But of course, that also denies humanity, and humanity’s ambitious nature.
Man, I hope you’re wrong about that, because Earth isn’t growing any bigger. We did live in rough balance with things for about a million years, so I have hope.
Which limits are you thinking of? We’re past the carrying capacity on certain fronts, but that was never a “will collapse” thing as much as a “we’re going into debt” thing, and I think they were first calculated after we had passed them.
There’s some ways in which we can stretch the Earth, but there’s some that are set in stone. Energy budget comes to mind; we only get so much sunlight, and even if we start doing fusion to sidestep the sun we only have so much ability to radiate waste heat. Energy use on Earth will have to plateau within the next few centuries.
“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Ehrlich said in an often-quoted 1970 Mademoiselle interview. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
World population in 1970 was 3.7 billion, and is 8.0 billion now. Ehrlich predicted that the carrying capacity of the planet had been met, and yet the population has more than doubled without the mass starvation his model predicted.
Man, I hope you’re wrong about that, because Earth isn’t growing any bigger. We did live in rough balance with things for about a million years, so I have hope.
Earth isn’t growing any bigger, but we have surpassed “limits” described by scientists without the collapse they predicted.
The actual capacity of Earth isn’t a fixed value.
Which limits are you thinking of? We’re past the carrying capacity on certain fronts, but that was never a “will collapse” thing as much as a “we’re going into debt” thing, and I think they were first calculated after we had passed them.
There’s some ways in which we can stretch the Earth, but there’s some that are set in stone. Energy budget comes to mind; we only get so much sunlight, and even if we start doing fusion to sidestep the sun we only have so much ability to radiate waste heat. Energy use on Earth will have to plateau within the next few centuries.
Here’s one:
quoted from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-didnt-first-earth-days-predictions-come-true-its-complicated-180958820/
World population in 1970 was 3.7 billion, and is 8.0 billion now. Ehrlich predicted that the carrying capacity of the planet had been met, and yet the population has more than doubled without the mass starvation his model predicted.
Yeah, they also thought birth rate would stay steady. It’s dropped like a rock instead.
It is true that agriculture got better in that time. It probably will again. There’s no hard limit being suggested here, though.