Are we too many people, or too few?
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- Опубликовано: 28 май 2024
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Should we worry about overpopulation or, as Elon Musk has argued, should we worry more about underpopulation? How many people could live on our planet and how close are we to reaching the "Limits to Growth"? In this video we look at how much we know and what we can conclude from this.
The full interview with Elon Musk is here: • Tesla Technoking and S...
The paper I mention at 2 mins 50 seconds that looked at how good the Club of Rome predictions were is here:
www.sciencedirect.com/science...
The earth overshoot day website is here: www.overshootday.org
The paper about how much carbon dioxide emissions you save by not having children that I discuss at 5 minutes 30 seconds is this:
iopscience.iop.org/article/10...
The website for the Simons Abundance Index is here: www.humanprogress.org/the-sim...
Estimates for the carrying capacity of Earth that I mention at 10 minutes 30 seconds are from this report: na.unep.net/geas/getUNEPPageW...
The 2020 Lancet study that I discuss at 13 mins 10 seconds is this: www.thelancet.com/article/S01...
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📖 My new book "Existential Physics" is coming out in August ➜ existentialphysics.com/
Many thanks to Jordi Busqué for helping with this video jordibusque.com/
0:00 Intro
1:33 Doomsters
6:39 Boomsters
10:08 What does science say?
17:17 What do we learn from this?
18:32 Sponsor message 
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Ahh yes, as a Filipino, I knew our overpopulated country would be mentioned in a topic like this. Another reason why we are overpopulated here is because many in the slum areas, the poorest of the poor, have 7-10 children while being unemployed and uneducated. The church supresses the release of free birth control handed to the poor cause they consider it as a sin. Then the middle class to upper middle class have less children, sometimes only one to two children, because they are more educated and more aware of the cost of having too many children. So the poor keeps having children while the middle class produce less. The church opposes the government from logical solutions and now Filipinos just voted the previous Dictator's son back to presidency. For you Americans out there complaining about how much of a mess your government and country is, I'm telling you, you haven't had the slightest idea of how bad a country like mine can get.
This reminds me of Hinduism gaining control over the Indian government. No offence to the religious people, but religion and state should be separate for the betterment of the people.
Here in the USA we became a Catholic Nation in 2021, so we will implement many of the policies that you have in the Philippines.
Dang. I don't think any of our governments are particularly awesome. They are all ran by humans so it makes sense that we have similar problems. Hang in there dude
@@user-vj9hb3gy6d Absolutely, and I say that as a former Christian with Christian, Hindu, Muslim, etc. friends. Faith that improves people's lives is a different beast entirely to religion as control.
Sry to hear that... Greetings from Germany
" The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor."~ Voltaire
And you have nailed the reason that Musk thinks a higher population is a good thing.
@@willieverusethis The mere fact you had the ability to comment on a RUclips video suggests that, on the scale of the planet, you fall into the rich category. Maybe you should give up your assets and go join the poor for the betterment of humanity.
Voltaire lived in a preindustrial society.
Robots will do fine instead. Better pass laws against it.
In Voltaire's time 70-80% of the population worked on farms in agriculture to feed the rest. Today in developed nations it's less than 5% that works in agriculture to feed the other 95%.
With further automation, technology and AI, that number could go to near 0%, but not just in agriculture but in almost every aspect of industry and production. In an ideal world this would mean all of us become free to do other things like use our brains to create more progress.
And what is often also underestimated is our capacity to think up new ways to keep ourselves busy. 100 years ago people were convinced modern factories would result in job losses and mass unemployment. It didn't. People just moved to new modern jobs that didn't exist before. 50 years ago again people were afraid automation and robotics would put people out of a job. It didn't. We transitioned fully to a service oriented economy instead again creating jobs in new areas or even creating new jobs that never existed before. And now we're there again claiming AI will soon replace us all. That may be true but we'll find ways to keep ourselves working. Just one example: if you had told people 20y ago there would be millions and millions of people making money by 2023 by making videos and posting them on a global Videosharing platform on the internet, they'd have looked at you with disbelief. But here we are 20y later.
It could very well be that in 50y time, the vast majority of us will be working in jobs or fields we haven't even thought of yet, or will all be simply creating things for entertainment or doing research, while the robots and AI do all the work behind the scenes. Being a farmer might by then be a life style choice instead of a job, just like being a factory worker, a service employee, a teacher, etc.
It's always incredibly hard to predict the future and how technology will change society...
Another line from Phil Collins: "... been talking to cheeses, all my life..."
You can do the math: If you divide all the habitable surface area of Earth with the number of people already living today, you get an average of 2 football fields per person. That area has to accommodate not only the resources for that person but also the necessary infrastructure and the rest of the ecosystem on land.
In fact, if you place all living people in a regular grid on the usable land surface, you could send messages around the planet by semaphore from person to person easily.
It doesn't matter if the population still grows - we are too many already! And do not forget: Every technological progress as so far only good for a part of humanity and always been bad for the rest of the ecosphere in one way or another, not least for bio diversity. This is what everyone forgets: It's not about how many humans the planet can carry, it's about how many humans the ecosystem can survive with, and we can all see that even 7 billion humans have damaged the ecosystem already beyond repair.
If you have 100 billion humans on this planet, there will be no other species left.
Child free is best life. No worries of parenting. Societies need to focus on quality and not quantity of people.
And treat parents better versus exploiting them. In the meantime, people need to protest by getting permanent birth control and remaining child free for life.
I love Sabine's humour. Her deadpan delivery means that anyone who is not really listening may miss her quips.
Today I learned there is not an abundance of Simons.
@@DamienPalmer HEr delivery is anything but deadpan < she just oozes life ! Joie de Vivre ! Viva le difference ! she yust doesnt like to be called a Heroin
you love it because it makes you laugh, or you love thinking of people missing the jokes? laughter or schadenfreude, which is it?
@@Wedneswere that is not mutual exclusive.
From what planet system are you, again?:)
German humor, we are not allowed to laugh in public
Elon saying Japan will eventually cease to exist reminds me of a conversation I had about a time when I lost a lot of weight all at once. I told my colleague that I was losing a pound a day. He said, "How long do you think you could keep that up?" And I said, "well, I was 150 pounds when I started, so 150 days."
They told me I could become anything, so I became nothing
If water levels keep rising indefinitely, the Earth will become just a big ball of water, that will eventually swallow the Sun. You think we have climate problems now??
It’s an exaggeration to prove a point I don’t think he literally meant there will be two Japanese left and they will refuse to have kids
@@j3ffn4v4rr0 😂
@@lchpdmq With Musk you never know. He's not the sharpest tool in the shed :D
Even if there is a specific carrying capacity for our planet and limit to technological productivity, doesn't mean we have to or should reach it. I think a great progressive move for humanity would be to give back large swaths of our planet to nature instead of dominating every last square inch and resource. Biodiversity is important for the evolution of life and for the maintenance of our planet and its life-giving environment. Let's take a few steps back from controlling it all and playing gods.
and even if in theory the resources are currently available to support more people, will the ecosystems that sustain many of those resources be able to handle the current amount of humans we have, especially if we want near-first world standard of living for everyone.
@@jamesmills2087 And your vision is impossible. At the moment, it is mostly the rich and the wealthiest people who are polluting, destroying etc. the ecosystems. If everybody lives as wasteful, the limit will be reached even quicker. But it will not come to that anyway. Because we cannot become all rich together. That is an illusion, nothing but ideology. In fact, even in rich countries, the wealth gap between rich and poor is ever widening, and poorer people have to go to food banks.
How much of the world is populated? You can fit the entire population of the world in Arizona. How does giving land back to nature help the human race? The world is 50% greener now than before the Industrial Revolution.
Controlling the land is a responsibility. If we were actually doing it there would be far less wildfires thus saving many life giving forests.
Perhaps less rhetoric and more sensible adult debate would be better, but then again, fear is a far better motivator to dystopia.
You go first
Sabine just doesn't want to admit outright that the overpopulation problem is not a problem for majority white, European first world countries, but instead is exclusively a problem for the third world, Africa, India, and central America. She simply won't ever frame it that way, although that's exactly the truth of the situation. Truth is always sugarcoated to make the "medicine" go down.
Unfortunately many people are not concerned about progress, they were concerned about having power over other people.
14:31 "If you extrapolate this trend indefinitely, Japan will cease to exist" However as they are currently one of the biggest cheese importers in the world, this will mean more for the rest of us.
Ha!!! =:oD
eDAM that's cheesy!
🤣
😂😂😂
The carrying capacity argument is somewhat flawed as it ignores having a healthy, intact, and biodiverse ecosystem. Most of the carrying capacity arguments don't really factor environmental health into the picture, they look at the planet as being essentially a pure food producing system for us, rather than us being part of a larger working ecosystem that we rely on.
