What are you implying here? Sorry, I’m dense.
I assume the idea is that scarce resources lead to war; India, as an example, already has difficulty with food and water production and distribution, and if that gets worse, India might decide to go to war. And a nuclear power going to war might decide to use its nuclear weapons to desalinate water and grow wheat.
I lost the thread a bit, sorry.
Even at the present of 7.5 billion people, the only reason I think it isn’t even worse right now, is because about half of the world’s population gets by on a couple of bucks a day so are living a minimal existence. As nice as it would be for everyone to live a much better life, don’t think the planet earth can stay healthy, it’s already struggling and future generations are going to pay the price.
With limited natural resources, global warming, over 400 dead zones in our oceans, topsoil erosion rates, ground water levels running much lower, fresh uncontaminated water being harder to come by, linear economies, these are all serious issues and why I think even our present population on earth isn’t sustainable for future generations if they want to maintain a fairly decent standard of living along with a healthy earth. So, other than that, not to worry.
Well, we can talk about zombie apocalypse, but I think at least some if not most of these problems might not be such a problem. 7,5B people are working to solve that. Have some optimism.
@Little Nemo. Fertilizer can be transmuted from water and thin air. That is why I cited Haber. You just need a lot of energy. Of course fossil fuels are much cheaper and handier for that. About 3-5% of world production of fossil fuels are used for that if I understand correctly (no proper cite, wiki says so - google for ammonia production). I might be missing some detail, but i do not think that scenario involving (sudden) lack of fossil fuels automatically means the end of the world. Should still be still be somewhat high on the radar. Yes. Higher than zombie apocalypse, for sure.
Now be honest. When is the last time nations went to war over food and water? Do you honestly see some country like India pointing its nukes at a country with food, say Australia, and demanding food?
To be honest, I think many countries just encourage their hungry people to move or immigrate to a country where the food is.
The historical question is whether reproductive capacity will ever overwhelm productive capacity. I think time is proving that this won’t be an issue. The real issue is whether humanity’s environmental footprint will damage productive capacity so abruptly that it can no longer sustain the population. Given the effects of runaway carbon pollution, I would say yes, and suggest that humanity’s best hope for long-term survival is a Pakistan/India nuclear exchange in the next decade.
A lot of the problem with Palestine and Israel is water rights. I’m not saying it’s a guarantee, but it’s possible that if Israel had the rain that Seattle gets that we’d have two states.
Not just NO, but HELL NO
The earth can sustain 11 billion humans for about one century, followed by utter collapse. Even if we smart up and improve our ways a bit.
Trim that number to 5 billion, and with careful management it can last 5 centuries or so, tops.
Trim that number to 2 billion, and with very sensible management you can sustain for a long long time. You will still run into problems with the nonrenewables, such as mining depletion making some metals very uneconomical to extract. But between recycling and use of very low-grade ores we can hang on for a very long time, but it won’t be an easy ride.
Yes, we are getting smarter all the time, developing new technologies to better manage the world to sustain us.
But there are two problems facing us:
First, virtually every solution we devise depends on ever-higher tech to work. If we lose that tech for whatever reason, we are in such a bad situation that we will not be able to recover from it. So we have one, and only one, try to do this right.
Second, we have already done an immense amount of damage, and this damage needs to not only be stopped, but reversed to get the earth into a state where it can sustain us longterm. That will be ludicrously expensive.
These are things like:
*the whole CO2 / global warming / climate change thing.
We have already exceeded the point where the situation is unsustainable. On land, the CO2 leads to some warming, more energetic weather, etc. Bothersome but survivable.
But at current levels of CO2, even if just maintained not increasing, we face ocean death by acidification in a few hundred years. As in 100% all complex life, in the ocean.
*groundwater depletion.
We have drained groundwater levels to the extent that in many,many regions farming is impossible without irrigation. Not merely reduced, but impossible. Replenishing this groundwater is… well, almost impossible in the short and medium term.
*Plastic in the oceans.
This is the scariest of all, because the impact will hit us not in hundreds of years, but is already starting now. Virtually all surface-feeding species are being affected and headed to some serious problems.
You want to turn the oceans into the world’s breadbasket? Fine. But first you will have to find, extract and dispose of the mass of plastic that is well on the way to out-massing the fish in the ocean.
In the US, true.
Worldwide?
VERY VERY FALSE
Not just poverty, but also resources, and primarily energy. The Dutch and the Chinese are working on multi-story factory farming because they are short of space. In an urban setting, it can be cheaper than trucking in produce. Desalination is ridiculously expensive and requires a huge amount of energy, whatever method is used.
The world has repeatedly passed through phases where population growth exceeded the ability to feed the population. In classical times there were mass die-offs when something went wrong, more recently, the patterns in India and China show periodic troughs where the population hit a limit that was “resolved” with famine and war. The changing of the Chinese dynasties correlates to this, I believe. The problem was also solved by enforcing peonage or serfdom or whatever it was called locally, and forcing the majority of the population to subsist at a minimum level.
Western civilization broke the mold by the large-scale use of fossil fuels and new technology, including agriculture. The population jumped rapidly, but never was there any equality in the distribution of the new wealth, it always relied on the toiling masses. In essence, the new technologies relied on cheap and abundant energy. Unless we can repeat that trick again, we cannot maintain a large population in the long term. It has been said that we are consuming resources equivalent to four planets, but the problem is that we only have one. I also saw a prediction that after about 500 years the population of the earth will drop to the levels of the 18th century. AFAIK, we reached the first billion in around 1800.
In theory, the planet could support 10 billion people, but not on a long term basis at anything other than a subsistence level. There are various problems; there is very little usable (fresh) water, which is becoming increasingly polluted, the amount of land available for agriculture is shrinking due to urbanization, which in itself increases the consumption of resources. But, as I read somewhere, we cannot solve our problems simply by becoming peasants again.
The real crunch will come when we hit the limits for the economic extraction of minerals, when fossil fuels become excessively expensive to produce (shale oil is an example of that, already), when the amount of arable land cannot be increased even though we have destroyed the natural countryside, and above all, if this is combined with a catastrophe such as severe climate change and/or agricultural epidemics. Our food chain is based on less than ten major crops that lack genetic diversity. Consider the famine in Ireland from 1845 to 1848 on a global scale. Consider also that the stocks of the major cereals would just about see us through one really bad year, but not more than that.
I’ve seen this quoted, also saw a TV documentary. China is bankrolling all kinds of infrastructure projects in Africa, but it wants the minerals and the food in return. It is just a new form of neo-colonialism. Whether it actually benefits the locals is highly dubious, they don’t have a legal claim to the land, as if they (the locals) are the sort of people who understand such niceties anyway.
Something similar is happening in eastern Europe. The European agro-companies are buying up farmland there because it is cheaper. And expect a stampede whenever the Ukraine is no longer at war.
What do you base any of the above on? Where do you get the figures that the earth can only sustain 11 billion people for 100 years, while 5 billion can get 500 years? Sounds like either you made that up or you are using projections based on current practices and methods and known reserves, perhaps on current climate change predictions and the like.