• Question: How many people can the earth look after where the populations going up?

    Asked by icedancer to Gioia, Iain, Jo, Leo, Mariam on 22 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Joanna Watson

      Joanna Watson answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      That’s a really good question. I guess it depends how many resources each person is using.

      There are some people who think that we are already using up to many of the worlds resources and that we can’t carry on like it even with the number of people that are on the earth. I would have to spend quite a lot of time investigating the answers to this question to give you my personal answer – more time than I have this week – sorry.

    • Photo: Leo Garcia

      Leo Garcia answered on 21 Jun 2010:

      The earth has only a limited amount of room, and a limited amount of resources.

      We have to find a way of reducing the number of people being born without restricting the natural urge to procreate – and to find ways of producing more food for our rapidly increasing population.

      If the population is very high, then nature will inevitably cause it to decrease, in ways like famine or disease – so it is in our best interests to find a way to control the population of the earth before this happens.

    • Photo: Mariam Orme

      Mariam Orme answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      I don’t know the answer to this, but I do know that if the earth’s population keeps expanding, and we all keep wanting the sort of lifestyle we have now, we’re going to be in big trouble relatively soon…

    • Photo: Iain Moal

      Iain Moal answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      That very much depends on how technology progresses. Before Fritz Haber found out how to turn nitrogen in the air into ammonia, which could be made into fertilisers, we were importing fertiliser from abroad, because British soil could not produce enough food for the people. Fertilisers were a bottleneck for food production.

      If we keep on growing food the way we do, then out planet is believed to be able to sustain around 10-15 billion people, possibly 20 billion if we razed all the forests and jungles and dedicated all that land to food production. To put that into context, we will probably reach 9 billion before 2050, and the population is growing fast. Maybe technology can bump up food production. Many agrochemicals companies and companies producing genetically modified crops are working on it. There will have to be a limit at some point though.

      I think that the only hope that our species has is if we bring the poor out of poverty – it would only require a few percent of the world’s GDP. Only when women can control their fertility, when babies have a high survival rate and when quality of life increases, do birth rates go down and approach a stable number. It frustrates me that the countries of our home-planet can’t get together and make this happen: it IS achievable. Perhaps your generation will be able to get it together and do the right thing.

Comments

  • Photo: icedancer

    icedancer commented on :

    Thanks.

  • Photo: Daniel

    Daniel commented on :

    It really depends on the average living standard of a human on the planet. In a rather old paper, scientists have considered the major kinds of impact that humans have on their environments, and converted them all into one parameter – land use. This is of course a simplification, but it gave them a number that I think is useful to frame this discussion – the number of Earths that would be necessary to sustain humanity at a given average standard of living. The results are summarized in this figure: In their model, we have already crossed the line, though the exact time of the crossing depends on the modeling parameters and some other assumptions. So it is clear that we need to do something about this problem. How to approach it is subject of this related discussion over in the Fluorine zone.