The Human existence on Earth....something's got to give!

[starfleetengineer]

I saw a website earlier tonight which mentioned the population of Monaco was 32,409 in 2005.
I believe Monaco is one of (if not the) most densely populated places on earth. With an area of 1.95 sq. km that gives just 60 sq.meters per person. (approx. a square 8m x 8m)

This got me thinking...

"How long do we have before every square meter of the world's surface is populated to the same density as Monaco?"

Radius of the earth (equatorial) = 6378 km
Surface Area = 4*pi*R^2 = 511,185,933 sq.km (5.1 x 10E+14 sq.meters)
At the population density of Monaco, the Earth would have a population of ~ 8,520 billion. (Assuming we found a way to build on the oceans as well)

If we're just talking Land Area then we've got to divide by about 4, which gives ~ 2,130 billion.

The current rate of growth is about 1.16 % per year.
The 1960's high was ~ 2.2 % per year.
Growth rates are predicted to be gradually falling towards a low of about 0.5% per year by 2050.

This the site: http://www.ibiblio.org/lunarbin/worldpop gives a current world population of 6,786,220,480. (Let's assume this is reasonably accurate)

So lets extrapolate 3 scenarios...,

1. ...assuming we average 0.5% growth from now into the foreseeable future:
This gives us another 1,152 years until every inch of Land Surface is populated to the density of Monaco. (the year 3159)
If by then we've worked out a way to live over the oceans, we'd buy approx another 300 years (until the year 3438).

2. If we assume the current growth rate of about 1% is maintained, these dates come down to the years 2585 and 2724 respectively;

3. If growth rates were to return to the 1960's highs of 2.2%, then the respective dates would be: 2271 and 2335. (Only 200-300 years away)

Oh, and BTW,after spending 1/2 hour doing this calculation, I returned to: http://www.ibiblio.org/lunarbin/worldpop and found it had increased by 5,320 people.

Food for thought?

[MKruer]

I will be the first to bite. I think it will be a combination of the above, though the Draconian law seems a little to archaic.

As a trend of New vs Old world, the more technologically advanced a society becomes the slower the birth rate becomes. Japan and Hong Kong would be a good example. I believe the death rate out strips the birth rate in both these regions now. there are a number of reasons for this, chief among them is that people people in technologically advanced a society tend to get married and have children later in life, in addition those people tend to have smaller families.

Oh yes, we will probably go the rout of the Arcology long before we truly populate space, this would give people on the planet a much longer buffer time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology

[ajtribick]

Space travel is not the answer. It's too expensive to get to orbit, and once you're there, there aren't many places to go.

I personally suspect the option humanity will go for is "the nasty way".

[Goonster]

Space travel is not the answer. It's too expensive to get to orbit, and once you're there, there aren't many places to go.

I personally suspect the option humanity will go for is "the nasty way".

I have to agree with this . The numbers of people that would need to emigrate into space to make any difference means it would be impractical and unworkable-even with new technology getting us up there.
China already restricts the number of kids you can have and I think this will be taken up by a lot of countries as the population grows. I live in Jersey,which is only 9x5miles big(or should that be small!)and the population here is nearly 90,000 .And also people are living longer lives as improvements in medicine are made.
Restricting families is the only practical way to curb the growth.

Goonster

[MKruer]

"It's too expensive to get to orbit" Its only expensive because their is no infrastructure. We will be forced to go into space simple for resources alone.

Unfortunately The way things will go is more like something like this.

Create laws that make it prohibitively expensive to have lots of children. The problem with this, is that most counties will op like china did to allow only one child and the parents will choose to have a male child first or only. These countries will end up like China with a 10/1 male to female ratio. Mean while as global resources dwindled, Another world war will start due to the limitations of resources. The will force the governments that can to invents in the infrastructure for space to get the additional resources. Meanwhile while all of this is going on, the building of an Arcology like structures will advance. These structures will become the precursors first true self substantiated colonies.

[Hunter Parasite]

As a trend of New vs Old world, the more technologically advanced a society becomes the slower the birth rate becomes. Japan and Hong Kong would be a good example. I believe the death rate out strips the birth rate in both these regions now.

But, but but but...
As a society advances technologically, the citizens of said society will live longer. If you've ever watched the today show at around, 8 or 9 in the morning, I think, they show people who are a hundred and over, and there's like ten people a day!(And they wrap their picture around a nice little bottle of smuckers.) So if people start to live to say, 140 years, the death rate will probably balance out with the birth rate, OR, fall behind, allowing for increasing population numbers again. So I think some form of global birth control is the only valid option, as space flight is ungodly expensive, and Draconian laws are a tad barbaric.

