Can we have a Trillion People on Earth?
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- Опубликовано: 12 сен 2024
- Could Earth be home to a trillion people, or even more? We'll explore if we can do this with current technology, what future technologies would help, and what such a planet-wide city, an Ecumenopolis, might be like.
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Credits:
Can we have a Trillion People on Earth?
Episode 229a, March 15, 2020
Writers:
Isaac Arthur
Editors:
Berindeanu Cosmin
Evan Schultheis
Darius Said
Derek Hightower
Dillon Ollander
Jerry Guern
Keith Blockus
Phonetic Failure
S. Kopperud
Timothy Burns
Produced & Narrated by:
Isaac Arthur
Graphics:
Bryan Versteeg spacehabs.com
Jeremy Jozwik www.artstation...
Katie Byrne
Kris Holland (Mafic Studios) www.maficstudios.com
Sergio Botero www.artstation...
Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound epidemicsound.c...
If we get to trillion people and we’re still stuck on this one rock without any O’Neil cylinders or Dyson Spheres, then we didn’t support this channel enough.
But hey, at least some of the channel was supported.
I’m Dutch. We’re #2 food exporter in the world with just 17m people. A big percentage of our country is full of greenhouses. Yes, I think we can sustain a trillion people easily.
But the Netherlands has a lot of fertile soil compared to many countries.
@@understance9516 Yes that is true. But not enough to become #2. Technology and efficient farming makes that possible.
watch what happens in 100 years when the sea level covers your country in water.
@@onewhostudies6856 Many parts of the country are already multiples meters under sea level.
Sea level rise is being taken into account when upgrading our defenses.
I’m pretty sure we’ll be fine, really.
Imagine if we could get most of Sub Saharan Africa to procude that much Food.
Is interesting how for so many years we believed we had to move from our solar system for population to continue growing and now with Isaac Arthur, we can see that only in our system we can fit more people than in many galactic scifi populations :v
God damn, do we really need 1 trilliin homo sapiens? Lets aim for 200 billion and call it good, then continue growing our population in outer space.
Thanos from the Avengers movie should have watched Isaac Arthur
@@stevedavenport1202 well, we need a large enough population to support a high enough degree of specialisation for us to reach K3, and it would be preferable to minimise the space that such a population takes up in order to facilitate faster communication between specialists, thus 1 trillion on earth is a highly desirable aim for the continued survival of life, and with such a population it is quite easy to seed many other planets and habitats, which reduces the likelihood of a common catastrophe wiping us out.
Imperium of man: hold my hive worlds.
@@guy_autordie Nah, thats nothing compared to a Dyson s...
(Got sniped in the face by some near inquisitor)
Other people: 7 billion people is too much. We are all going to die.
Isaac Arthur: trillion people is super easy, barely an inconvenience
Those "Other people" don't understand what "Overpopulation" means, it doesn't mean too many people therefore its a bit of a misnomer... it means there's a concentration of people that the infrastructure in that specific area can't sustain. The planet is not overpopulated, but there are a lot of places with a high concentration of people and other places where there aren't any but could be... besides when theres more people than can be sustained... the problem corrects itself though in a quite horrible way... the extra people just don't live.
ISAAC ARTHUR: Basically, we can make our own Coruscant.
DISNEY: Imagine all the royalties. *drooling*
More like. "Disney has flagged this video for copyright infri.... can't complete sentance. Don't wanna jinx it.
Keep dreaming
we will end up like Mustafar tho
We had Coca-Cola death squads before just wait for Disney death squads
Disney death troopers will be knocking at our front doors
me: think I gonna sleep
Isaac Arthur: What if trillion people earth
me: nevermind
Me: I wonder what I should watch.
Isaac Arthur: Me
Me: Good idea.
i like falling asleep to isaacs videos. interesting, but doesn't keep you awake thinking. like a story he's telling with a lot of detail
*I dont need leep, i need answers*
Isaac Arthur: Problem with food supply
Me: www.amusingplanet.com/2013/08/the-greenhouses-of-almeria.html
Isaac Arthur: ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
you mean oarf?
Since we all have to “shelter in place” thank you for doing this! I’m sooo bored at home
I'd say it's more like a stay-at-home civilization (community) right now, heh
Stay safe, stay well, try to stay happy.
I live in UK, suffer fibromyalgia which means I am in the "at risk" group.
Wouldn't know if I had coronavirus until in hospital as the symptoms I have would mask it.
@@seriousthree6071 Stay safe
This has nothing to do with the video but wtf accent is This???
Hi isaac! I gotta say, your series is definitely the reason i'm so obsessed with futurism and hard sci-fi. So, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for stoking my curiosity!
Thanks!
@@isaacarthurSFIA
The challenge also with high density development is aesthetics whether it will be beautiful both inside and outside from the most lowest to the highest levels in every aspect.
The challenge of creating a "Catherine Palace or Palace of Versailles or New Jerusalem" Class of beauty on such a massive scale that isn't polluted or hideous dystopian hellscapes.
As is often portrayed. And which pollutes our current world a problem that needs to be fixed:
ruclips.net/video/bHw4MMEnmpc/видео.html
I used to love Cosmos with Carl Sagan. Thank you for giving us a way to experience the joys of science and technology and the wonders of nature and the universe as Carl Sagan did! :)
He is the spiritual successor to Dr Carl Sagan.
You're probably being inundated with comments like this, but do you have any way of discussing future pandemics and pandemic defense? Feels timely
On his video about life extension tech he talks about the cure to cancer briefly but not about the recent breakthrough with the killer T cells, but also we're basically at the point where we can just make vaccines for anything like we're doing with covid, and will probably have it within a few years. Also you should look up DRACO, it's the virus equivalent of antibiotics and shows promise with flat out curing a lot of viruses and is severely underfunded.
@@Potato-pq5ez
We are ~15 months from COVID-19 vaccine.
Better to use inhibitors or blockers of ACE (angiotensin-II) to prevent lung inflammation
@@WadcaWymiaru I'm from the future, your prediction was right
@@Potato-pq5ez Yes, I have been rooting for DRACO since the early results with DARPA. Really sad it has not been developed. It is a brilliant strategy. I am not normally heavily conspiratorial, but the lack of interest by big pharma looks like they would much rather have treatments, they get paid over and over for, than cures.
