I’ve heard people clamour on about how there’s too many people and not enough resources to go around.
I don’t give it much credence since resources aren’t equally distributed in the first place.
All I believe is that the quality of life would decrease but don’t know anything beyond that.
I don’t think you have to worry about it in your lifetime, or even the lifetime of your kids or grand kids, but eventually a scarce resource, such as water, will become limiting and that will directly impact agriculture and food production. When you have billions of people without any access to adequate food or fresh water you have a big problem. Perhaps they will come up with a cheap and easy way to make fresh water, but then some other resource will become scarce instead. I don’t think it’s about running out of room… it’s about running out of something else we all need to live.
Let’s move this over to Great Debates.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
There is an entire solar system full of stuff out there if we ever were in danger of running out of anything critical, which seems unlikely. Not because we couldn’t use something up, but because in general when the price of something goes up alternatives are explored that perhaps weren’t feasible before. Whale oil being the best example of this, or trees in Europe during the middle ages.
As for the OP:
And yet, globally the quality of life has gone up in leaps and bounds in the last 100 years.
People have been on about this for centuries now. Every time we’ve come to a cusp we have burst through and standards have gone up and up. The short answer is that there are plenty of resources on the planet to hold all the humans we are likely to get. Population is set to level off in the next 100 years or so and then start a steady drop. Distribution of resources is the thing we are running up against today, but I expect that to eventually fix itself (or be fixed anyway). Really, the big worry from what I can tell is not the amount of resources or even distribution, but instead environmental impact, especially global climate change. THAT is the real issue it seems.
Water is effectively indestructible and endless. The world’s covered in it. The problem you have is twofold;
Both problems are solvable through the application of energy. So, really, your issue isn’t a lack of water, it’s energy. You need more energy to move water, desalinate water, purify water, and so on.
Even the issue of water is actually less about survival and more about lifestyle.
The amount of water a person needs if they subsist on bread and water, taking sponge baths and using a pit toilet is a very small amount of water.
The amount of water you use when eating steak and avocados, luxuriating in hot baths, flushing five gallons at a time and keeping your over-sized lawn green… that is an entirely different amount of water.
There is plenty of water to support many more people on the first lifestyle, and we’ve already exceeded the population that can be supported on the second lifestyle. Humans being what we are, the conclusion is likely to be “Hey, I deserve the water they take from me! Therefore, I should kill them.” I don’t expect that a lot of people will voluntarily give up their steaks, lawns and showers.
To be honest, it’s the same behavior you see in most animals if confined in an environment that is too small. From fish to rats, they respond to that stress by staking our their territory and fighting off their neighbors.
We’re in no realistic position to exploit the resources of the rest of the solar system. At all.
Whaddya mean? The stores are full of moon pies and Mars bars.
We’re getting there.
It isn’t a big deal over the next fifty years or so in my view. We waste tons of food and misuse agricultural land, so there is no risk of starvation. If we aren’t making enough food we just waste less and use land more efficiently.
Humans really only need food, water, public health, basic medicine, rotection from trauma, the elements, etc. Those are cheap to provide.
Plus when a nation hits 5k per capita income their reproduction rate drops to sustainable or lower rates. Virtually all wealthy nations are at below reproduction rates and will see a population decline this century.
What does concern me is that population will grow in Africa. They will go from 1 billion now to 4 billion by 2050 or so. It is a continent that is fairly dysfunctional and won’t handle it well.
Plus 50+ years from now I’m sure radical life extension will exist. Living to 200+ may be possible within a century, which will add to population. But by then something may come along to make things easier more sustainable living, living off the planet, erc) but those scenarios are 50-100+ years away.
Really? Where is ‘there’? We have yet to exploit even a single drop of water from an extraterrestrial source in the last sixty years of spaceflight. No major government space organization is seriously developing the infrastructure for in-situ utilization of space resources. The ‘space mining’ schemes from a generation ago are just as much cartoon proposals today as they were then. Planetary Resources–a private company–does have an effort to identify and develop technologies for the ‘mining’ of asteroids (primarily for water) but their plan through the mid 2020s is to launch a series of smallsats to look for and inspect potential resources. I think what they are doing is great, and their ambition is in the right direction, but this is a very long way from being able to extract, process, and deliver space-based resources to Earth.
In fact, the reason to develop the technology and infrastructure for in-situ extraction and utilization of space reources isn’t to provide those resources to Earth (at enormous cost) but to provide a sustainable path to permanent human habitation in space. Except for rare elements or materials and processing that are too polluting to produce on Earth, there will likely never be an economic case for shipping space materials to Earth’s surface. Our basic critical resources for sustaining human populations–fresh potable water, nitrogenous fertilizers, suitable marine conditions for aquaculture–are not really suitable for extraction from space resources.
The natural carrying capacity of the Earth, sans technological innovations such as extensive irrigation systems, genetically modified high yield crops, and the Haber-Bosch process, can support somewhere around one billion people at a sustainance level. It is fair to point out that industrial technology has allowed us to extend that capacity by an order of magnitude but only by the use of nonsustainable resources such as non-replenished underground water reservoirs and fertilizers produced from ‘fossil’ hydrocarbons. Those resources, without some means of replenishment or replacement, will eventually run out, and arguing that the problems are “solvable through the application of energy,” is handwaving that ignores that a) it takes an astonishing amount of energy to produce or refine resources that are naturally formed over hundreds of thousands or millions of years in a human timespan, b) mass distribution of these resources like potable water to end users requires a massive infrastructure, and c) all large scale applications of technology have had unintended consequences, to wit, the silting of rivers due to upstream damming and diverting for irrigation or industrial purposes.