I was born in the early 70s and the world was already a crowded place. Since I was born the global population has more than doubled. In that time we have also lost more than 60% of the large animals on the planet (numbers and biomass, not species). It's difficult to calculate how much forest has been lost in that time as agricultural mono-crop tree plantations are counted as forests in most assessments, despite having little to no ecological value, resulting in a situation where many nations claim to have "reforested", but if you look closer they actually have fewer intact forests than they did in the 70s (by which point we'd already destroyed roughly 2/3 of the global forests).
From an ecological perspective, we are already far beyond the planet's carrying capacity. The only way we maintain even the current population level is by sacrificing the planet's ecosystem to so so, leaving tiny, fragmented patches of it in existence and converting the rest to a human support system.
Yes, I was thinking something similar. If we continue to waste resources in an unsustainable way, then it does not matter if the population is one billion or 100 billion. Either way we would (and almost certainly will) trash the planet.
Carrying capacity is about how much resources we can get from the Earth and that depends 100% on technological progress.
What you are describing is something entirely different and it makes the same mistake as always, of thinking that tech progress is lineal and not exponential.
We know the "natural" carrying capacity of Earth is for humans, and that is from a few hundreds of thousands to a couple of million people, that's it, and that is with some tech, like fire, language, tribal societies, etc.
Right, it is a totally anthropocentric vision of human wellbeing at the cost of our fellow inhabitants of the planet. As Eileen Crist wrote in 2012 who would want to live in such a place? She says that she does not think a population of 10 billion or so would necessarily lead to annihilation of the human species:
"I do not necessarily foresee a world that collapses by undermining its own life-support systems. It may instead turn into a world that is propped by the strengths advanced industrial civilization has at its disposal: the rational-instrumental means of technical management, heightened efficiency, and technological breakthrough. It is possible that by such means a viable “civilization” might be established upon a thoroughly denatured planet. What is deeply repugnant about such a civilization is not its potential for self-annihilation, but its totalitarian conversion of the natural world into a domain of resources to serve a human supremacist way of life, and the consequent destruction of all the intrinsic wealth of its natural places, beings, and elements"
Source:Crist, E., 2012. Abundant Earth and the population question. In: Cafaro, P., Crist, E. (Eds.), Life on the Brink: Environmentalists Confront Overpopulation. University of Georgia Press, Georgia, pp. 141-151.
We can indeed support many more people with less impact on biodiversity. We already have the technology. Farms are shrinking in size and output has increased at the same time.
We can easily lessen the impact today, but it would be a bit more expensive to use greenhouses, etc.
I completely agree with you. Earth carrying capacity might be well over 15 billion. But in such a world, 99% of the people will live like slums of India.
Hi Sabine, interesting as usual. Two things to note, carrying capacity also depends on the quality of life; we certainly don't want more billions of people with not enough to go by. Currently we have more than a billion people without electricity and more than that being "energy poor" and a quite a few millions who are undernourished. Even if we stabilize the population below the carrying capacity, there is the issue of abundant energy with enough return on investment to sustain a highly technological society, so if that energy becomes scarce, the carrying capacity factor decreses. Basically, there is a dependance of energy for the capacity of the planet to sustain life at high number of human occupants.
Quality… let’s just consider the lack of available beach front property, crowded parks, and don’t get me started on the crowded surf spots! Why exactly do we need more people when we can’t properly educate the children that are born now I wealthy countries?
@@liamstacey419 Exactly!
The question is "how much below?" The driving force in all the places our hostess cited is the cost of raising children, which (for whatever reason) is higher every decade in the developed world. In the US it now costs about 300,000 USD to raise a child to college age; in Japan it is more than twice that much. In Japan, the population began to fall in 2009; in the US the population is still rising through immigration, but we dropped below the replacement rate in 1973, and has been below that ever since. Roughly a third of the US population today is from immigration (mostly legal, screened for criminal records, education and skills....).
This is absolutely correct. In raw numbers, there are more people in abject poverty than at any other point in human history.
Don't worry, things will get better for everyone after the US empire finally ends.
This has quickly become one of my favourite channels. Not because of the factual content (which is excellent), but for her dry sense of humour … just love it!!!!! 😄
Wow, I think she should just skip the jokes, some are bad, some are painfully bad, and her delivery and timing are the worst.
@@danbsports6760 Which goes all the way around and back again, making it hilarious as far as her fans are concerned. It takes panache.
@@danbsports6760 That is what dry humour is, unfunny funny jokes.
Is it factual content, or only from your frame of reference?
@@Cryptonymicus since there is no objectivity in human thinking we might as well never use the word "fact" again. is that what you wanna say?
The fertility question is really interesting. Here in Brazil people used to have 10 kids or more in the past, when now it's pretty difficult to see a family with 3 kids.
But the thing is the mentality of the time and it's context. Back then we were a mostly an agrarian country, so people had lots of kids to help them to take care of plantations and farm animals. While today we're mostly a... I forgot the word... We live mostly in cities. Where life's expensive!
Anyway, thanks for the video, Sabine! 😊
Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
Thoughts on the MST?
@@Doctor_Subtilis You mean the Brazilian MST?
For me they're a political tool only, unfortunately... Because no politician is ever going to solve the issue. 😕
Other than that, their only condemnable action was in the 90s, when they destroyed the experiments from Embrapa in a farm (that was used exclusively for scientific research).
Acho que vc quis dizer urbano
My grandma had 14 kids, my mom had 2, and only my sister has had a child so far, so yeah, pretty accurate
Cosmopolitan, that's the word.
The Haber-Bosch process is the reason why we have such large populations. Fixing N2 and digging out fertilizers (Phosphates and Nitrates) using Diesel Engines are essential. Perhaps this sort of thing will always stay ahead of the needs of a large population, forever.
I would not bet on that.
So interesting fertilizers have been floating around idk if any actually have made it to market.
In the Middle Ages when the plague killed off more than half the population, life generally got a lot better for those who survived. Suddenly there was a lot more land available to farmers and a labor shortage meant that peasants could command better pay from their lords.
I dont know about the accuracy of ur statement But people arent just consumers of goods. People produce stuff too. So lesser number of people can lead to lesser products.
Yes, but most of us aren't farmers anymore.
@@manunderyourbed the supply/demand effect on wages is evident after each world war and is evident now in post-Brexit Britain where delivery driver hourly rates have doubled or even tripled. Such shock events are temporary though as the population soon recovers and increases. It doesn't take a genius to see that in an ever-more automated world, more and more people on the planet is not a great idea.
Common misconception, that’s not actually true
@@michaelh13 the rural worker indeed demanded and received higher payments in cash (nominal wages) in the plague’s aftermath. Wages in England rose from twelve to twenty-eight percent from the 1340s to the 1350s and twenty to forty percent from the 1340s to the 1360s. Immediate hikes were sometimes more drastic. During the plague year (1348-49) at Fornham All Saints (Suffolk), the lord paid the pre-plague rate of 3d. per acre for more half of the hired reaping but the rest cost 5d., an increase of 67 percent. The reaper, moreover, enjoyed more and larger tips in cash and perquisites in kind to supplement the wage. At Cuxham (Oxfordshire), a plowman making 2s. weekly before the plague demanded 3s. in 1349 and 10s. in 1350 (Farmer, 1988; Farmer, 1991; West Suffolk Record Office 3/15.7/2.4; Harvey, 1965).
eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economic-impact-of-the-black-death/
"Elon Musk fathered 8 children, though maybe by the time I've finished this sentence he has a few more" - damn shots fired
It aged well 🤣
I wonder how many of the newest moms work for him ...
Why is Elon Musk mocked and ridiculed for having 8 children, but a poor African is not?
Bro isn't a hypocrite 😅
@Frank Skoda-Simmons 6 of the 10 were with his first wife. 2 with Grimes. 2 via IVF with Shivon Zilis. 3 women.
Some countries population are shrinking but real state is more and more expensive. As a software developer, buying a flat is proportionally many times more expensive that it was for my father, a factory worker... People don't have children just because the oligarchs stole their future, and nobody wants to bring a children without a future.
that's actually true, populations are shrinking, but housing is more expensive.
Well in germany it's that certain cities are drawing in more people, but then you can also try to weigh the benefits of a more medium size city and putting yourself in a well off suburb.
Where i live it's very affordable, you can go to the city in 20 minutes of train ride, and it has a relaxed vacation like vibe if you want it to be.
Real estate prices aren't particularly related to population size. That's an almost entirely market phenomenon.
@@ArawnOfAnnwn my theory for cheap housing is that there were so many people with new money trying to buy houses in the last 200 years that it wasn’t nearly as possible to overcharge for housing, and they could make the money they didn’t gain by overcharging back by simply selling more houses. Back then people would work non stop with no breaks and you better believe rich assholes exploited their labor to the fullest.