I am also of the persuasion that most adverse health conditions are caused by pathogens or provoked by pathogens eliciting an immune system over-reaction.
It used to be that people with ulcers were blamed for those ulcers. They "did not handle stress well", they were "Type A" personalities... There were lots of camps for managing stress. But then it was proven to be caused in 90% of cases by bacteria, and most of the rest by Aspirin. This relation caused the loss of billions for pharmaceutical corporations. Same thing happened with bad backs, especially lower back pain. In most cases that turned out to be bacteria too. Bacteria living in the disks. It takes a long treatment with antibiotics to get in there and completely kill the buggers. There were all sorts of people blaming the people with bad backs for the condition. I think these cases are just the tip of the iceberg. I think the blame game has resulted in less research into the true causes of many conditions. I think type II Diabetes, Obesity, Schizophrenia, many cases of Teen suicide, Anorexia, Alzheimer's, many forms of Cancer, Arteriosclerosis and many other diseases, though I don't have specific candidates beyond the ones listed are caused by pathogens. And we are not likely to ever know unless we get broad acting antivirals that can clear out latent infections, and can use them speculatively. After bad backs were cured with antibiotics, suddenly there was a massive push to prevent and punish doctors from/for using antibiotics on anything they were not proven to work on, blaming that for super bugs. But the reality is that these highly resistant strains are caused by trying to keep people alive with compromised immune systems and failing. That and giving antibiotics to billions of chickens and other farm animals.
Humans: “It’s exponential growth. Oh yeah! Gonna be at a trillion in no time baby!”
SARS-COV-2: “Oh, you wanna see some exponential growth?”
"Wanna see what happens when you grow exponentially at a rate below one?"
Add race mixing to that. No genetic diversity, one virus can kill us all.
@@sakiel5402
Race mixing adds to genetic diversity and improve genetic resistance to biological disasters.
@@remliqa Making two races more similar is not adding to diversity, it's removing it.
@@sakiel5402
Two? There are literally hundreds(if not thousand or more more) races/ethnic on Earth which can lead to a multitude (though not that much, human are genetically more similar than other species regardless of race/ethnic) of genetic variant between these offspring of these people. mixing Having purebreed just isolate and further flaws genetics damage . People who advocate for genetic purity should vie for The Darwin Awards .
“Can we have a trillion people on earth?”
Coronavirus: Allow me to introduce myself
Camostat: you said something mr. Virus?
Dragos Xtc don’t remind me 😒😒🤦🤦
Ebola is far worse.
@@darkstorminc if ebola spread more quickly definitely
@@nowdefunctchannel6874 let us pray ebola never makes the jump to being airborne.
Imagine trying to instill 'social distance' with a population density *that* high.
I think a planet with a population density that high would be *very* conscious of pandemic risks.
Chinese wet markets would def be illegal. They're just a biological timebomb really
@@Nufuckingway U.S. live markets as well. 😒. We allow livestock to be held and sold inside stores... Clean house before pointing fingers.
@Jason Buford We should have eliminated diseases by now, but china exists.
@@allhumansarejusthuman.5776 what other than lobsters is actually sold live? I tried looking it up but couldn't even find anything but maybe it's not a new england thing.
A trillion people on Earth? Time to *move to an Earth-like planet*
People got so caught up with CAN they do it they forgot to ask SHOULD they?
Well I reposted it. Ever since *the damned Tribe* started policing YT I've seen their algorithm delete my comments
We'll never live on another planet. Ever. It's too complicated to travel through deep space, and the complications it causes the human body would be disastrous.
@Engineering Glassing them all would be an improvement.
Steven Cooper Well the answer to that is yes. Unless we ever reach a post-employment civilization, more people is better. Why? For the same reason that this has been true since the founding of civilization. If 1 person could only produce enough food and goods to support themselves, then more people would be worse as land and materials are a limited resource, but that has almost never been the case. More people means more specialization, which increases productivity so that each individual produces more than they could on their own, which improves everyone as a whole. For most of human history, this just meant that more people would have more time for protecting each other and maybe making slightly better tools. Once we got agriculture and were able to raise our population limit from a few people per square mile, to a few dozen, we were able to support cities. This introduces further specialization, with artisans or full-time crafters, becoming a thing, along with governments, which yes are a pain, but also means large-scale projects such as irrigation canals can exist which benefit the whole, but are too large for an unorganized group to accomplish in most cases, let alone maintain, as using a canal is beneficial, but spending your time maintaining a canal instead of growing food is not. With even a few hundred million people, we do see a rise in productivity, though it’s slow, and really only noticeable over centuries as populations rise (which indicates that food production was increasing as famines were fairly common and were likely a sign that populations were often near their limit), as well as new trade routes, increased specializations, better art, etc. Nowadays, every person is another potential Einstein, another potential Edison. Certainly if they all lived in slums, uneducated and in poverty, that wouldn’t be useful in the slightest. But current trends don’t suggest that. Even though land is limited, farming yields in the US have increased despite total farming land usage and total number of farmers going down. Even though there are a finite amount of resources, and our demand for them has increased many-fold, almost every resources has become cheaper as we are better able to extract them from the Earth/grow them. Poverty rates have decreased significantly worldwide despite urbanization (and thus people packed in potential slums) having increased. As long as people produces more than they can use as an individual, everyone benefits. And that’s before we get into new technologies being more likely the more people (and resources from more people) we have to throw at the problem, not to mention any moral considerations. If living is good, then it stands to reason that more people living is good (especially if you can maintain the same standard of living or better, which improved technology from the extra people should help achieve). While I would say that forcing people to have kids would be a human rights violation, I would say discouraging people from having kids because you’re worried about us supporting them, is probably not exactly moral as you are preventing individuals from existing when they otherwise could, especially if you think it should be a long-term trend to prevent a trillion people ever being on Earth.
