
World Population Growth - okket
https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth
======
zpeti
I don't understand all the negativity in other posts in this thread.

Poverty is falling dramatically right now, and is falling faster than the UN
ever predicted. It is quite likely that we can feed 7bn people.

We have 80 years to come up with the technology to feed another 4bn by 2100.
And population will probably fall after that. That sounds doable to me. Food
technology is making huge gains, if we have lab grown meat at almost a tenth
of the cost, imagine how much easier it becomes to feed everyone.

Why the pessimism? I know everyone's facebook feed is full of the world
ending, but the situation isn't actually that bad.

~~~
collyw
> It is quite likely that we can feed 7bn people.

We could probably feed a lot more, if we crammed everyone into small cages and
fed them like factory farmed animals.

The question is why you would want so many people living like that? You are
already indirectly pointing out that meat will be off the menu for future
generations and I am sure there will many other things that will need to be
sacrificed as the population increases (for example, fish populations don't
sound like they are keeping up with demand). And at some point there are going
to be some hard limits on how many people can be fed.

~~~
AstralStorm
Do you mean feed them all soy mixed with wheat? Remove all meat production and
most of the water expensive fruits?

It can certainly be a palatable diet, the wide variety of vegetables can be
kept. It will be hard to convince Asians to eat much less rice though.

~~~
X6S1x6Okd1st
> It will be hard to convince Asians to eat much less rice though.

that's an odd thing to focus on. Moving people off meat & cheese would do a
whole hell of a lot more than moving people off rice.

There's also some interesting work being done on growing rice in brackish
water which could turn some unarable land to arable.

------
riffraff
for those who have not seen it, the "Global population growth, box by box" by
the late Hans Rosling is (IMO) a more entertaining introduction on the same
subject.

[https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_...](https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth)

------
Mizza
I have two conflicting thoughts about this:

1) I controversially think the world is currently underpopulated. Yes, as a
species we need to get our pollution and resource management under control,
but we need to do that at any population size. Once pollution and water is
properly handled with technology, there should be enough landmass to handle
20B+ people. That's 10 billion extra potential scientists and artists to
propel our species forward.

2) I am terrified that the idea that populations stabilize once a certain
level of development and women's education is reached is false and not
culturally universal. It seems like a very important untested assumption. If
it isn't true, and we continue to see exponential population growth in
developed second world countries but not in first world countries, I think
that the disruption to the status quo and fear of aggression could lead to
massive global wars of the kind we've never seen before.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
The current population uses more resources than sustainable each and every
year, and does so at increasing rate. Species, habitats and forests are going
at unprecedented rate. We show _no_ signs at all of handling soil, pollution
and water properly.

Yet you conclude there's not enough of us ruining the place yet?

~~~
Wintamute
No signs at all? All green technology, efficiency improvement and conservation
initiatives globally add up to zero in your book? Most reasonable people agree
there's much more to be done, perhaps that we're only beginning to scratch the
surface of what should be done, but to dismiss it is absurd. We should
celebrate and applaud initiatives that are heading in the right direction -
for example, UK power plants recently went 5 days with zero coal burning
emissions, the longest coal free streak since the industrial revolution.

~~~
lotsofpulp
All those people in India/China/Brazil/Indonesia want single family detached
homes with a yard for their kids and a garage for their cars, and absent a
force restricting them from it, they’re going to trend towards it as they get
richer.

Actually, best hope might be concentrating all jobs in very urban areas and
making it costly to get into relationships/have children so women themselves
opt out of it and drop the birth rate as they wouldn’t be able to afford the
amenities they want.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _those people in India /China/Brazil/Indonesia want single family detached
> homes with a yard for their kids and a garage for their cars_

Source? The world’s population is urbanising. That trend shows no sign of
slowing.

~~~
lotsofpulp
I don't have a good source, other than experience of myself, family, and
friends. But once people's kids reach school age, I don't see families
sticking around inner cities unless they can afford private school and a nice
big apartment, or they're too poor to move out to suburbs where they can
stretch out and have some space. The world is urbanizing, but perhaps that is
also one of the causes of declining birth rates, as it's not as desirable to
raise a family in small, urban apartments.

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jansan
Biggest challenge for our planet, yet almost nobody is talking about it. IMHO
it is just ridiculous to attribute famines to a 1 degree temperature rise,
while at the same time ignoring the fact that due to population growth the
available land per capita has decreased dramatically within the last few
decades.

~~~
mrpopo
> IMHO it is just ridiculous to attribute famines to a 1 degree temperature
> rise, while at the same time ignoring the fact that due to population growth
> the available land per capita has decreased dramatically within the last few
> decades.

These are two different problems that both need solving, and I'm sure some
people in Africa are trying to tackle the population growth problem. If you're
on HN right now, I'm sure you are more concerned with the temperature rise
problem (by the way, 1 degree? We already passed that).

~~~
jansan
When did we pass 1 degree (Celsius)?

~~~
mrpopo
Technically, we didn't pass it completely (0.8C).

[https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-
temperature/](https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/)

2016 reached 1C of warming anomaly relative to 1951-1980 average, but was
exceptionally hot.

But there are enough greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and feedback loops in
action so that, even if all human activity stopped right now, the 1C bar will
be easily toppled, and depending on prediction models, the 1.5C is probably
already unavoidable as well.

~~~
jansan
Maybe, but that wasn't my point in the original post. The famines that are
taking place today are attributed to the temperature rise so far, and that is
clearly below 1 degree.