We’re in the wealthiest period in existence, of course people are going to exploit each other more, because now it’s possible for them to do it and guarantee a sucker!
House shitty price because not every city developed equally. Its more like land instead of house price. Government failed to make enough house and boomer vote for laws that make their house more valuable.
This practice definitely make it harder to live without debt in the future. If population shrink, house price can go down.
Nobody stole nuffin. Nough with this victimisation shtick.
One thing not mentioned in this video is once you exhaust resources, the carrying capacity of the system plunges to a small fraction of what it was before. Imagine if you have the only forest logging operation in the world that produces wood and the forest grows 1,000 trees per year if the forest is healthy. If you cut 1,000 trees per year to produce wood products you can do this indefinitely. Now you switch to cutting 5,000 trees per year and the people are happy because all this increase in wood has made the products cheaper and they can consume more of them. This mirrors the "Simon index" mentioned in the video where the amount of wealth required to obtain goods & services goes down over time. As you keep cutting more and more trees each year, improving your wood harvesting efficiency, the products you produce keep becoming cheaper and easier to obtain. But eventually you exhaust the entire forest and it's no longer healthy. Now it only produces 10 trees per year worth of growth. You've destroyed the forest's ability to grow trees quickly and wood changes from a cheap commodity into a luxury for the elite.
If the overshoot of resources is now in August and has steadily gotten earlier over the years in the face of expanding technology, and expanding population, how can we expect innovation to answer the problem of future overshoot?
First lets find out if the overshoot is actually happening, or if it's just a made up number created by people whose careers depend on a certain level of alarm. Where does the data come from?
We cannot. That is the answer.
We are stuffed. Bertrand Russell predicted the demise of humanity.
"Honey I shrunk the resources" is the best thing I've heard all week
Amazing content this was so informative and listenable I' m so grateful for content like this
When does she say that??
@@pedroestables8182 Near the beginning. After three min in with the Xmas tree graph.
Yes, ignorance is bliss
@@timothyrussell4445 Yes and most of the points she makes actually make Germany one of the worlds biggest polluters due to wind and solar being far from green and sustainable. The entire narrative of overpopulation and humans impact on climate change is severely flawed. Some of it outright pseudo science nonsense.
All these problems we know are coming and I STILL can't find work in ecology 10 years after graduating from uni...
college is a right and true scam
Why you gonna snitch on yourself like that
There is just sooo much speculation in all of these predictions. So many things change over time, economics, cultural preferences, climatic conditions, the effect of technology...When I was born though, there were less than 3,000,000,000 people. Now there are about 8,000,000,000. It's really hard for me to see how a lower population would be very detrimental. I mean, I lived there!
As the population increases, so does the complexity of the interactions as well as the severity of the extremes that that result from this greater complexity. So a small change in the overall population density of the entire world for instance will tend to lead to pockets of extreme density increases. Similar to how small changes in global temperature can lead to significant increases in the number and severity of storms. Just looking at population growth based on simple one to one co-relations such as resource availabilty, do not represent the whole picture. They also often overlook big parts of the story, like in order ti increase production of a, we need more b, but if we use more b, there is less b for producing c ...
This is like asking if you need to eat more food or less food, while giving zero thought to the quality of your food.
I mean, if this is the only food available, I think it matters a lot.
Yea, but amount of quality food are getting less and less, when amount of bad-quality food are increasing.
That's the Elon's message :)
@@ElijahMergold I'd rather eat shitty food than no food but yes maybe agriculture and energy should be nationalized.
@@laiya2758 maybe better think about saving availability of good food, isn't it?
@@ElijahMergold Idk I live in a food desert . I have plenty of cans stocked up alrdy in my pantry. Thank goodness for canned foods.
Malthus was not wrong about the limit of food production: from the late 18th century viewpoint and tech level. What actually caused mass population growth in the 20th century was the invention of cheap artificial fertilizer.
And oil...
Also the advent of modern medicine increasing the number of surviving children, infant mortality numbers drastically reduced , and NOW "nuclear peace" meaning the regular historical destruction of overpopulated areas by war ...has been slowed . But not entirely stopped.
Thanks!
There is no doubt in my mind that the population will reach a sustainable level in the long term... the question I have is if this level will be reached the good way (planning and policy), or the bad way (the horsemen of the apocalypse...)
Scary thought that Nigeria is projected to have over 700 million population in the future and a larger population than China.
Given what you know of humanity, what do you think? Of course the "bad way", when it comes to humans there's no other way. The "good way" only exists in Star Trek.
@@coreyham3753 You can't fix stupid!
The most likely future outcome of humanity is Easter Island on a global scale. First we'll consume every mineral, plant and animal on the planet and finally we'll eat each other.
this video misses the fundamental problem, that being capitalism demands eternal population growth.
if the population shrinks then capitalism crashes and the world is thrown into civil war and god knows what horrors.
if the capitalists get their way (musk etc) then we will far exceed carrying capacity and again civil war and horror.
we are doomed either way because of C A P I T A L I S M.
Good summary. Two major pieces to add:
1) By definition, on human time scales "non-renewable" resources are just that: limited. Most credible calculations indicate that with current per capita rates of consumption, numerous elements (e.g., phosphorus) and compounds (low entropy carbon fuels) needed for our current civilization and quality of life will become increasing constrained through this century. Two obvious solutions are reduce the per capita rates of resource consumption (and recycle where possible) and reduce the 'capita.' One good paper on the subject is this one, that also has a good intro to the "doomsters" perspective: DOI 10.7185/geochempersp.3.2
2) As you point out, populations in overshoot crash. One aspect of human populations that is often overlooked is the inequitable distribution of resources as a result of complex political-economic systems. One very interesting study looked into this aspect of resource limits and determined that inequity makes the political-economic system less stable, leading to collapse sooner than would otherwise occur. "Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies," doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2014.02.014 Piketty and other (generally "leftist") analysts believe that this self-destructive dynamic in inherent in capitalism.
What you say can't be emphasized enough. There isn't always some substitute waiting for us around the corner for critical resources.
Maybe it's arrogant, but I doubt that experts have adequately taken into account the effects of sea level rise in these estimates.
Maybe it's arrogant, but I find the idea of 185 million people in Niger absurd. No mater what experts have calculated
You take on some really great topics. An engrossing walk-through of the whole spectrum of speculations, and then some nicely grounded analysis.
Around 1970 Bangladesh had a fertility rate of nearly 7. It is currently 1.95. Education, particularly of girls has achieved this. It shows that things can change quickly.
We need better people not more people. Raising well balanced, well educated children is of paramount importance. We are certainly going to reach 11 billion before any leveling off. That may be okay because we can produce more food and even return some areas of the planet to a pristine state by intensive high tech methods being developed.
At the other end of the birth death equation, old age may soon be understood a great deal better and we could be living a lot longer and healthier lives. While Musk has a point, I don't think we will be facing population collapse, unless it's because we make the planet unlivable. The future is hard to see, but if we can combat the excess greenhouse effect in time and return some habitat for other organisms. We can gain further resources from space, we can export a great deal of our most damaging industry to space. We may in fact be able to expand out from our birthplace and ensure our continued development.
"Better people" that thinking is exactly why the globalists want to decrees and control population and wealth. Astonishingly idiotic take.
While I am not so optimistic about the space comment (reaching orbit is incredibly difficult and energy intense in the first place), I absolutely agree with the rest.
In fact we likely don‘t even need new agricultural technologies, we just have to be better at distributing our current technological levels in the west to the rest of the world.
“Science Fiction/Star Trek” has brain washed you!
Working in space is 1000x more energy intensive than just fixing any problem on Earth...!
Don’t be so Naive ...!
Just because the fertility rates drops doesn’t mean the drain on resources/pollution goes down ...!
One person living in AC big house/car is way more draining than 10 people on bicycles/huts...!
If it moves Elon will try to get it pregnant.
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - S Gould
This quotation fits way too many aspects of this "debate" to leave it out.
How to measure the value of a life. This in itself would take a lifetime.
we should listen more to wisdom like Gould's, and less to selfish asses like Musk.
See "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Thomas Gray
@@annamyob4624 if only there was something we could do?
@@gregsonvaux4492 🤣
Would like to have seen the impact of planned obsolesce plays in the use of resources, while it would be a difficult technical and social problem to solve, given current incentives, it would be interesting to see how the "overshoot" day would be affected.
Sabine, I LOVE your blogs. You tackle many topics that I have questioned (and with "wicked" humor). Please keep up your good work.
Dear Sabine, I really love how you have, through concise yet easy to understand videos sprinkled with humor, made it more accessible for the average person to also learn from the studies of technical sources such as The Lancet. You are doing great work, and I appreciate you very much.