A post-employment civilization is a bit different as in such a society humans don’t produce anything, and quite likely you have the technology to fully utilize all the resources obtainable within reach of however long you’re willing to wait for it to come back to you. In that case, more humans means less resources for each individual, but even a trillion people on Earth in such a civilization would have access to far more than we do. We use a fraction of a fraction of the energy hitting Earth, and fusion could easily surpass that if we started using ocean water for hydrogen (to support a trillion people we don’t need vast oceans technically, or even a biosphere at this technological level, though it’s likely most people would prefer to keep them, even if it limited how much resources we could use), so could easily have access to vastly more energy than we currently do. The Earth’s core easily would contain more than a thousand times all the materials we use on the surface (especially as many rare materials are heavy and thus are likely in the core) and a Post-Employment civilization makes getting at even a fraction of that possible, without even having to worry about magnetosphere fluctuation or removal (which you also don’t have to worry about because you could create your own far more stable one using the vast energy available to you). Not to mention that we still only have dug up a fraction of the rare materials hidden in the crust. This is also before you get to asteroid mining, star lifting, material creation from fusion, etc. So while it’s technically true that more people would mean a decrease in material wealth available to everyone, at that point, people are likely to have access to so much material wealth, that they could easily tighten their belts, still live far better than anyone alive today or the next century, and easily support a trillion people or more. Besides, I’m curious as to what communities develop when you have trillions or quadrillions or even quintillions of people all within real-time communication of each other.
Wife (in sexy new lingerie): “Babyyyyyy look at me...I’m gonna give you some of the”.....
Notification Isaac Arthur new video: (Shuts door) “See ya tomorrow babe”
DCED LMAO
Isaac Arthur: Can we have a trillion people on earth ?
COVID-19: I'm gonna do whats called a pro gamer move.
Covid (proceeds killing a bunch of old people, mostly smokers)
There's definitely ways we could accommodate a trillion people on Earth or another planet. One solution would be for most people to live in archologies at least several kilometers tall. These would include vertical farms
Would be neat having our own homeland, instead of the blight going on in NA, Europe, and South Africa.
Watch isaacs video on ecumenopolises
The other challenge is if said environmental is beautiful/aesthetically pleasing.
Alongside being. clean and healthy
@Steve I guess it would depend on what type of high rise apartments they are. There's two main kinds of high-rise apartment buildings.
There's the public housing projects. These are the ones that quickly turn into ghettos. It's common to see drug deals in the corridors, rampant vandalism, elevators that are hardly working, etc. A crime ridden ghetto can come in the form of any residential neighborhood, high-rise apartment building, low-rise apartment complex, townhouse development, detached house subdivision, etc.
The second type is the luxury variety. These buildings have low crime rates and usually have recreation facilities inside the building, on the roof or on the grounds. The luxury high-rise condos are usually located adjacent to the downtown area of a city or on the beach. These apartments essentially are mansions in the sky.
That is the whole point of this video. He is delving into the details as to how to make it possible, and has keyed on automation to provide the necessary labour to establish and sustain such a population, advanced in biotechnology to enable much more efficient and obviously greater good production, and also the types of energy and power harnessing technologies that are the underpinning of making it possible. For the energy aspect he suggested nuclear fusion and delved especially with regards to space based solar power through microwave transmissiting solar power satellites to receptors on Earth.
Energy is most fundamentally necessary. Controlled nuclear fusion in the near future is plausible and the technological capability does presently existing to produce microwave transmissiting solar power satellites, launching them into Earth orbit, and their land based receptor stations.
Nuclear fusion fuel, which is hydrogen, is 12 million times more efficient per unit mass than natural gas. Hydrogen is found abundantly and practically limitlessly on Earth in water, from which it can be extracted via photosynthesis.
Hive Cities.
For the Emperor!
Hideous and ugly monstrosites not worth living in.
If we have make a hive city in Spain
And all give cities are watched by the inquisition
We won't expect the Spanish inquisition
THE EMEPEROR PROTECTS
@@reeticasawhney6 You have been reported to the Ministry of Silly Walks for a brain wipe.
The reality is that Hive Cities need to actually have A LOT LOT more population than they actually possess in the lore for them to be the dystopian hell holes that they are depicted to be.
You’ve come so far!!! Your channel is the best out there! Iv been a fan since you were under 50k subs. Keep up the great work dude :)
You can fit the entire population of Earth (7.8 billion) on land mass the size of Texas (268,597 mi²) if it had the density of NYC. To get towards a number approaching one trillion, you need to expand the land area roughly 13 times larger than Texas to accommodate those people, which is less than the total land area of the continental United States (3.7 million mi²). In sum, there's more than enough surface area on the Earth to house one-trillion people. The trick is in maintaining a sustainable food/energy supply that doesn't require using vast tracks of arable land for agriculture. Indoor vertical farms coupled with hydroponic systems that are powered by solar thermal + battery storage would ideal, but power satellites might be a more attractive option in terms of efficiency.
If it maintained a density of nyc and it was 13x the size of Texas than that would be 13x our current population not 1 trillion.
@@skygge1006I think he meant 130 times, but then the USA - Texas comparisons does not make sense.
Taxas at density of New York would accommodate today’s worlds population, but us could accommodate only bit over 100 000 000 000 humans.
I'd like to point out for anyone unaware that we currently produce enough food to feed everyone on the planet-we just don't distribute it efficiently, leading to tragic levels of waste. Whether you pin this on some aspect of our distribution infrastructure or the economic systems deciding what gets shipped where, it's a problem that we'd probably need to solve before we got a trillion people...but one we could in principle solve tomorrow (or at least next year), with great benefit to the world.
Hey Isaac fun question: Would you rather meet an extra terrestrial civilization now or humanity 300 years in the future?
Me personally 300 year future. I could be a historian and tell many stories.
both will be extraterrestrial
😮 trillion people we not here thank goodness I’m not here same face and eyes me in heaven stay forever
If you feed hydrogen to yeast you can create protein-rich food, the area of solar panels needed is a tenth the area needed for photosynthesis to produce the same amount of calories. You can also feed yeast on natural gas. All the water in a yeast farm can be recycled so you can build such solar-powered yeast farms in the desert or in ships in the sea.