[BobHegwood]

If I might post a probably unpopular opinion here...

There are already too damned many people on the Earth don't you
think? I have had but one child in my life, and THAT was an accident.
I firmly believe that population control is not only likely, but should be
mandatory.

Either that, or a good nuclear war would probably have the desired
result. Think about it though... Why do people wish to
reproduce more of the same animals who currently can't get along
with each other anyway? Why do you wish to perpetuate violence
throughout the Universe?

Be that as it may, however, I think we'll go to the stars simply
because we're an exploratory race, and each of the people on this
board obviously have an interest in exploring the Universe.

Sorry, just my opinion again and I already know what a
jack-ass I am so you don't need to remind me anymore.

[MKruer]

As a trend of New vs Old world, the more technologically advanced a society becomes the slower the birth rate becomes. Japan and Hong Kong would be a good example. I believe the death rate out strips the birth rate in both these regions now.

But, but but but...
As a society advances technologically, the citizens of said society will live longer. If people who are a hundred and over, and there's like ten people a day!(And they wrap their picture around a nice little bottle of smuckers.) So if people start to live to say, 140 years, the death rate will probably balance out with the birth rate, OR, fall behind, allowing for increasing population numbers again. So I think some form of global birth control is the only valid option, as space flight is ungodly expensive, and Draconian laws are a tad barbaric.

I fore see two problems with your analysis;

First you are assuming that the average person will start to live longer. Current life expectancy is has not really gone up that much since the introduction of ?€?modern?€

[MKruer]

If I might post a probably unpopular opinion here...

There are already too damned many people on the Earth don't you
think? I have had but one child in my life, and THAT was an accident.
I firmly believe that population control is not only likely, but should be
mandatory.

I agree with the fundamentals, but not necessarily the tactics implied by the options listed above. There are much more effective ways to control population other then some draconian law that prohibits birth.

Either that, or a good nuclear war would probably have the desired result. Think about it though... Why do people wish to
reproduce more of the same animals who currently can't get along
with each other anyway? Why do you wish to perpetuate violence
throughout the Universe?

I tend to classify all wars into two categories. 1) war of ideas 2) war of resources. Unfortunately there is no easy answer for number one, but great distances do help in the reduction of conflict. Number two can be eliminated if resources become a non issue, space is full of resources and entrepreneurs don?€™t have to worry about those pesky environmentalists.

Be that as it may, however, I think we'll go to the stars simply
because we're an exploratory race, and each of the people on this
board obviously have an interest in exploring the Universe.

If history should have taught us any thing is that a stagnant society dies. So if a society wants to continue then it is in their best interest to keep moving. That?€™s why I am a big supporter of exploration, whether it be in the sea or in space. Both push technology to its limit, and helps the society increase the technology base which then works back into the society sustaining it longer.

Sorry, just my opinion again and I already know what a
jack-ass I am so you don't need to remind me anymore.

Your not a jack-ass you are just telling it as you see it, people only think of you as such when they disagree with you, but know you might be correct. And it?€™s my opinion that?€™s its better to have an opinion then be a lemming. The trick is that you become the jack-ass when your opinion fails against the superior argument, and you still stick with your original opinion. So its ok to change and adapt when someone submits a superior argument.

[ajtribick]

"It's too expensive to get to orbit" Its only expensive because their is no infrastructure. We will be forced to go into space simple for resources alone.

An infrastructure capable of lifting billions of people off the Earth and putting them into space? And then where do you put them?

As a little thought experiment (and doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations - this isn't supposed to be a rigorous analysis by a long way), suppose we say that each planet can support a number of people directly proportional to the amount of solar radiation it receives (a quantity which depends on how far the planet is from the Sun, and on how big the planet is).

I'm going to rule out Mercury and Venus as colonisation options since they lack water and organics. I'm also going to rule out the Moon for similar reasons, since the Moon would likely be dependent on Earth for water and organics, and the entire point of moving everyone off the planet is to stop the drain of resources on Earth.

Furthermore I'm going to rule out the gas giants and Io for being too nasty, and only consider Mars, the major moons of the giant planets and dwarf planets (including Charon), since these bodies at least stand a chance of having enough gravity to offset zero-g-related health problems... (see also the last paragraph of this post)

So from an energy consideration, what is the maximum population of the solar system?