Mor Cheese, Please.
we will punch a hole in the ozone with a spray brand they don't like (sarcasm)
She actually strawmans the position pretty thoroughly.
Honestly... if anything, that Lancet part is most likely the worst source possible. If using that as a foundation in issues of population levels, and thinking economy follows the same curvature as population leves, i can imagine scoffing at what Elon Musk is saying quite easily. You don't understand neither economy, nor the impact of higher living standards (and life expectancy baked in with this).
No, a severe decrease in population levels like the Japan example, will destroy the economy. No one would pay 90% taxes (or more), just to keep the "lights on".
@@johnnylindstedt3645 Stop "opining" without evidence. For some HTML reason, the ranking numbers did not copy, but the list descends from #1.
Top 200 Highest Impact Factor Journals (2022)
CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians - Impact Factor: 286.13
Lancet - Impact Factor: 202.731
New England Journal of Medicine - Impact Factor: 176.079
JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association - Impact Factor: 157.335
Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology - Impact Factor: 113.915
Nature Reviews Drug Discovery - Impact Factor: 112.288
Nature Reviews Immunology - Impact Factor: 108.555
Lancet Respiratory Medicine - Impact Factor: 102.642
BMJ: British Medical Journal - Impact Factor: 93.333
Nature Medicine - Impact Factor: 87.241
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In the 13th century when England had fewer than 3 million people they were building those amazing cathedrals. Little towns of 20,000 were all playing.
they had a higher % of young people though.
I am just getting to see your videos. Thank you for giving more then one view on most topics. Keep up the good work.
The issue is not "the world" but certain hotspots. Countries with rapid population growth experience turmoil, wars and potential collapse, especially when the young can't get jobs. The burden falls on nearby countries to take in, resettle and retrain the migration outflow, at huge cost to their economies.
Thanks for addressing this topic, Sabine.
Here in Ireland, demographics is a touchy subject because our population still has not recovered from the British-amplified famine of the mid-19th century. Where other Western countries have cities of hundreds of thousands sprinkled across their land, ours are merely tens of thousands. Where they have capital cities and main industrial/urban areas counting tens of millions of people, ours (Dublin) is an order of magnitude smaller. Yet, most infrastructures that are taken as granted in our neighbours, exists here in a much lower density and straining, or is plain missing. And since we've started our demographic transition shortly after joining the EU in the 1970s, most of the housing that exists now, which was built with families of 6-9 as the typical size, is proving woefully inadequate for the common families of 3-5 we have now. The point, I think, is that it's not so much an issue of volume of resources, but of how they're employed in the end, against a context that can shift in unanticipated ways. By trying to hammer the problem into a question of too few or too many babies we may be losing some critical flexibility in addressing the potential underlying issues.
How is 6-9 size inadequate for 3-5?
@@kekistanihelpdesk8508 Because they're split, two families as room-mates in the same house.
@@kekistanihelpdesk8508 too much can cause just similar issues than too little. it's just not efficient. unnecessarily big homes eat up money (by many means) that's then missing at other places.
Sit back and relax and enjoy the new diverse demographic flooding in.
Stop whining. The problem isn't the under population of Ireland, the problem is that Europe is over populated.
"Elon Musk has meanwhile fathered eight children , though maybe by the time I've finished this sentence he has a few more"
LMAAAO, Sabine, you absolute savage 😍
In evolutionary terms, this means he has achieved success and is more fit than the majority of the population. If his children continue this trend, his genes will spread throughout the rest of humanity.
@@Nethan2000 I'm glad when the occasional smart person has 8 kids, instead of the usual situation.
@@Nethan2000 I achieved success because I earned a math PhD: via institutions that humanity created.
Stop brainlessly repeating what others define as "success" when discussing evolution.
@@Nethan2000 And that makes musk a murderer: forcing nonconsenting people into the world, without OUR permission: the permission of those already here. That forces harm/burden onto those of us already here.
And, if his offspring suffer, then he is forcing that onto them, too.
@@Nethan2000 Sorry, but when people are forced into the world without their consent,
and you do nothing to stop it, then you got NOTHING to complain about what they do or what their politics are. Communist. Anarchist, Marxist. Green. Atheist, Antinatalist, Animal Rights Vegan.
Regardless of whether high birth rates area a problem or not, one thing is certain. As global population increases, pollution control becomes more critical. For example, back in the 1700s burning of coal and wood as a means to heat homes wasn't environmentally as threatening as it would be to do so in current times. The planet can handle environmental insults on a small scale, but as the quantity of pollutants increases, it eventually crosses a threshold at which it cannot. As Sabine mentioned, technological advancements can mitigate the earlier problems and change the figures used to calculate such lines in the sand... like "How much food can we produce annually?", "At what point do nonrenewable resources become scarce and cause a collapse of the industry reliant on them?" It is these technological advances that are crucial to "pushing out farther" the Lines, and allowing for sustainability of larger populations. New technologies to increase food production on smaller footprints of land, finding alternatives to burning fossil fuels, and creating alternatives to technologies that rely on rare metals and materials, are key. The time to act is BEFORE the line is reached. It is much easier to stay ahead of a problem than it is to find effective solutions and reel it back in to a stable condition after the fact. Unfortunately about half the population is threatened by any sort of change and lashes out emotionally before understanding facts... all the while offering no solutions of their own.
Excellent video...as always. Love this channel....always fascinating. Thank you for your content, viewpoint, and humor.
Clean drinking water is a huge limit on population. Especially now as temperatures are rising and rivers are drying up, and underground reservoirs are being drawn down (like the Ogallala aquifer in the United States). Energy is another problem.
Honestly, a world with a 100 billion people sounds like a dystopian nightmare to me.
Why is that?
@@onlypranav Well if you like the idea of having thirteen times more people for every individual you meet, great, but I would find such overpopulation horrific.
@@onlypranav Because people aren't that great as citizens of the Earth - they take more than they give back. More animals and plants, less people.
@No way Exactly
@@calessel3139 thats not how this works. You will still meet the same number of people in your life, they will just be spread across a larger area and with a lot less empty space between.
Sabine-I love you!
Not only are you brilliant but you have this dry sense of humor that just cracks me up!
Please stay on you tube!
Carrying capacity is a moving target because underdeveloped/developing countries are increasing their consumption of resources as they (naturally) seek to attain the living standards of the richer nations. Thus carrying capacity continues under ever more pressure daily
This is an untestable theory unless anyone knows what the carrying capacity actually is. With gasoline, hydro power, and now solar power I would seriously doubt that any scientist has any idea how much essential resources any given person can wring out of any given piece of land or sea, so what even is the resource that we're running out of?
@@gorkyd7912 Watt per square meter, fish, forests, metals, we are living on 150 square kilometers and that makes 55 people per square kilometer on average. Half of the total landmass is occupied by deserts and more than half of the rest by agriculture.
Sabina, great program! As a plant and soil scientist who has also worked on water issues, I have to bring up one point. You mentioned climate change but you did not address environmental degradation, and by extension, the ability of the earth so support us. The aquifers our farms and cities rely on are being pumped dry. We are in the midst of, and the cause of, one of the greatest species extinction events in Earth history. I could go on and on. These degradations and extinctions are only accelerating as we mine the earth for more resources, farm more land, build bigger cities. Then, there is heat. Compress the same volume of air in a smaller space, and that air gets hotter and particles of air collide more and more. Same thing happens with humans and rats and conflict.
I think it is fair to say, that, on this one, Sabine's lack of environmental expertise was glaringly obvious.
I do not recall a single word on the impact of human population size & growth on other species!
That MUST be weighed in any dicussion of overpopulation.
It is the absence of this discussion in the views of Musk, et al, that makes them so utterly foolish!
We use too few of the available human brains due to uneven developpement. Uplifting the available brains use from having to deal with survival to being able to deal with what brings our species foreward will outdo a loss of otherwise mostly struggeling population.
Wrong! We use all of our brain all the time.
@@christianadam2907 brainS, as in not using what some people could benefit to society if their potential was not wasted on problems of immediate survival.
@@lism6 this makes sense 👍 my apologies
@@lism6 exactly
Yup! The future success of our civilization will come from currently-impoverished nations in the “third world.” Just like how we learn about genius individuals who rose to prominence from poverty in the past, we see it today still from places in Africa and Asia.
When one considers the unsustainably high debt level, rapidly aging population, and extremely low GDP growth (especially in PPP terms), the future here in Japan does not look so nice for Japanese people.
How about a talk on the oceans fisheries? I remember in the late 50s/60s, the oceans in the future will be a massive source of food. I think that fish populations have drastically declined do to over fishing.