Mmmmm....printed bacon...in the shape of - wait a minute!!! ;-)
The real question is: do we need a trillion people on earth?
*”Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”*
YES! This 100% ^^
"But i'll do it anyway"-Me
@@kingbyrd.1512
Then you're part of the problem...
But that's not an argument for why shouldn't we.
Which doesn't mean we won't.
Just had a disagreement with my family last week about this exact question. They're staunch Malthusians, even if they don't have a word for it.
Funny that you reply now, because I'd forgotten about that conversation and just had a similar conversation with the same family members yesterday.
Isaac Arthur: Can we have a trillion people on earth?
Me, an introvert: NO
but.... there'd still be plenty of space...
Without even watching the video, yet.
I know Isaac's gonna say "yeah"
This video is just gonna be about what that'll be like.
8:51 "People like kids"
I take issue with that statement.
Maybe, yes, but what for?
What will all those people do with their lives?
Last time I was this early there were only 1,000 people on earth
1,066 people, according to VSauce (Earth, Texas)
@@avishalom2000lm
Yeah 😅
The smallest settlement organisation of people known so far is actually over a thousand people
Odane McDonald by what definition? Bancroft Idaho has 381 people, and it’s hardly alone in small settlements in Idaho, nor is it the smallest.
Brother man is a hunter/gatherer
Imagine how much *off brand anime* would be made every year
This is the last place i would expect to see such culture
Any civilisation with 1 trillion people would be so adaanced we can't even imagine. For starters I'd imagine they'd be able to terraform all of the desert and tundra on Earth into fairly habitable land.
Once you get to that level of tech, you don't need farms as you have hydroponics and cultured meat and a dozen other future methods. So you're land is only really needed for houses, nature preserves and whatever forests or fields you want.
And so there are 500 million km2 of land, assuming that can be terraformed into usable land with a half decent climate. You'd need a density of 2,000 people per km2 to reach 1 trillion. In our world Bangladesh manages 1,200 people per km2. Without any farms needed, 2,000 seems perfectly manageable.
Also artifical islands can be used to exploit the oceans fully. So in terms of land, 1 trillion seems reasonable to me. Bloody hell though, that would mean London with a population of 1 billion people.
You could also have flying cars, so that the roads we have now are replaced by forests. I'd love a world that abounds with reforestation.
@@Rishi123456789 I think underground roads would be a huge improvement. Filling in all roads with fields , meadows and trees would make cities about twice as green.
@@l0ndon429: "I think underground roads would be a huge improvement."
I think no roads at all would be a huge improvement. We don't need them. Period.
@@Rishi123456789 and how are we going to move goods as vans and trucks do now without roads?
@@l0ndon429 Simple. Cars will be replaced by flying cars. If we can go to the Moon and return safely to Earth, we can have flying cars.
Jacque Fresco (March 13, 1916 - May 18, 2017) was an American futurist and self-described social engineer. You are the new Jacque!
Jacque Fresco was a con man and a fraud
"The future of garbage" sounds interesting.]
I've heard about one method of dealing with it that's under development: Gasification. Basically, the garbage gets tossed into a blast furnace, like you'd use for processing iron ore, but instead of just putting in hot air, they put in steam and oxygen, turning 90% of the garbage into a mix of hydrogen and carbon monoxide that can be used to make various chemicals. The remaining 10% (which would end up as ash if you just incinerated it) ends up as a sort of artificial stone that can be used in construction.
yes, that was the last nudge for me to subscribe to curiosity stream
Plasma gasification and 100% recycling
@@jonathanhensley6141 Use the blast furnace approach for the bulk of it, then plasma on the rest?
@ Sir Isaac Arthur; of course we can!
*If* we turn the entire earth into a variant of gigastructural engineering; such as the -Coruscant- Ecumenopolis/Metropolis planet; or a type of Eco-Arcology
*Emperor of Mankind has entered the chat*
"A trillion? Rookie numbers."
*Hive tower is typing...*
@@littlegravitas9898 The Caste System patch 2.0 has been Re-Uploaded
@@thedoruk6324
*system has detected malware*
*local-host-sub-earth/admin:reboot-factory*
*asteroids have entered the chat*
@@littlegravitas9898 That's why -Imperium- Governmental Supported Hackman Innitatives constantly reboot & format the System(!)
@@thedoruk6324
*the Inquisition would like to know your location*
I know I'm a year late for the Douglas Adams stuff, but it would be really dope if at some point you did a vid about the Babel fish. Not specifically the fish itself, but hypothetical objects, technologies, etc that would allow for unhindered communication between wildly different languages.
30% decrease in butterfly population over the last 25 years in Ohio. (Published paper 2019.) Not sure what would be in a “nature preserve” with a trillion people.
Giant towers housing and growing food for thousands of people would support a trillion people and only use 1% of earth's land area. The other 99% of earth's land area could be given back to nature and allowed to run wild. Your lack of imagination isn't a valid impossibility argument. :-)
the risk of pandemic in the types of habitats discussed would be huge, our medical tech needs to upgrade before we start trying to make some of this.
Gonna be self-isolating for a bit, your channel's going to get me through it. Thank you.
How is it possible to produce this much content?
Other youtubers says it takes them weeks to write the script for a video. Isaac manages to publish two videos some weeks.
Isaac Arthur : "Can we have a Trillion People on Earth?"
Coronavirus : "No"
@skem Actually, without such viruses we would never developed such a immune system.
What a ridiculous conclusion...
I admire smart people and try to be one. Nowhere your level but I’m catching up. We stand on the shoulders of histories brightest and best
Old tokyo had a population density of 53000 people per square km in the 1800s, crazily enough this was done with 3-5 story wooden buildings
How much is it nowadays?
@@steezburger609
7000ish people per sq km
11:00 There is also a lot of food lost to storms. If it rains too much it can delay planting and hail takes out whole fields sometimes.
There's a lot of untapped potential for expansion beneath our very feet. That, and the possibility of partially draining the oceans (given the ability of keeping the biosphere intact through terraforming) in order to have larger landmass.