Just for comparison, in Bangladesh the population has quadrupled since the
1950s.

~~~
mrpopo
Bangladesh is not suffering of famines? Africa is suffering of famines, and
the land use is far from saturated.

Furthermore, most of the planet except Africa has a fertility rate below 2.5
already (Bangladesh at 2.4). The biggest reason for the population growth is
due to the current population NOT dying of famines, diseases, etc. like they
used to, and dying of old age instead. There is nothing to do to tackle the
population growth, you would have to literally kill people.

------
avefilip
The fact that there was 3 billion people in 1960 is mind-blowing to me.

~~~
mihaifm
Also mind blowing: 6.5% of all the people who have ever lived are alive now.
That's 1 in 15 humans who have ever walked the Earth, being alive now.

~~~
xhgdvjky
holy crap

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zimbatm
The sheer mass of people that India and China has. If they wanted to, they
could send a fraction of their population to pretty much any country and
double the head count. It would be a pretty effective method to invade
peacefully.

~~~
jarfil
Seems like by 2100, Nigeria will be the third "population power" in the world:
[https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/projected-population-
by-c...](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/projected-population-by-country)

~~~
vorg
Nigeria won't have 800 million people by 2100, nor Africa 4.4 billion.
There'll be some catastrophe well before then.

------
dang
A discussion from 2016:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12691669](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12691669)

------
jakozaur
There are some credible estimates that population on Earth will peak at 8.5-9
Bln. (2050-2070).

See: [https://www.amazon.com/Empty-Planet-Global-Population-
Declin...](https://www.amazon.com/Empty-Planet-Global-Population-
Decline/dp/0771050887)

Historically mid UN projections never turn out to be true. They were either
low variant or below that.

~~~
mc32
That’s a lot of people consuming at 21st century rates.

We’ve got to work to stabilizing pop to more sustainable levels where we don’t
have further slash and burn land for farming and animal husbandry, resource
exploitation at future rates, etc.

Obviously messing with population growth is fraught with problems of
unintended consequences (ala China OCP), but we can do better to bring
effective zero growth to places experiencing exponential growth. (Women’s)
Education, empowerment, opportunity, etc. This goes a long way. As with carbon
emissions it could help to set a year baseline, or better calculate an optimal
pop given natural resources and set incentives to stabilize at those points.

------
lkrubner
Left unexplained is this rather large mystery:

"For the long period from the appearance of modern Homo sapiens up to the
starting point of this chart in 10,000 BCE it is estimated that the total
world population was often well under one million."

As others have often pointed out, as a large bodied mammal, we would expect
humans to be roughly as successful as other widely dispersed large body
mammals. And yet its thought that there were 100 million bison on the planet
before human civilization arose. So there should have been 100 million humans
on the planet. Why would there be so few humans, if other large body mammals
were so plentiful? I'm inclined to think they are underestimating the number
of humans on the planet in 10,000 BC, or there must be a good reason why there
were so few humans.

~~~
tropo
It has to do with the trophic level.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level)

Plants are almost always level 1. Bison would be just a bit over 2. (a bit
over because they may consume bugs, bones, etc.) Humans would usually be
higher than that. The traditional Eskimo diet is nearly trophic level 5.

Due to loss of energy going from one level to the next, the biomass of
creatures with high trophic level is limited:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_pyramid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_pyramid)

------
thefounder
There are enough resources for everyone as long as we invest in education and
technology. I don't even count resources we could exploit from other planets.
We also need to be careful with the nukes...

The population growth may become an issue for our grand-grand children. I
believe we will long gone by then.

------
drchewbacca
Overpopulation is such a hard conversation to have. I think a lot of people
get scared that even talking about it will lead to calls for a genocide and
therefore want to not even begin talking about it.

There are a lot of positive things that can be done, for example educating
women.

I'm not sure if anyone has seen these calls to action but it sounds like there
are problems ahead with such a large population.

[https://www.worldpopulationbalance.org/call-action-
scientist...](https://www.worldpopulationbalance.org/call-action-scientists-
warning)

~~~
cowwithbeef
It's a hard conversation because of the mechanics of how the human species
works. If one group of people decides to take action and promote infertility,
it will simply be replaced by the neighboring group of people who continue
having high fertility. We have only globally enforced infertility or mass
death of fertile populations as our long term options. It's depressing. If any
group continues being highly fertile, they will inherit the earth. The
authority necessary to prevent high fertility among all people is dystopian
beyond belief.

~~~
jansan
You would have to take some form of positive action, for example improve
women's rights, to do so. But the problem is that this will reach only the
more open minded parts of the population, which again will result in the other
part (often religious fundamentalists or simply less educated parts of the
population) inheriting the earth. It's a grim situation.

~~~
quotemstr
Right. Malthus gets the last laugh in the end, doesn't he? The carrying
capacity of the Earth is finite, and even if you're able to educate and
incentive 99% of the population into holding fertility constant, that other 1%
will grow to dominate the population, since selection pressure operates on
whatever it is inside of us that makes us want to have more or fewer children.

The only alternative is ongoing state control over reproduction, and even that
just delays the inevitable.

~~~
UberofXplsgo
Well, all high growth populations have eventually slowed their population
growth as gdp capita and mean years of schooling increased

~~~
quotemstr
The Amish don't seem particularly interested in this effect: they're growing
rapidly. Same thing with the Haredi. This effect whereby "all high growth
populations have eventually slowed their population growth as gdp capita and
mean years of schooling increased" is a _temporary_ phenomenon we observe
while natural selection does its work and selects for those who are able to
resist the fecundity-reducing effects of modernity --- people like the Amish
and the Haredi.