Yes, our oceans are basically experiencing a mass extinction event. Fish stocks are way less than half of what they were 100 years ago. Some species' numbers have totally collapsed. Certain countries are basically combing our oceans clean of everything they can find, and every year they find less. The amount of fish the world consumes has been completely unsustainable for decades. The whole world would have to immediately cease eating any non-farmed seafood for our oceans to have a chance of recovering. Most fishermen would have to find another job. Unfortunately the world's fishers aren't willing to do that. Most of them are from poor countries with few opportunities, and there aren't any governments offering to help them transition, so they're just going keep grabbing whatever fish are left until there are none.
@@Pushing_Pixels A couple of notes. Fish farming is also alleged to be very bad for the environment. Japan is not a poor country, yet they are well known to overfish.
@@abc33155 Fish farming is not great for the environment, that is true. But if we want to continue to have a normal marine environment, or rather have one again in the future as it's far from normal now, it's the only fish source that's not going to drive species to extinction. So, unfortunately, it's the only viable source long term. Unless we stop eating fish we're going to need fish farming.
I'd make more sense to spread education to the people we do have rather than try to get more people on the planet for "more brainpower"
All of Musk's ideas have clear counterpoints like this, but he presents it like his idea is actually the counterpoint to the obvious logical conclusion. Hopefully someday everyone realizes he's literally just an idiot in charge of a lot of smart people.
Wrong. You aren't able to think in trends, you just think in circumstances. The current tendency is that education increases, regardless of additional intervention, and births decrease. So if you are big-picture INTP thinker like Elon, you focus on the tendency that is concerning instead of spouting a platitude about a problem that is already fixing itself.
@@ekszentrik Myers Briggs is astrology for nerds
well, if those more educated go to study humanities, then they won't contribute much to progress
@@ekszentrik not really. Think about all the useless work people are doing under capitalism. Corporate lawyers, advertising. On top of that, the global south people are forced into poverty by being exploited by western imperialism. Not exactly an environment conducive to intellectual progress.
What everyone forgets when discussing this problem is that other life forms exist and the biosphere is not a perpetual motion machine.
I think it is more likely they are factoring that the biosphere is technically self regenerating/renewable; considering more what impacts that could drastically alter the expectation for it to be so.
Sure, eventually, the resources on Earth will be fully depleted, but the only solution to that would be harvest from asteroids or other planets. Even then, eventually, the resources of a solar system, a galaxy, too, will deplete.
Well, everyone except one of the two sides of the discussion.
@@IHateUniqueUsernames this is just my interpretation but i think what Jason meant is that as the Human Population grows and we need more resources we are taking those resources away from other species
Human Growth harms biodiversity
@@nidhogg8446 Fair point. I didn't read it that way.
That said, it's survival for the fittest, and humans have, apparently, rigged the game vastly in our favour.
It's better than perpetual motion, it is powered by the sun. This means we get a ton of new energy everyday, and we (and all the other life forms, which I also care about) are nowhere near using all of it.
As a Canadian, I can tell you that while the rhetoric is that we have an underpopulation problem, that only refers to not having enough workers to do the jobs that born-here Canadians don't want to do, and a dearth of healthcare workers due to the lack of free/affordable education. In actuality, we are bringing in refugees from other countries and they're having to live in shelters because there isn't enough housing. Meanwhile tens of thousands of homeless Canadians are having to live on the streets alongside the refugees that didn't get to the shelters in time for a spot. Not enough housing, too many people. And that's just one issue. There are _too many_ humans. Our Northern Territories have a hard time supporting human life because it's hard to grow things there. Not because of a lack of people, but because much of the land is scant soil over rock, and many food crops grown there come from greenhouses with soil imported in. There are also the issues with short growing season, cool temperatures, poor soil quality and small amount of precipitation. No number of people brought in is going to change those. If you brought more people into Canada's Northern Territories, they'd _starve to death._ Living standards? Like, what? Really surprised to hear you give us and our Northern Territories as a (bad) example.
I used to live in Yellowknife and I can vouch that the quality of life up there is very high. We import food and export minerals, metals and other natural resources. In this way, population increases but nobody starves. Go up there and visit some day, you’ll find your conceptions of Canada’s north will be greatly challenged!
Another great video Sabine, keep up the good work 👍
I'd argue the biggest barrier to progress isn't the risk of population decline, it's not giving the people already here a decent education, living standards and healthcare.
Absolutely. We're basically just letting things sort themselves out, and hoping high-quality people are a result. If we focused on making the brains we have better through nutrition, upbringing, and enrichment, then ~10 billion brains is more than enough. But if your goal is to stretch your billions of dollars beyond your lifetime, then cheap life outside of your social circles is very desirable. Besides, educated populations are far too demanding, free-thinking, and rebellious.
Fully agree. Rather than trying to convince westerns to deliver more babies, let's spread the knowledge, health, welfare and of course rule of law as far as we can. How many Einsteins ("yes, that guy, again") did we waste because they were born in places that didn't give them the right opportunities?
Obviously, Paul Honey!
So go start giving people an education, what are you waiting for.
Go start with the poor in Iran or Yemen or Somolia, Come now get to it.
@@SM-nz9ff Already doing it. I always vote for those parties that want to increase social spending and international development.
I am really starting to like your way of presenting science. You're a gem :)
Gobbledygook without the science
Coomsters?
what about the other species we share the surface with?
This!! It’s not just about us, just because we ‘could cope’ with a gigantic population does not mean all the other species we share the earth with could
I have issue with the notion that we can now sustain more people on the planet due to technology. That's not how modern agriculture works, it works by injecting a huge amount of energy surplus in the land (in the form of fertilizers) and then gaining a greater crop yield while exhausting the fertility of farm land over time. This is on the one hand hugely energy inefficient. And further, farm land across the world is shrinking with desertification.
Our current carrying capacity in terms of simple ability to feed the population is overinflated right now by temporary measures that cannot last indefinitely. The goal cannot be to get to the carrying capacity that our technology temporarily allows....but the capacity that earth can maintain without exhaustion.
I previously commented on your strange delivery of jokes, but honestly once I got used to it, and just listen to the jokes themselves they’re hilarious and it makes me like this channel so much more. Thanks for the great content ❤
It's German humor. *YOU WILL LAUGH!*
@@mikepublic111 Not just German, it's like that in eastern Europe as well. I love it.
I have only recently become a subscriber and love that we visit the different points of views of each respective camp then go into the science behind it. We need more RUclipsrs like you rather than influencers! Keep up the great work!
It's a scandal that Ehrlich never got laughed at and ridiculed out of universities.
Love your humour ;-) thanx for interesting info boiled down to essential content
Regarding the word „living“: what is assumed to be standard of living? Is „not dying“ considered enough?
increased prosperity should always be considered too yeah.
The chart about abundance sort of does carry that feeling, more people should feel an ease and relaxation and fulfillment in life through accomplishments, and less of an everyday struggle to stay alive.
It should be a measure to strive for.
@@ayoCC which is an entirely subjective and relative measure. humans value prestige more than survival
We could probably fit lots more people on the planet, but what would their quality of life be? A question that was not addressed here.
Depends a lot of things.
It’s not about land mass. We have room. It’s a lack of agriculture
The bollionaires don't care
@@FFSWTFisThis landmass is not something humans shouldn't blindly take even if the agriculture allows it. The world is shared by many other animals. They deserve their own space on this earth and should be allocated most of it.
@@skycloud4802 It’s a nice thought but doesn’t pertain to my point. Maybe we should refocus on those plans to build islands??
Very thoughtful presentation. Thank you Sabine.
I always find the delivery entertaining, even when I am not particularly interested in the subject. I love the deadpan humor.
Aaaaaaand it was just revealed that Elon musk has now 10 children 🤣🙌
Reasonable people can disagree on whether or not there is an over-population problem. But it's absurd to make the argument that we must have more people in order to survive as a species.
I can't help but feel that any time a politician asks you to have more children there is something in it for her/him, and when a rich person like Musk do, it is some kind of wish for more customers for their product or they are just flapping their mouths randomly.
The ones proding for more children come from two camps, the God simple and the too greedy for their own good.
I had a rather frustrating argument, decades ago, with a guy who felt that we should just give up on the rest of the world, the environment, so we can make as many people as possible. I was shocked --- he seemed to be an intelligent person. I thought it was a hellish idea.
But why, I asked him, is it better to have arbitrarily more people?
He said, so that we can have more Einsteins and Beethovens and Rembrandts, etc.
I asked him, so now we have, what, 7 or 8 times as many people on Earth as in Beethoven's time... so we should have 7 or 8 Beethovens?
And shouldn't we have some 6 Einsteins now? Etc? Where are they?
He felt that they are there somewhere, but that they were oppressed somehow (by his favorite oppressor --- whom I will leave out of it.)
It's an interesting question, though... those geniuses of the past seem far beyond anybody who's around today.