Aurex we don’t even need to do that. Tho we would need to drain it for water
> _There's a lot of untapped potential for expansion beneath our very feet_
Do you want to breed Morlocks? Because that's how you breed Morlocks!
Why not! :D Sounds like it could make for a great novel. Oh wait.
Pls more subjects about near future and transhumanism
More likely we should examine how we can maintain a modern civilization if some catastrophe reduces it drastically. Where would be the best place to pull everyone together?
I'm skeptical of the Earth's capability to sustain trillions of humans without going through Environmental degradation.
Mortkyth 23
Move all agriculture underground. Which is what we should be doing right now.
Insect control is more precise and thus the use of genetically modified plants is not needed.
At the scale he's talking about you would have geo-engineered most of the planet and there'd be little if any 'natural' environment left, so environmental degradation starts to become somewhat meaningless;
The entire environment at that kind of density would be artificial, unless you deliberately set aside areas for nature...
If you can manage that kind of population, I doubt there's much you have to fear from environmental degradation as an existential threat...
But it does remain a question of whether it's ethically acceptable to just plain exploit every part of the planet you can get your hands on...
Most likely there would be no 'environment' to speak of and everything would be artificial
he talk about 2 type, one tith mega arch that contain 1 million each, only need a million million, in 3 to 4 hundred years could be done :p but you have to allow high construction, not 4 story maximum buildings ;) but on other tory its no wild land and only 2 story buildings all over.
That is sort of the idea if you ask me.
Writers love the idea of world cities but forget that generally speaking cities are fucking terrible for the nearby environment.
It sometimes can cause migration from smaller areas, which is great for the environment but cities are definitely a major cause of environmental degradation.
Even arcologies and fission, which we basically have, you are still creating waste. With fusion, you are doing better in the waste front but still not enough to power hundreds of millions of homes AND keep trees safe.
I have world cities in my fiction and I personally like to compare them to the Izzet League.
It is a real convenient form of life if clockworked correctly, but the environment is at best stored in other arcologies through genetic engineering or at worse just nonexistent.
I suspect we'd run into Mouse Utopia-style behavioral sinks long before we got to a trillion people. No thanks. I'd rather we mass-produce Bishop Rings.
There was a problem with the mouse utopia experiments. Namely that the mice had no entertainment or other mental stimulation while they were there. Other experiments that corrected for that found much more promising results.
@@werewolf4358 I heard about that experiment, they basically died of boredom and went crazy
I have a garden 40 ft wide 75 ft long a produces all the food I need for me and my family my neighbor's family my sister's family my friends family and a few other families besides so it's easy to make a garden that can produce enough food for everybody for a year despise small garden and yet I could still sell food on the side get to other people for them to live.
Isaac, stop, you're spoiling us with all this fantastic content :)
Thank you so much, Isaac, for your unfailing optimism and highly-informed projections. I feel like being proud to be a human could be possible!
Yes, you could have a trillion people on earth...
...but would you want to? Better spread out to other planets and solar systems, even other galaxies eventually.
It's not a dichotomy. Consider the actual numbers of people who would emigrate - it'd be a minuscule fraction of people on Earth, therefore irrelevant to the growth of the population on Earth.
If 1% of people emigrated every year, at a population of 10 billion (figuring mass emigration wouldn't be possible in this century, as there wouldn't be colonies of habitats to house them), that's a hundred million people taken off the planet to space habitats, the Moon, Mars, etc. I don't see millions of people, let alone tens of millions emigrating in the next century, let alone per year. Likewise, if we push this forward 350 years, with O'Neill cylinders and colonies on the Moon, Mars, and perhaps among asteroids or the atmosphere of Venus, I still don't picture these growing via people from Earth, but rather the native population growth. The same goes for a thousand or 2500 years down the line. Worlds with larger native populations would have less need for emigration to grow.
That tendency to native population growth specially true if these worlds gain independence and have nationalistic leanings: even if a hollowed-out asteroid can double in volume and population from 2,000 'Belters' after having had a century to develop their own distinct identity, they may resist having 2,000 'Earthers' move in and demand things change to make them more comfortable to people who grew up on Earth.
Even if 1% emigrates a year, that won't prevent a civilization otherwise bound for 1 trillion people from hitting that number. If 1% of people emigrate, and it has a noticeable effect, it may very well be one of people having a sense they have options. If you end up with half a trillion people out in space and half a trillion on Earth, thanks to being able to emigrate, that gives people on Earth a sense of freedom that would encourage population growth. You may hit 1 trillion people on Earth faster thanks to humanity having spread out because they don't feel as though they're being squeezed into one world.
@@nkordich true, but on such a scale a really nasty plague could do immense damage to the population of earth.
Mind having people off world would mean that we do not have "all our eggs in one basket." Even if the 1 trillion died there would probably still be survivors.
@@seriousthree6071 Again, it's not a dichotomy - there's no either-or here. There's no "better spread out" instead of a trillion people on Earth. If population growth is moving that direction, my point is, even exporting humans to the stars by the millions won't stop it.
Regarding having all our eggs in one basket, there are only a few scenarios where isolating humans on Earth would not be far cheaper and more efficient. For the price of one Mars colony, you can create a dozen domed cities in remote places (islands, mountains - even underwater or underground) which would remain sealed in the event of plague or gamma ray burst (which may actually be more survivable on Earth, thanks to our atmosphere - the real victim of GRB is the ozone layer, which could lead to mass starvation if we do not grow enough food under a UV protective dome by the time one occurs). Asteroid impacts and supervolcanic events might take out one or two such colonies, but probably not a dozen. It would require a bit more effort, but even a snowball Earth / 'Snowpiercer' or runaway global warming scenario could be endured through such survival arcologies for a lower price than attempting to support a single Mars colony.
It could even protect against some gray goo and rogue AI scenarios - while we often imagine these as danger to anyone on the globe, it depends on the specifics of their nature. Gray goo is not magically powerful - it'd be about as efficient as biology, or perhaps a bit more, and potentially more adaptable, but it's not going to have the ability to eat everything, even if it was lethal on contact to humans. A sealed habitat, particularly one that is designed to be self-sustaining underwater or underground, may survive at a fraction of the cost, which will allow more opportunities for survival against other threats.