Relying on future technology to solve the problems we are knowingly creating today is like wishing for Father Christmas to bring you a new bicycle instead of maintaining the one that you have. No doubt there will be future innovations which will improve the quality of life and (perhaps) reduce resource demands, but many of those innovations are essentially impossible to predict when and how they will happen any more than a natural philosopher at the turn of the 19th Century could have predicted how technology based on electromagnetism would drive our civilization today. It is try that the market will ‘correct’ for overpopulation and overuse of scarce resources, but that correction may well be famine, warfare, and disease for hundreds of millions or billions of people, which is a fate we should strive to avoid by intelligent management of shared resources (up to and including the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere) and promoting voluntary reduction in population growth. We don’t need or have a use for ten billion or more people, especailly when many of these people will never have access to education or resources which will allow them to be productive or innovative so as to contribute something to society.
Stranger
Today? Or ever? If you mean today, well…we don’t need it today. We won’t need it tomorrow either. We may never actually need it. I can’t think of a single resource that is vital to human civilization that we couldn’t figure out a way to get here on Earth if we needed it badly enough or that extrapolations of current technologies couldn’t get us without having to resort to magical Father Christmas tech to make happen. But space mining for in situ refueling or resources for building is already being explored, and there are plans for things like mining H3 on the Moon at some point. Whether they will be economically feasible is a different question, but then it gets back to market forces that would drive us to realistically look at using extra-planetary resources in the first place. My only point is that IF we ever used up all the resources on this planet we aren’t exactly in a closed system…there is a whole solar system worth of resources out there that could be exploited in the future. That we don’t have the ability to do it today is more driven by the fact we don’t have the need to do it and that it doesn’t make economic sense than that it’s simply impossible to do.
Think of it this way…when crude oil was first exploited through drilling it would have been inconceivable that we’d be drilling for it in the deep oceans. The folks in the late 19th century would have only had the vaguest idea of how to even go about doing it, and would have laughed in any case because it would not be economically feasible to do or even really explore in any but the vaguest sort of speculative ways. Today we are doing it because the easy oil is all gone and we have to push the envelop to find new sources.
Overpopulation isn’t a “threat”. It’s happening. It is the underlying cause of hunger, pollution, unemployment, global warming, crime, violence and war. But it doesn’t make sense to think of it on a global scale. And it doesn’t make sense to talk about it like an impending disaster. It is an ongoing situation, and it has always been ongoing. It’s the basic cause of human migration, which is alternately known as “refugee crises” or “wars of conquest”.
People steal when they’re hungry, they fight when they’re homeless. They migrate when they need jobs.
But it isn’t helpful to think of it as something that will happen if we don’t stop having babies. It’s more important to think of it as a permanent underlying driver of societal change, and to deal with it in that sense. One child policies won’t fix overpopulation, education will. But it’s less exciting to talk about the obvious fact that resources are limited and unequally distributed than to mention the scary “population bomb”.
If we want to make any sort of meaningful impact on climate change, we’ll need to reduce the human population by 20%. Go back to 1900 levels.
If you mean the actual year 1900 and not the 1900s generally, that’d be a reduction to 20% of current levels.
Overpopulation is not a threat. At all. The most important resource we have is the human brain and the higher the population, the more of that important resource we have.
Proof? We live in a time with the lowest violence and the lowest poverty in human history. We also live in a time with the most people in history.
We also live in a time when we are consuming non-renewable resources at or near the greatest rates ever.
Other than for aesthetic, so what? What important non-renewable resource is not replaceable with another resource? When we run out of oil we’ll move to nuclear power (which will require brains).
To me the biggest threat caused by a large population is pollution but even then it can be solved. Today the US (and probably Europe) is cleaner than it was 40 years ago even with an expanding population. If we could ever get conservatives and liberals together to combat AGW with nuclear power we could lessen that threat as well.
I was impressed with the board, we got all the way to post 13 before someone took up the mantle of the incorrect view that overpopulation is a major issue.
To all still wondering, this video is the best primer to counter that narrative.
hundreds of years ago, the primary method of keeping warm was chopping down trees and burning wood for warmth, today? Natural gas heating. Much less impactful environmentally. We can have MORE people being kept warm while impacting the environment LESS than we used to with newer cleaner technology.
Our solar capacity is increasing, getting cheaper and more efficient all the time, that allows us to tap into the secret weapon over resource constraints on the earth. Free energy. The earth is NOT a closed finite system, there is energy flowing in from the outside called the sun. We can use that energy to do work, like desalinating oceans and radically increasing the usable water suply, hydroponic crop growing can reduce water use. Genetically modified crops can allow us to feed more people using less land and resources. Cars and eventually trucks and planes can be switch to electricity, reducing further the need to burn finite resources to move around. And remember, the energy source of that electricity? Finite? not so much, it’s the sun, free flowing battery in the OPEN system known as the earth that is flowing in from the outside.
Our capacity to use energy and its impact per person is NOT CONSTANT over time, that is the primary failure of all reason and logic the population catastrophists are engaged in.
The sun is not infinite of course, but on the time scales we all give a damn about, millions of years, it’s essentially free energy we don’t have to worry about going away, more than enough time to figure something else out to propagate the species should we need to move on.
Few groups worry about their own overpopulation, but point to rival groups that “breed like rabbits.” The fear seems to be rooted in something less savory than concern for a sustainable environment. " (It’s worth noting that China’s “one child” policy ended not long after neighbor India hit the one billion mark a few years ago.) Terms like “surplus population” date back to Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus in the 18th Century. Malthus said that the population increased at a geometric rate and the food to feed it increased at an arithmetic rate, a wholly unproven idea.
Every species’ population expands to its natural limits and for humanity, those limits seem not to have yet been reached. If the population were outstripping its ability to feed itself, would Iowa have so much unsold corn? Would any farmland be repurposed as shopping malls?