Could it be that the genius isn't just a matter of numbers, but something else, perhaps something to do with their environment?
There are PLENTY of geniuses now. There's so many that they're diluted. When a single genius dominates the entirety of Europe, the only area of the world whose history we look back on in detail, that one genius can seem huge. When you have millions of geniuses all over the world in every industry all being recorded to history at once in a dozen different languages, they all seem pretty small. But there's no way that 8 billion people could be sustained so well without them.
@@gorkyd7912 This. Einstein was the only scientist on TV in his time. Today, there are many scientists on TV.
One of the data points that suggests the Doomer camp is right is the *water table problem* as part of the carrying capacity issue.
In America the underground water aquifers are over 50% depleted which are directly underneath the Midwest which is one of the breadbaskets of the world.
The Midwest will run out of water due to heavy and continued irrigation in the next 40-50 years because there is not enough rainfall to replace the consumption used.
This is true for multiple areas around the world. Concerning news indeed..
But there's a solution to that.
Look at the Netherlands, tiny amount of land, and quite far north, yet they're one of Europe's largest food exporters, because they have a lot of modernized farming techniques (indoor vertical farming with aquaponics).
If we had this in the US, we could easily avoid the issue of draining the aquifers, and we wouldn't be destroying so much land with massive inefficient farms.
Except that the United States has 8,000 liters of renewable freshwater per American. France, in comparison, has around 1,500 liters, China 2,000 liters, India 1,000 liters, Pakistan 250 liters.
When we look at resource availability, it should not be seen as a global problem, but rather as a specific regional problem; Japan has taken extreme care in securing its (vegetarian) food security and can easily do so with a 3,000-4,000 liter freshwater availability, despite the massive population density.
Countries with very stretched water resources, on the other hand, is it responsible for their population to increase further?
@@shipwreck9146But the Netherlands also has a pretty horrible CO2 emissions per capita (especially compared to the rest of Europe) and at least in part this is because of the organization of their economy.
I'm skeptical that their agricultural practices can be be translated elsewhere regardless, its a very densely populated and rich country that has a very long history of extensive geoengineering and one of the best climates in the world. Northwest Europe very rarely has to worry about water issues compared to somewhere like the American midwest, which is fundamentally different in how they practice agriculture in the vast, very sparsely populated fields you get there.
A lot of that is what we choose to eat. Not what we have to eat.
Good point. And it's just one of a number of them. The more one studies it, the more things there are wrong with even trying to sustain the present population. The giant population collapse predicted in the Club of Rome's computer modelling for any unabated continuing expansion of population (not really touched on in the video) is about to engulf us.
The best bet is always to be more pessimistic... that way, at worse you've only gotten a smaller population. When you're too optimistic (ie: "They'll have a fix for this in the future" etc) then you simply are shovelling issues forward for other generations to have to deal with and it ends up by having the issue simply ignored and a lot of people asking temselves "how the hell did that happen?".
I mean... I'd prefer going on a bridge designed by a Pessimist than by an Optimist... History has shown that having blind trust in "It'll all be OK" make sure that said bridge will crash down (or whatever the issue that was basically ignored).
As with everything, both are necessary. Too pessimistic and you’re paralyzed with fear, too optimistic and the ball drops when you lease expect it. If you simply take precautions and plan for the worst while expecting it will help, then you’re doing both. I’m sure you probably meant that but simply staying pessimism is correct is way too ambiguous.
as absurd as it is, pessimism are not perfect as you think it is but that the only human has as survival primate, sometimes they overlooked things but ignore the big picture, such as social issue vs climate change, ppl tend to have more passionate to be pessimist in politic and art rather than actual reality and threat, u find more mental issue in those ppl to due to lack of literature, self control, and stuff.
@@werren894 never said it was "perfect", but putting on Rosy Goggles and saying "bah, the next generation will figure it out" isn't the way to go.
When you're take too much precaution, you don't go forward as fast as you can, but when you don't take any, you'll fall into the first pit you come across.
i totally agree, .. i would rather cross a bridge designed by a pessimist.
"pessimistic" sounds a little negative. I'd say "conservative" instead ;)
18:20 I hear the claim of progress frequently but nobody ever defines it. Progress causes all the problems, then we're in the dilemma of needing more progress to fix what we messed up, but the new progress rarely fixes the mess and causes more mess.
I think the biggest fear about depopulation in developed countries (but also many developing countries like China) is simply that our economic models and pension schemes are predicated on the fact that people have kids and maintain the population around the replacement level. In most developed countries, Boomers failed to do so and they now get retired, provoking both a pension overload and a capital crunch which will, in turn, dry up the capital that had allowed the developing world to feed itself and access modern technologies. And just add the fact that young people drive consumption, are agents of progress, and challenge the status quo. Aging countries are therefore condemned to slow death before their demography has the time to recover. As for the developing world, many are likely to experience rapid deindustrialization and, most likely, famine.
I enjoy your style of sharing interesting facts, and your sarcasm is hilarious.
It is life saving sarcasm...
Yes, Klaus "Anal" Swab will be proud of her and her team of "young" globalists.
Comment your Credit card information. Lol they tone is so serious. Love the dry humor.
More thought should be given to the stability of the ecosystem with all the stress that increased agriculture and other human exploitations induces. This is surely the biggest factor regarding maximum population. Also, to comment on Elon Musk's thoughts on this: His views are purely from an economist standpoint, and from that worldview a growing population is needed for the endless expansions of economies. A population reduction guarantees a long-lasting recession, and we need to decide if this is a bad or a good thing.
yes yes yes, he sees it from the view of a money maker. not a person who has to compete with thousands of poor people for limited resources.
I completely agree with you! If we want to understand how many people this world can take we must look deeply into the whole complexity of the ecosystem we live in. The term ‘economy’ must become a much broader insight into the whole spectrum of what a sustainable life on this planet actually means. Every profit calculation must include all those negative impacts our activities have on the ecosystem we exist in. If it doesn’t, it is an unrealistic and deceitful calculation and will inevitable lead to a future backlash.
Much of the anxiety in the world today derives from the way we humans have lived in an unbalanced relationship with nature for a long time. An abuse on nature is an abuse on ourselves. We must understand that we humans are part of nature, not above it! To live in balance and harmony with nature must always be our first priority, at least for no other reason than it is the only way we will ensure a good future for our children and grandchildren. The best way to ensure this is to stop our human-centric ideologies and start caring for ALL LIFE on this planet.
Great insights. I have heard Prof Sam Vaknin, who is working on the Chronon Field Theory taking Occam's Razor to Physics, say that the economic problem in industrial societies with below replacement birth rates is that eventually the elderly population will so surpass the young that the young will be reduced to slaves to pay the pensions and social programs for the elderly and they will rebel against that.
Yes, the endless expansion of economies, the bane of every empire that ever was. Once they reached their maximum expansion, conditions stagnated, then decayed. Every time.
The stress of agriculture properly applied would be minimal, but that means adapting to drought and relying upon areas not experiencing drought, not wasting pesticides and fertilizers, for every ounce in the river is wasted and harmful downstream.
But, we can and will hit resource bottlenecks and stops, where, for example, copper mines become exhausted and new sources have to be discovered and recycling geared up a lot more. Most of what we say we recycle ends up collected and dumped in a landfill. Most plastics - landfill. Paper, mixed. Metals, again, mixed and most exported and reimported once recycled. Glass, poor to mixed, although the chances of our running out of silicon is next to nil. Oil, don't get my laughing, we're going through that like a teen on their first job's payday.
Don't get me started on solar panels pollution and energy requirements to manufacture, let alone our new high energy density batteries and efficient motors that rely upon rare earth minerals.
Food isn't much of a problem yet, mostly we have distribution issues that we refuse to resolve, as "it isn't our nation's problem", so we in the US literally dump good food to keep pricing stable for the farmers. Well, until a few disasters, droughts and disruptions hit us...
@@richardhauer7354 Your use of the word ‘monoculture’ indicates that you have an understanding of the problem with our contemporary relationship with nature. I regard modern ways, such as monocultural farming, as one of the harmful ways that we relate to Mother Earth in. But it goes beyond just the issue of food. Monocultural farming is the standard way of the forestry business today, as well. In fact, we see it across the whole spectra of industrial use of nature. It is the way the industry thinks! Because of that thousands of plant, animal and insect species are being extinct right under our noses. We hardly notice it, before it’s too late! Before we know it we have no insects that can pollinate our plantations anymore.