An AI threat would be tricky, as it would depend on motive that makes it a threat, which we couldn't predict (if we could, it wouldn't be much of a threat). A self-enclosed survival arcology would be isolated by design, and that would include isolation of its information network and automated system to a degree. It would not pose an immediate threat to an AI extinguishing humanity elsewhere - even long-term, its interest is in its isolation and survival, not threatening an AI. In contrast, a Lunar colony with a mass driver aimed at it would be a threat that AI would have to neutralize, and a self-sustaining Mars colony could pose a threat in time.
The biggest threats are human. An ideologically-based threat might not let such colonies exist in isolation, as they would likely contradict an ideology that you'd hope a remote colony would resist. A plague or starvation scenario might see such Earth-bound colonies compromised by military coups, but in general, such cities are going to be organized by the people with the military resources to keep them isolated. Even then, a remote colony under an ice shelf, minding its own business and having its own defense, may be more trouble than it's worth. It wouldn't offer much in the way of scientific return, but if survival's the point, that's the priority, and a multiplicity of survival arcologies offer more opportunities to survive against most threats than a single lunar or martian colony, when it comes to first establishing a safeguard to the species'/civilization's survival.
However, by no means does that exclude space exploration or colonization. If anything, learning how to make an enclosed colony work is a necessary precursor to it. Again, it's not an either-or scenario. By the time we're able to make self-contained environments that can provide their own energy, warmth, food, and do so for a viable population on the Moon or Mars, we're going to have the ability to do so on Earth - solving the majority of the survival benefits of a colony long before we can transplant this kind of self-sustaining system to Mars or the Moon or the atmosphere of Venus.
@@seriousthree6071 A postscript regarding 1 trillion people and a nasty plague: even if nearly 1 trillion died, by the time we get to a population of 1 trillion, we'd likely have far more genetic variation - if not actual speciation - making the chance of a nasty plague wiping out *everyone* unlikely. Genetic engineering and cyborgization would likely make people more resistant still. If space colonization is cheap and easy - again, it's not an either-or scenario - then self-sustaining systems and greater automation are likely far more advanced, and we're likely to have a greater ability to have arcologies, cities and continents lock down.
With several billion people, we already have a perpetual plague - a set of seasonal flu viruses that were fight every year. At a *thousand* billion people, we would likely have a great deal of experience dealing with nasty plagues. I would expect such a civilization would have a great deal of its infrastructure to deal with such a circumstance as we're now seeing with COVID-19, both in organization and technology. Working from home may be the norm, while we're only now seeing it as an emergency and temporary thing in most places. VR is in its infancy as a way to virtually visit people and places, while the 2009 Bruce Willis movie, Surrogates, is a future in which people interact through an android proxy in most of their daily dealings by default. While the light-lag might be a limit on how far you can remotely operate such a proxy, if plagues are a perpetual threat associated with high populations, you may travel in isolation (a VR pod shipped to a resort or foreign city) to spend a couple of weeks in quarantine, especially if you're more comfortable experiencing life through such a proxy.
Although I don't think Isaac got into it as much as he could have, I would think the political structure of Earth with a thousand billion people would likely be very different form our own. Imagine a thousand super-states with a billion people each, each composed of dozens or hundreds of countries in confederation on a political spectrum. We're not hitting a trillion people in a century, and the political landscape when we reach that point is going to be very different - perhaps less tied to geography, but perhaps with just as many divisions, rather than the simplified united Earth we often see in science fiction.
Even if there's one high-level government that regulates the sub-states, there may be isolationist elements within them that are hostile to outsiders due to a political or religious mindset that prefers to be left alone. While such an arrangement might not permit a truly rogue state to exist, it may allow for enclaves of people where travel and exposure to outsiders is at best an oddity, if not actively discouraged. Such hermitages would be likely to shut their doors early when they hear of a nasty plague, even if it turns out to be nothing. While such isolationists might not stand a chance against an over-government if they were to try to act as a rogue state, isolation in the face of a nasty plague would be the order if the day, and they'd be ahead of the game. Such antisocial enclaves may not be our first choice for heirs to the Earth, but their isolationist policies may ensure survival against all but the nastiest plagues.
The question is why? If we ever reach the technology to even reach a trillion people on Earth, we could make stuff that can support life elsewhere besides planets. Besides, planets are in grand picture of the universe are one of the worst place to live, like living near an active volcano.
Would there be enough toilet paper?
Not if your country has a Chinese diaspora living in it.
Bidet
Nanomachines.
3 sea shells 🤩
This video brings up an interesting point that people don’t have as many kids anymore because there’s way more to worry about, and more work to do, and what we do get isn’t enough to promote or make you feel confident to have children
No, the precise opposite is the case. People have less children when their situation improves.
Hey Isaac still loving your channel!
Wow. This is the first time I have ever seen your channel, and hopefully I will see many more of these videos in the coming years.
Never clicked faster
Isaac: We can have a trillion people on Earth
World Elite: Am I a Joke to you?
Okay I'm picturing my own optimum Earth with a trillion inhabitants.
From orbit, it looks like Earth at the end of the Pleistocene: almost all green, mostly forest, five million happy and healthy hunter gatherers walk across its surface, which teems with life.
Around the equator, beanstalks rise to geosynchronous orbit. Here and there at higher latitudes are structures which are in essence "hatches" providing access to what lies beneath.
Beneath the surface, the rest of Earth's trillion people live in a sprawling complex of homes, factories, parks, farms, John Varley-style disneylands, &c., in multiple levels which burrow down as many meters or kilometers as they need to, leaving the surface undisturbed.
I noticed some images of birds flying around within an O'Neill cylinder. I wonder how well a bird would be able to adapt to such an environment.
Imagine the global lotto with a few Trillion People.. WOW!!
Isaac Arthur turned me on to the idea of transhumanism.
I currently identify as a robot trapped in a meat popsicle :-(
Now... how to tell my parents...
