How will we survive when the population hits 10 billion? | Charles C. Mann

By 2050, an estimated 10 billion people will live on earth. How are we going to provide everybody with basic needs while also avoiding the worst impacts of climate change? In a talk packed with wit and wisdom, science journalist Charles C. Mann breaks down the proposed solutions and finds that the answers fall into two camps — wizards and prophets — while offering his own take on the best path to survival.

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65 Comments on How will we survive when the population hits 10 billion? | Charles C. Mann

    • nor do the ‘elite’ deserve to leech off of the work of that many people. maybe the people who manipulate mass amounts of people and the people who allow themselves to be manipulated deserve extinction. good riddance lol

  1. You talk about “hitting the edge of the petridish” but over time, as wellbeing goes up, birth rates go down. We’ll never realistically hit the edge, because we’ll always end up decreasing in population at a steady rate

    • Grailer Grailer that’s not what i’m thinking. Over time increased wellbeing will mean less and less kids are being born, and eventually it’ll get to the point where the same amount of people are dying as being born, keeping the population at a steady rate

    • Sérgio Mesquita Rocha Sérgio Mesquita Rocha this is not actually always the case. Whilst it is true that lower classes generally end up having more kids on average, it’s not necessarily because they are stupid. Traditionally, lower classes have had more kids because of higher mortality rates, but nowadays, particularly in the western world, it is largely going to be attributed to worse education in a sense, which is fuelled by poverty as lower class neighbourhoods often have worse public schools, largely because schools are funded by property tax, and so those brought up in poorer neighbourhoods have worse education infrastructure. Over time tho, less and less people will be in the lower classes causing less and less babies to be born, to a point where it’ll levell out to a similar amount dying and being born at the same time.

    • Birth rates may be going down, but growth rate is still positive, globally. Some countries have zero to negative growth, but *any* growth is exponential, and even 1% growth (which we’re still above, globally, last I checked) has a doubling time of a mere 70 years. Will growth rate keep falling, and get to zero or below? Well, current predictive models (from e.g. the U.N.) very on their predictions, but the “edge of the petri dish” version says: *YES*, it will, it’s just a question of when and how… if we hit the edge of the dish, that probably means we’re way over a sustainable “carrying capacity”, as it’s called… which I strongly suspect is the case; carrying capacity long-term is probably (in my “prophet”-style analysis) way under 10 billion humans, though the “wizards”, as this speaker calls them, will of course say otherwise. If the wizards are right, maybe we’ll survive at 10 billion, maybe even for a long time. If the prophets are right, we’ll probably go back to well under 2 billion, maybe even under a billion. If that happens in less than a hundred years interval or so, that’s gonna be pretty grim. And that’s the point. Can we, and if so how can we, reduce growth and/or population to a sustainable level without it being brutally grim?

      One thing that can be said for sure: any positive value for growth rate is not sustainable. Period. If this sounds wrong or counterintuitive to you, look up the “most important video you’ll ever see” (a talk from a professor in Colorado, with versions titled along those lines), and hear him talk about the petri dish and how it all goes for them.

    • Global fertility is till well in the positive and the economic consequences of low fertility can be severe. There is no easy way out of this problem. You can’t just stop making babies without creating enormous problems 20, 30 years down the line.

    • a7i20ci7y that’s at the moment. Over time, technology’ll increase allowing us to create more babies if we need to. The fact of the matter is, overpopulation isn’t going to be as big a problem as everyone thinks it is

  2. 10 billion people on Earth is a problem. 10 billion people throughout the solar system are the colonists of an endless frontier.

    • Good point: Wizards and prophets diverge on this point of space colonization as well:
      While people like Musk want to go to Mars and terraform it, other people think that the Earth is our only home and we have to cherish it.

    • It is not that big of a problem if it is distributed evenly around the world. But the thing is that population grows where it can not sustain itself. Example, Africa.

    • I recommend to watch StarGate and The Expanse TV shows! In both of those there are people living throghout the solar system on all kinds of different planets.

      I’d love to live up to day when it’s possible to travel from one planet to another without paying big bucks for it. Sadly, we are still not there yet.

    • Are you willing to participate in it tho ? No ? Then GTFO, and praise to all you care, that neither you nor your children will ever see what War IS.
      And If your answer was “Yes” – then by god start this war with killing yourself, because you have to be an animal without any humanity to willingly kill other people that haven’t done anything to you.

      P.S. and no, what u did say was not a “joke” or “sarcasm”, more like blunt ignorance.

    • Are you triggerd because “muh world peace” is and never realistically was an option, SasNolan? Sucks to be a naive kid like you who thinks “HEH when I dont fight the others wont aswell”. Pathetic…

    • +Maik S The UN exists.
      Simple proof you can solve problems without _blowing random people who’re just trying to live life’s heads off._

  3. Won’t happen. Women hit the wall holding out for Mr.Perfect, price themselves out of the market, and learn to love their dogs more than having their own kids. They put careers and status-seeking above actual procreation.

    • Yeah, because women are the only ones that would rather focus on a career than a family life that they might not even want. If somebody loves there dog more than people, then who cares?

    • This comment has merit but wealthy women western women only make up like 5 percent of women worldwide, so that still leaves many many women who don’t fit your description. It’s only really North American and European women who behave as you say.

  4. Stabilizing and decreasing the population, with a worldwide two-child policy. + free birth control for everyone 🙂 And supporting a plant-based diet.

    • Well the rich educated western countries have only mild population growth so it’s not even our fault that the population is rising so drastically. It’s Africa, India, and South America we need to worry about. Those people need education and start doing what China is doing.

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