The reason is that we haven’t understood or haven’t cared about how much everything in this world is interconnected. This world is made up of a web of relationships but we humans seems to think that we are above that. Well, now we are starting to realize what huge damage we have caused this planet. Hübris and greed are the two words that comes to mind when we want to describe the reasons for this folly. It boils down to the erroneous idea that we humans ‘own’ nature and therefor can do whatever we like with it. If we truly understood what nature and ecology really is then we wouldn’t be doing the things we do to it. We just wouldn’t allow greedy people and corporations to act the way they do. Ignorance is the root-cause of all this abusive behavior. Modern people have so much to learn from so called indigenous peoples when it comes to how to live in a healthy relationship with nature. After all, we are nothing but nature ourselves!
Informative and entertaining for sure! As to the future, totally inconclusive, and for good reason.
Quantity pushes quality aside. Higher industrial efficiency also breeds misery. It is part of the escapist mindset.
This is without a doubt my new favorite channel - Sabine can bring a difficult topic sooo close to understanding for "all" that it has to be call a gift.
You also need to factor in fresh water use. The US southwest is running out of water fast; the colorado is being sucked dry by higher than predicted population.
climate change and other looming environmental disasters renders this entire discussion asinine. externalities and unforeseen consequences are going to swamp our abiility to innovate starting now
0:09 That image is nightmare fuel.
She said "noone expects Japans population to continue decreasing indefinitely" but there was no real explaination to that. Low fertility in developed countries isn't caused by overpopulation, so why exactly do we expect fertility to go up eventually?
I feel like this video deserved more discussion on our ability to support such a large population, even of just a few billion with modern lifestyles. I think in general people under-appreciate the question of if modern development is realistic. Natural systems usually contain time delays so environmental harms continue to develop over time- even if we maintained our current population and lifestyles, the ecological crisis would continue to get worse.
And regarding that 60s/70s research about overpopulation, of course there was a lot of error when trying to estimate population, but just because technology helped us in the past does not mean that it will always be that way. There are obviously limits on our physical abilities and it's unrealistic to assume that human ingenuity can replace functioning of natural systems.
Of course people and institutions don't want to give up modernity, so it's not easy to talk about or get watch time from, but I think it's really important to consider and discuss. I obviously have more to say about the ecological crisis, so leave a comment if you'd like and I'd appreciate discussing whatever. (Effectiveness of existing green tech, anthropocentric/ethnocentric bias, misleading information from institutions, whatever)
Well you can look at the overshoot day by country, and see that developed countries reach it way faster than the global average.
Important to note that low tech societies have a much more direct and immediate impact on local ecology. Deforestation in particular is devastating and swift when agrarian societies expand too far. Advanced societies use a lot more resources - but most of them are drawn from non-biological sources such as mining which while messy doesn't have the incredibly widespread impact of low tech slash and burn agriculture which wipes out entire biomes and the species they support. Advanced economies have broader impacts on the global environment and create more exotic forms of pollution, and rely on rarer resources which may be more readily exhausted
@@Vastin Subsistance farming deforestation is not a minor player, but you underestimate the amount of land that has been and is repurposed for modern agricultural practices, and the impact that pesticides have on biodiversity.
High rates of meat consumption and the increasing reliance on agrofuels severely counteract the benefits of higher yields.
I would also like to know the contribution of population displacement in the equation : once a slash and burn has come to its end, the forest can grow again, but not if the land is taken by modern agriculturalists or a nearby city expansion.
@@jeanf6295 modern farming is highly focused on broad plains lands using agrochem to greatly increase yields - so it generally doesn't contribute as much to deforestation. The fertilizer runoff problem is quite serious however, as is the fact that the chem used for fertilizer is limited.
@@Vastin Plains that in some cases were once forests.
In the Brazilian Amazon, causes cited in research papers I could find cite cattle ranching as the main driver, I also found one that suggest that soybean may displace cattle ranching [1].
In Indonesia, palm oil, timber plantations and conversion to grassland, potentially after uncontrolled forest fires make up 60% of the deforestation [2], small scale farming makes up 20%.
I won't pretend that the little time I spent looking at the subject give any kind of comprehensive picture, but it sure sounds like agricultural yield is not the only factor to look at.
[1] iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/5/2/024002/meta
[2] iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aaf6db/meta
I would like to know more about what science has to say about modern agricultural practices, characterized by the use of fertilizers, pesticides, and high-yield crop varieties (the Green Revolution) and whether these practices can be sustained and what it would mean to the world's carrying capacity should they not be sustainable.
If you look at the huge variation in the predicted carrying capacity, you will spot the answer:
The club of rome and other pessimists predict a collaps due to natural Ressources like Phosphorus or oil running out.
Others dissagree.
Doesn't matter. You throw 90% of those calories away feeding farmed animals instead of just eating the plants yourself. Chew your own damn food and maybe we could afford sustainable crops.
How about addressing cellular agriculture? We need to massively scale up cellular agriculture.
Given that much of modern agriculture is fueled directly by fossil fuels particularly for fertilizer and pesticide production but also the consequences of climate change on those processes directly or worse the looming phosphorus shortage crisis yes there are serious implications for our carrying capacity if we don't learn to adapt.
In particular research has shown that as plants selected for high growth gain more access to carbon dioxide they increasingly end up diluting trace nutrient content especially in the case of the crops developed around the use of fertilizers as one of the more common adaptations that spurs their greater rates of growth is that they reduce or outright stop investing resources into the mycorrhiza(which in wild plants generally involves half or more of their fixed carbon) As plants are largely dependent in these mycorrhizal associations for getting essential nutrients this adds another factor in lowering plant nutrient yields.
The phosphorus factor is another major point since we depend on energy intensive industrial mining operations as our main source of the element with fertilizer being the largest use of it. This is problematic because as economically viable phosphorus rich "ore" gets depleted we will need to find alternative sources which will naturally all be higher entropy sources, i.e. the resource is much more dispersed largely in the form of agricultural waste products either in landfills or feeding toxic algal blooms polluting streams rivers lakes and the ocean particularly near the coasts. In all likelihood I suspect landfills will be the more economical of these two options given how much biomass gets thrown away. Its also probably important to account for what resources are the main ways life uses phosphorus particularly as a key component of adenosine triphosphate(ATP), as part of the structural band of DNA and RNA and in a number of animals vertebrates included it also serves as a key component of their internal skeletons since the evolution of hard mineralized parts appears to have initially been selected for as a means to store phosphorus and important ions. As such the size of the biosphere is largely constrained by phosphorus abundance. The heavy use of phosphorus despite it being a relatively rare element is actually why number of astrobiologists think we ought to consider Earth life as phosphorus based life rather than carbon based as phosphorus is the only cosmically rare element which is a major macronutrient.
Agricultural waste is a serious concern and cutting that will definitely be needed for any real solutions related to agricultural production but it alone can not solve the issues.
I majored in environmental systems, and I took a course that might have a few points you may find interesting. In regards to food production, crop yields are mostly plateauing for countries that have resources to implement best agricultural practices. There isn't much that can be done to increase crop yields significantly in many places, and in places where farmers could benefit from implementing better tech/practices, it is often the case that they don't have the resources to implement it. What's more is that crop yields are decreasing from loss of top soil, climate change, and loss of water or bursting food bubbles. Most countries are already using all of their most crop friendly land, whatever land that's left is often not efficient to use. A lot of land that are used to produce food were set up in place where agriculture was never going to be sustainable (e.g. like having ground water as the water source). In short, crop yields are reaching their max (with current tech) and are further limited by other factors, many of which are related to anthropogenic climate change. Many countries expect food production to be a major problem for the future, and one current socio-environmental issue now is countries "land grab" as a way to prepare for future food insecurity, which richer countries buying arable land from poorer countries, which is obviously bad for the poorer countries who really need that land to produce food.
1) I think the thinking mistake here might be that there is no mechanism for populations that are decreasing to stabilize. I.e., the inverted pyramid will stay inverted. I don't know if this has been well documented in modern times, but it must have happened many times in history. Usually, because an area could no longer support a population. 2) Ehrlich may have been right but for a completely different reasons. I.e., people choosing to have fewer kids...
I almost wonder whether Calhoun's mouse experiment tells you more about the post peak development we are going to see than looking back into history.
The wealthiest people have a vested interest in maintaining a reward system that requires resources to be in excess supply in relation to population. To them, they would gladly decimate the population to maintain a system that awards them power.
Dear Sabine, thanks for that insightful comment! I do particularly appreciate that you highlighted the problem of pinpointing the carrying capacity of the human species. Firstly, it is strictly impossible to forecast technological progress - as anyone knows who has read Gödel-Escher-Bach. And on top of this factual uncertainty, there are many normative choice involved in "determining" which level and distribution of resource consumption is "adequate", "required", ... - beautifully captured by your cheese example.
Carrying capacity is blindingly obvious. Our technology hasn't actually increased it, it's just given us an artificial life support fueled by the potential of our future. It's no coincidence that our population stayed stable under 1 billion people before the industrial revolution.