Seriously, every day I curse my corpse and dream of being a cyborg or full transhuman.
We should keep Earth underpopulated. The cared craddle and garden of humanity, not an urban covered orb.
Gotta start somewhere
I mean... Arcologies allow for a mostly natural world while still having at *least* a trillion people.
A post scarcity society could contain 1,000,000,000,000 on Earth, but it would require replication technology and fusion power. At present technology level we max at roughly 54 billion assuming a population density of New Jersey where 50% of the state is forest and the other 50% is a mix of unusable, arable farming, rural and urban habitation. This assumes humans only live on on the existing habitable land that requires no engineering such as deserts or tundra - basically the lowlands of the temperate and tropical zones only.
Thank for the interesting video! I’m gonna share it with certain environmentalists.
Also congrats on getting married!
@Jason Buford Only the extremists are. People advocating for a sustainable near-future are relatively rational.
im sure people are already suggesting this but a video on disease spread in space would be interesting and timely
what about artificial wombs that would be the best way to get to a trillion , could you do a video about aritfiul wombs
There was a TV show that had them iirc. Also used by the Clans in the BattleTech universe.
A trillion people on Earth shouldn't be too hard. You just need a lot of shovels, a lot of nuclear and geothermal power, and a lot of hydroponics. Time to become mole-men!
SIFA steaks? Great slip in.. Hope your wedding is fantastic, might hold off on honeymoon a while though😱
Be well...
Truly informative video. Thank you Isaac.
Awesome video idea
Congratulations on getting married btw
The positive point of view is refreshing.
I have no doubt that we could have a trillion people here on Earth, but I sure as hell wouldn't want to live there.
why?
Boris Babanov despite Isaac's optimism, elite interests in profiteering and generally low political IQ will ensure that a trillion person earth will be created in the worst way possible, and will be a hell where nature has been all but purged, replaced by an endless favela filled with debt slaves.
basically today, but drastically increased in scale
Even with just 8 billion humans, levels of resource depletion and pollution are off the charts. 1 trillion people would be untenable.
Humanity: * Wants to reach a trilion people *
Coronavirus: *"I'm gonna end this man's whole career"*
lmao
Coronavirus fatality rate is all of about 2.6% if that.
I... Think not. XD
Whatever deaths it causes at it's current rate of infection and fatalities, is about the kind of population drop you can compensate for in a year or two...
What happens when a massive solar flare takes out all our tech, do we eat each other back down to a billion people?
I believe before we reach those population numbers we need to invest in protecting our infrastructure against such threats. Also, if human to cyborg conversion were possible, a massive solar flare would completely wipe out a robotic civilization without proper electromagnetic shielding.
I dare say that 7.5 billion people on Earth is already too many let alone a trillion ;)
No. I want 100 billion people. If we stop reproducing we won't bother settling in space or other stars.
Ridiculous !! :)
stabilizing the population does not equate to stopping reproduction nor does it mean not expanding into the universe but Earth has it's limitations and it is creaking under the strain of 7.5 billion people already.
@@freezatron it is not under strain. There is your problem. I'm baffled that you AA and say such ridiculous things.
Not under strain ? . . . What planet are you living on ???
There's a reason you're baffled, and it has something to do with your being unaware of your own condition ;) :D :D :D
freezatron the strain is more from our way of life and technological limitations. To be frank, if we model humans like we model animals, the Earth can support merely a few million people worldwide. That’s how many it supported for millions of years. Then we got agriculture and suddenly several hundred million were easily supported despite it never fully reaching the globe before industrialization began to take hold. Certainly our current lifestyle is not sustainable at our technological level. Even ignoring environmental disasters, at some point fossil fuels would run out and without them we’d struggle to support this many people. Environmental disasters can and are likely going to directly decrease the habitability of Earth for the worst unless we do something about it. Several hundred million people though, that seemed relatively sustainable. But if I had a button to put us to that “sustainable level” I would not press it. Because a few hundred million people would be unable to support modern civilization. It requires materials produced all over the world, meaning you need people all over the world, who need local goods and services in order to not waste material shipping across the world what could easily be produced locally. You need vast manufacturing centers to produce the tools needed to support our current industrialization efforts, tertiary industries, service industries, etc. Combine the problem of economies of scale, and you’d quickly find that the costs of goods has gone up, more people have to work more to get the same amount, poverty rates likely increased, and without a lifestyle change, or new technologies (which take longer to achieve as you have less people who can solve the problems needed for technologies to happen) you’ve only extended the time before you have problems, not fixed them. If we made some lifestyle changes, supporting a trillion people would be relatively easy with current technology, though quality of life could easily go down if all technological progress stopped (and I can’t think of any reason for why that would realistically ever happen). 1. Switch over to renewables. Fossil fuel consumption will rise the more people you have, so where we likely have several centuries left of supplies, if you have a trillion people at US standards of living, you’re going to go through that in decades or less. We do have the technology currently, it’s just expensive which is why the world hasn’t completely switched over, though it’s getting cheaper and more places are looking at these options. Still this is assuming no technological progress with current technology. 2. Recycle everything. Consumables should not be made from plastic, and only the bare necessities should be made from plastic as we can’t easily recycle it and the quality degrades when we do. Again economical reasons are the primary reason we don’t currently do this, but I’m not saying we can support humanity at a trillion people with current technology in ease, just that it’s possible if we made sacrifices (and not destroy of the biosphere). 3. Support further urbanization. The more people you have, the more people you will have to transport goods for, and with our current technology it’s most economical to keep this transport as 2D as possible as tunnels and bridges are expensive, though you will need them. If you let suburbans continue to grow, then you will see a lot of lost land better suited for agriculture. But if people can buy goods, work, and live all within walking distance, you can cram a lot of people into fairly small cities, and not necessarily uncomfortably. You will need to work to prevent the creation of slums, though I’d expect them to be on the outskirts of the city as people try to cut down on traffic times. Likewise encourage skyscraper growth, many cities only have a dozen stories or so on average or less, we can easily do better with current technology, and increased land prices from increased demand should actually make it economical 4. Now that you’re able to support our current population indefinitely (and probably a few billion more if you industrialize the remaining third world countries) cut out meat from our diets, most farmland goes towards raising animals, while most of our calories do not. Do the math and you can see that we can easily support a hundred billion people just by cutting out meat. Since you’ve already gotten rid of the two most unsustainable behaviors, fossil fuel reliance, and plastic-dependent consumable consumerism, and suburban creep, a hundred billion should be likewise supported sustainably, and again without more environmental damage. 5. Use at a bare minimum greenhouses, and if you can, vertical farming and other high-yield forms of alternate farming. While food prices will be higher, increased productivity of a trillion people (people have a multiplier effect on each other’s productivity so productivity grows polynomially not linearly with population) could potentially offset that. Either way, that’s a trillion people, with current technology, living far more sustainably than we do, if not necessarily as rich or carefree. Add in almost any fully-matured near-term technologies and you can change the last point. Synthetic meat lets us avoid all being vegetarians. Cheaper solar panels and other renewables make switching over a good idea even without having to worry about Global Warming. Mass-produced graphene and carbon nanotubes transforms almost all areas of life as buildings get taller and cheaper, phones require less rare metals, super-capacitors change the effectivity of renewables, etc. Better automation does to manufacturing and construction what the Farming Revolution did to farming, in other words, make it so only a few people need to work in the production of goods with most doing other things like software engineering. It also lets greenhouses and vertical farming become much more cost-effective (and already the US produces so much food that we throw away a third of it, yet barely deal with hunger let alone actual starvation despite our immense inequality, not to mention our obesity rates which is a clear indicator that we can easily support more people).