The answer comes out as a mere 1.14 times the maximum population of Earth - most of the offworlders end up on Mars (12% of Earth's population) and the Jovian moons (1.4% of Earth's population total).

Thus it would seem that even if we could magic up the infrastructure to shuttle vast numbers of people around the solar system, the solar system wouldn't be able to support them because most of the planets and moons don't get enough energy.

Assuming all this doesn't have a load of gaping holes in the analysis (which it almost certainly does), the consequence of this is as follows: if the maximum sustainable population of the Earth is less than about 5.8 billion (using a current world population of 6.6 billion), we've already exceeded the maximum sustainable population of the entire solar system. Go humanity!

(It would be interesting to do this analysis taking into account all the zillions of asteroids flying around and seeing what happens, but I don't have the relevant info to hand.)

[Reiko]

We don't need to worry about reducing population growth anytime soon. Just build giant arcologies to house people, farm the oceans for the food (not just for the fish), build fusion reactors for a clean source of energy and mine the moon for helium 3 to fuel those reactors.

[MKruer]

The problem with this entire analysis is that everyone er... almost everyone is thinking very two dimensionally and/or not including natural advancements in technology in other areas.

hypothetical if we built all building like the world trade center (Just as an example because its easy to calculate the space) One building has a foot print of 63x63m but had 110 floors, and had an maximum occupancies of 50,000each or 12.6 people per meter. I guess this rules out the "running out of space issue"

http://www.archiplanet.org/wiki/World_Trade_Center

We will run out of resources long before we ever run out of space, and their is only one option left to gain the resources, and that is space. anything else would be tantamount to suicide.

Also one would think that If we had "An infrastructure capable of lifting billions of people off the Earth and putting them into space" We would have the technology to build permanent space habitats.

The basis of the thread is all wrong, its not about space, it about resources and technology. Those are the real limiting factors for how large of a population the world can have. As it turns out back in the late 70's we had the technology and the right population size to sustain the world, we fell out of that, but we are headed back towards an equilibrium again, and its predicted that the population will start to level off for the simple reason, you can have more people then you can feed, if you do then those people you cannot feed will die and bring the population back into equilibrium with the food that can be suppled.

[MKruer]

I would like to refine my original statement a bit
Unfortunately The way things will go is more like something like this.

The laws of supply and demand will keep the population down in those countries that believe in the capitalistic society. Those that tend to lean more socialist will create laws that make it prohibitively expensive to have lots of children. The problem with this, is that most counties will op like china did to allow only one child and the parents will choose to have a male child first or only. These countries will end up like China with a 10/1 male to female ratio. Mean while as global resources dwindled, another world war will start due to the limitations of resources. The socialist society running out of resources will start or provoke a war to gain resource from those weaker and/or more capitalistic because as they assume are unfairly use resource, not because they are, its just that on a per capita basis capitalistic society will use more resource to increase the quality of life vs the sheer population count; while the more socialist society want more bodies, but well keep the quality of life the same. This will force the governments that can to invest in the infrastructure for space to get the additional resources. Meanwhile while all of this is going on, the building of an Arcology like structures will advance. These structures will become the precursors first true self substantiated colonies.

Blah, blah, blah.. 5000 years from now if we are still suck on the rock the population density will still be no were near estimated 8.5 trillion people. Even if we Soylent Green people it will not happen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green

[Fenerit]

Found something relate to the subject.

http://www.paep.ca/en/CIYL/2007/doc/Env ... 0Facts.pdf

[PlutonianEmpire]

I voted for the terraforming of planets in Sol system, but to be honest, I think fate has a grim plan for humanity.

[LordFerret]

MKruer, that's an interesting observation about China's population. I believe though that globally, females still outnumber males 2:1. China's situation is unique.

One of the things I've found interesting, is that population growth in many european nations is currently stagnent. Part of the reason for this was their utter decimation in population during WWII. Poland is a perfect example here - they're still trying to recover, though at this point they may never. While this site is more designed to emphasize carbon dioxide emissions (Breathing Earth), I find it also a perfect example of population trends... put the cursor over each nation to check out its birth/death rates.

[MKruer]

Most of the rest of the world has a higher female to mail ratio, mainly because female test to live longer, not because their are more female births. Birth rate world wide tend to be 50/50.

Here are a few links you might find interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_ratio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co ... _sex_ratio

One of the point that I was trying to get across is that if a Draconian law was put I place, It would lead to a larger male to female imbalance. I think that the fact support this particularly in China, Africa and the Middle East