In the biological theory of carrying capacity, resource distribution habits is part of the species to be carried. The theory ignores what the species could do if it was intelligent (which humanity in crowds isn't).
Population size is not a purely quantitative problem/issue. Do you want be surrounded by thousands of people or live in a quite village, and do you think this effects your quality of life?
The rich people want as many as possible, they dont feel the effects of population density
Yes! Surrounded by thousands of people, half of whom are mentally ill, working like slaves to preserve next-to-meaningless hyper competitive alienated lives… there are indeed many more significant factors overlooked, sociological among them…
Lol living in a city is lovely, meanwhile rural poverty is higher than urban poverty.
Living in a small village brings much more contact with small minds.
I live in Manila, Oh boy.. I'm doing my best in college to go to Europe.
Crowded place is a nightmare especially if you're not used to it. But it's sometimes desirable snd functional. But I prefer to live in west nonetheless. Plus they care about the architecture and amabience.
To be completely accurate, Malthus was actually correct at the time because the Haber-Bosch process had not yet been discovered. The population at the time would not have been sustainable without also being able to scale up food production, which wasn't possible until the early 1900's.
What? Just because he couldn't know which innovations would extend the carrying capacity doesn't make his predictions any less wrong.
Thank you so much for focusing on this topic. Personally I react negatively when people sound the alarm that we don't have enough people. Some people want to be parents and some do not. I should not be lectured by the Pope that I am selfish for choosing to have a pet instead of a child. In my case I have neither. I grew up on a farm but I also lived in high density population centers. I have an experience of pressure in high density populations that I do not feel when I am out in the country. Perhaps there is a reaction to crowding on fertility rates.I believe there is a bias for unending growth economically and with that the need for more and more people. Those assumptions are about to be tested. Who wants to live in a world where you are supposed to have children whether you want to or not ? I believe the trends in population growth or decrease can change at any time. The idea that we would be trapped in a trend to the point of our demise seems irrational. If AI and robots are going to replace us maybe we will have some help caring for our elderly. Thanks again for the topic.
Great points. I agree.
As it happens I just finished reading Zeihan's "The End of the World is Just the Beginning". It is fascinating to contrast Sabine's viewpoint with Zeihan's, who is a geopolitician. He fleshes out the implications of rapidly changing demographics with the end of globalization. The implications are scary.
Globalization will never end as long as the technology to make it possible exists. It has just entered a different phase that many of the elites do not like or understand. There will always be a population reducing factor, either war/famine or some form or population control. It is up to us to choose.
Realistically it will probably end up being war/famine in less advanced nations and control in more advanced. Logically, who does not want to control it himself by not thinking only with his reproductive organs will have it controlled by our good old mother Earth with her old fashioned means.
With Zeihan you have to remember there is an underlying assumption that things will continue as they currently are, and that what we want now is desirable in the future. That works for say for the next decade maybe two but beyond that you start to get really into the arena of prophecy. Whose to say we will continue capitalism as we have? whose to say chatGPT wont save/doom us all? No one thought the Soviet Union would fall peacefully but it did. In the 80s everyman and his dog thought Japan would soon rule the world (kind of like we think of China today). Don't get me wrong i think Zeihan's work is a wonderful resource, but every so often he says thing that seem literally like a record scratch - multiple times he has written off the Germans, but the South Koreans are also in pretty dire straits and yet he says "I wouldn't write of the Koreans"; if there is one nation I think history shows writing them off is at your peril its the Germans. He waxes lyrical about NZ and but is quiet on Australia (despite it being one the "winning" countries in his thesis)- NZ cannot survive globally without AUS. I think he also forgets that just because govts are shitty and cause immense suffering they often continue for years - think North Korea for instance, SA, Russia - horrid leaders, much suffering, still in power and unlikely to be moved. Why would China be any different? As Stephen Kotkin says, if there is no viable alternatives to power than even the really awful will stay in the top job by just pandering to their oligarchic base. Zeihan loves numbers but sometimes he forgets the power of culture to overcome hardships and challenges in surprising ways.
Yeah, I was never afraid of humanity ceasing to exist, but the effect it would have on living standards. Ultimately I think Zeihan and Sabine agree we're going to be okay no matter what, but Zeihan stresses a lot more how difficult that change is going to be
@@JoshuaMartinez-ml5hl There is a much more sinister hidden process than this, it is the question of self-editing with biotechnology. Soon we will have the capacity to edit ourselves, speeding up the evolution by incalculable amounts and heading in dubious directions. This has the potential to create much greater chaos than any kind of overpopulation.
The implications are normal.
One thing is sure ..it's scary watching the world population growth clock...while having a fast deteriorating planet full of people that mostly all want more 'stuff'
Peter Jolliffe You don't say, a lot of people seem to have as many possessions as they can afford...
Wonderful presentation! I would very much also like to hear your thoughts on the disruptive effects of AI and quantum computers on world population predictions and standards of living.
Interesting take. I'd have liked to see your thoughts on the "If everyone on Earth had the lifestyle of the average American, we would need 4.5 Earths for resources."
Same also for Germany. Its easy say to something like this sitting in Europe.
The relevant question is not if we'd be able to feed (etc) more people (sure, we could, at least for some time), but if it in the medium to long term would result in improved average well-being (mainly, but not only human) . Or if we'd get better well-being by a lower population, a lower consumption of resources. I very deliberately look at average well-being, avoiding the sometimes seen utilitarian argument of total well-being improving by adding people with a lower level of well-being. Extra population having just bearable lives would not be the way to go. Obviously, it is no zero-sum game either, but that does not justify increased population as a goal.
The Population decreases because women are not attractive anymore and the men have no money to pay them.
The more of us, the less of others (except for livestock)
So does well being necessarily have to include cheese?
What *objectively* constitutes well being?
Did any greek person 2000 years ago have 'well being'?
All science/tec is made by well feed and educated people.
Average seems a bit hard to defend. If you only cared about the average, then a little while after the average quality of life stops improving, it wouldn't matter whether the we go extinct. Unless for some strange reason you only take the average at the current moment. Also if you take the average, it could be a bad thing to add very happy lives, because if they are not quite as happy as the current lives they would bring down the average. Total utilitarianism's "just bearable lives" makes it sound like these lives are bad, but you have to remember that these lives are defined to be positive.
Thank you for putting your ideas together on this topic and share it, Sabine & team!
Video after video without picking she answers things i have been walking around wondering for years. But without the need for doing the research. Its like a FUN FACTS OF EVERYTHING. 🎉
What about the psychological aspects, and how they contribute to social unrest? There are many who argue the world is big enough for more people, but space is also relevant for the human psyche. If you cram people into tight spaces, they become aggressive, as shown in experiments with rats.
I worked in a pet store when I was a kid and I learned this: put too many goldfish in a tank and some portion of them will die of, relatively immediately. You can call the cause of death what ever you want, but if you aren't centering some kind of natural system that the fish cannot access directly, you're just whistling past the graveyard. And I think it maps to us to a much larger degree than anyone feels comfortable acknowledging. We tell stories about us and why we do what we do but those stories conceal as much as they elucidate. Whether or not a given story is true, we need a story. Ergo, the self-narrative and therefore the narrative-making faculty is not primarily focused on proximate truth. It's focused on soothing the psyche and selling the narrative self. My point is that at the end of your video we not only do not have the answer to the question, but we don't know whether there is an answer at all, or how to determine the true one. This applies to the bulk of our narratives, so I'm skeptical when ever we don't indicate to one another up front that we know our own narrative-generating function is designed to be a skillful liar on our behalf.
On the first few sentences of your post. That's ecology 101. I wonder why people don't realise it.
it's probably related to the o2 capacity of the pump
The thing about narratives is that they surround _mental models,_ in which these narratives often seem _internally consistent,_ thus blinding us of our blind-spots. We are often correct _within our imagination._
I love how you address these topics! It's like eating a satisfying meal (covered in melted cheese) as opposed to empty junkfood of articles and tabloid pieces.
Good analogy. No opinions from anecdotes, only statistics. "What does the science say" If everyone developed opinions this way we'd be a much better planet, how ever many people we end up with.
She virtue signalled concern over Earth, and dog whistled to pester Jordan Petersen because he wants to eat food. All to an unstable audience. It's likely she wants all the cheese.
I count cheese as one of the fancy junk foods (highly processed)
@@wardsr Problem is, a frightening amount of people will only accept statistics that support their viewpoints.
@@pgtmr2713 "he wants to eat food" - specifically he wants to eat meat, and lots of it. Which is far more intensive to produce than vegetarian food.
Just want to say I really appreciate the humor in these videos
Would be interested in how the population would develop if we were to figure out indefinite longevity. Would it be dramatic to the current growth or would the projection be much lower than expected?
Good point.