a population, I don't think it would be easy living at any stretch of the imagination.

The world's population will decline when we finally start running out of oil. We've made our advancements in the past 100 or so years thanks to cheap fuel. Oil was at its cheapest during the 90s - the United States' best decade for enormous gains in wealth. Coincidence?

As someone said, unless we have a miraculous advancement in clean energy, we're in trouble by 2050, maybe even as early as 2030.

I'm not having kids.

you think just cuz there is no oil that they will quit fucking? lol

No, when there is no oil there will be less energy and people will die.

It's not colonization if it already belongs to you. It's, well...overpopulation.

I think the world's overpopulated, for sure, but humans are smart and adaptable. For instance, insulation in buildings is better, so some gas and energy costs are avoided. That would have been a lot harder back in the day when we needed coal burning to heat a building. We will develop better options than oil. Those will all be sold by the same people to us at exorbitant prices, but things will become more efficient, at least. If world population is increasing, you can rely on big business to accomodate.

That's what laws are for.

You mean laws introduced by politicians bought by corporate entities?

It all comes down to the theories of balance of people-resources.

There is no doubt that population will keep growing untill saturation level. But then there will be an inevitable and rapid decline.
However this is not due to education, fall in fertility or such things as many people think. According to a specific theory (mea culpa, can't remember the name) these factors only cause a slowing down of growth but have nothing to do with the decline of population.
What will cause the predicted rapid decline in population will be war, starvation, scarsity of resources, saturation of habitats, enviromenta meltdown, pandemic and so on.

So yeah, i believe that the earth will arrive to a saturation point and then there will be a rapid decline in numbers due to these reasons.

Exactly. If we can't shift our current-day energy consumption, we'll be back to old times. It will be harder for children to survive because they will be exposed to diseases for which vaccines will not be available. So why the fuck would I have kids?

Our population seems to be in a situation now of running off auxiliary power, so to speak. Or to use a another term, living off capital rather than income. Basically we can't sustain these population levels in the long term by using up resources that aren't being replaced.

With the way the climate is heading and the decrease in sperm cells, we're in a lot more trouble than we think.

Petrolium and Hydrogen Fuel Cells are not video game consoles. They aren't going to make money back on revenue of sales of material assiciated with their product. For that matter, Sony lost more money with the PS3 debacle than any other game company--console maker, developer, and publisher alike--last year. It's not an economically feasible solution for most of the world.

The only regular way for prices to come down are:

*Improved technology breeds effeciency.
*Growth of use brings in more money, which is used to make production more effecient or cheaper.
*Increased production creates lower overall cost as bulk purchases of raw materials increases.
...and the like.

The video game industry operates differently than most technologies on the open market. DVD's got cheaper because they became more widely used, the technology to make them improved and got cheaper (more effecient). With more use, royalty costs of using DVD's decreased as well. Overall, cost went down. But even then, they couldn't make a DVD player that could be sold below cost because that company would be paying royalties to use the DVD format, and the maker of the DVD player doesn't make money on royalties from the movies that are purchased for it. It's completely different with video games, the console maker has just that one machine and in order to make games for it, publishers have to pay royalties. It can work (though not always, and this isn't the industry standard if you look at history) to eventually benefit the console maker--but it can also work to make a more effecient machine and sell it for profit like Nintendo, Sega, and Atari traditionally did (and Nintendo still does).

No. Indeed damage is already being done to the planet at incredible rates. Our resources are being drained at rates exceeding their rates of renewal, which means our net supply is growing smaller, and irreversible damage is being inflicted on the environment. Societies need to adopt policies of controlling birth rates and population growth, far more important in this age than energy conservation and "green-energy" policies, lest they wish to ruin the Earth to the extent that it's uninhabitable for hundreds of years. It's a dire problem, but the solution is right before us.

Promote leadership that understands these problems and enforces the right solutions - decrease the world population (or decrease your country's own and let the rest fall from their stupidity).

I'd argue that the environmental eschatology is due to the deeply embedded Christian notion of original sin; even though we are moving away from mysticism as a society, until Christianity’s is replaced by a differing ideology it will continue to dominate all intellectual discourse.

Well, Islam is growing by leaps and bounds. Is that the ideology change you're looking for? There are nearly as many Muslims in the world as Christians. And the former is more prone to violence to spread it's faith (these days at any rate).


Frankly, I think the world is a little too accepting of Islam and too punishing of Christianity. I'd much rather live in a Christian nation (despite the hypcrisy and asininity) than a Muslim nation any day.