@Isaac Arthur
The other challenge with this is if said arcology is beautiful/aesthetically pleasing both inside and outside. On the upper levels and the lowest levels.
Alongside being clean and healthy.
There are many dystopian scenarios of overpopulated hideous hellscapes of pollution and ugliness.
I hope not.
We'll probably have fusion power brewery-grown clean meat, robots doing most jobs, and maybe even life extension in a few decades, much less a few centuries. :-)
No thanks, I’d like to keep some nature thanks
It would be super easy to keep the nature in cylinders or extra layers of a birch planet Earth and be able to make more space for it
Obviously new to the channel. I'd recommend you watch his video on Arcologies, it's very interesting.
YOU ARE AWESOME!! TY FOR YOUR VIDS
A true dystopian scenario in my mind. Fortunately with the way of popoulation growth is affected by technology, this won't happen but the reverse.
The problem with space structures is that other nations will think of them as weapons. It takes one bad intentioned person to create laws that prohibit technologies. Also, it is my opinion that the more people are educated the less children they will have. A time will come when governments will only allow one children per couple and only if conditions are met. Birth control and planning will be more readily available in the future so it is my prediction that the population growth will stop at some point. Having kids is a luxury not a necessity. Its ok if you disagree, lets be civilized about it.
Thinking about a city covering the entire Earth makes me want to puke.
Just a comment about Curiosity Stream. I signed up for the 30 day trial, and I'm not seeing anything new. Looks like all their documentaries, especially in Physics and Space categories, are all old, previously seen on TV. I love your youtube channel because of all the new content and you remain relevant. \\//,
also I searched for Nebula on Curiosity stream and couldn't find it. I found your web page but asks for separate login and subscription. I thought it was included with Curiosity, no?
quality over quantity
Why not both?
Sacha Daenens 100%. Hate these zero sum game, either ors.
Love your videos! Keep them coming, best part of my self quarantine!
Maaaan you better watch yourself... There are WAY too many people hyper-invested in the idea that the world is in a population crisis.
Don't let 'em get to you and keep up the good content.
A short scale trillion (10^12), perhaps yes.
A long scale trillion (10^18), definitely not. At least, not in physical bodies.
TIL about the long scale
No. Thanks for asking
No, but actually yes.
XD
1400^2 square feet PER person if Earth had a TRILLION people on current existing land mass....... a little math & research can shed light on answers to complex problems. I love science!!!
You are so wrong about the main reason for the recent declining birth rates, it is due to the education of women.
No... It's all about money.
@@jimsonbonilla8233
Indirectly yes, because money leads to more educated women, and more knowledge of/access too birth control. Education isn't just a formal/school thing, it's one's access to knowledge.
@@xavierclavius208 no.
Women have less children because they feel they don't have enough money to take proper care of them. A child is currently seen as a burden because it limits a woman's opportunities to be a succesful person and secure her and her descendants physiological needs. You take care of that, and women will then start to bear at least a couple of children (that's the perfect number for an astonishing majority of women around the world).
Someone show this to thanos
Thanos:-7.5B people .wtf .its too much lets kill half of them.
Issac arthur:- those are rookie numbers.
Thanos:- bu bu bu but maah resources.😭
I love your content Isaac, but the global population is going to cap at 10 billion.
Why?
Another reason birth rates are declining is because of the cost of actually raising children and the lack of surplus to do so. I.E. Look at South Korea's working conditions? Or luck at the Russian birth rate drop after their economy collapsed. Or East Germany after its economy, while not collapsing, moved responsibility for childcare from the state much closer to exclusively the family (and moreso the mother!). East Germany didn't become rich when they reunified with the west, but its birth rate still became similar to the west, after being much higher before.
And this is perhaps the paradox of the "women's rights and growth are the primary driver of low fertility" argument. Countries where women's rights went to hell while the economy dropped also had their birth rates drop.
South Korea is also another example. Many think of South Korea as a reasonably functional liberal democracy, but before the 90s it was not even close, but a series of different dictatorships ruled intermittently by revolutionary provisional governments. (North Korea, incidentally, was utterly stable). Women had very few rights. The economy was terrible, albeit growing somewhat, especially later on. Yet births had already begun to drop quite low under a fascist state with a terrible economy and terrible women's rights and worker's rights. This, to me, shows that birth rates have just as much to do to with relative economic surplus at the individual level and free time and effort to devote to raising children as they do with economic growth or women's rights pushing birth rates into unsustainable territory.