Human Race: Your Numbers Up

[Anomalocaris]

I do understand the concept of, "thinning the herd", but I don't think she would be so cavalier if it was her house and her friends of whom the world decided to "thin".

What would be the current world population had there been: No black death in the Middle ages, no wars in say the last 100 years,no Stalin, no Mao, no Pol Pot,no famines and no AIDS? Keep in mind that humans breed at an exponential rate.


Of course,humanity needs drastic thinning,by about 80%. However, that should only be in places which will not effect me personally;such as India, China, Africa, South America, the Middle East (leaving the oil intact) and perhaps parts of the Southern USA.

This would reduce the rate of climate change and make the remaining natural gas, oil and coal last a lot longer.

The only thing we've learned from history is that we've learned nothing from history (anon)

Actually, human population only increase exponentially where the population is much below the carrying capacity of the land. For much of human history, technology progressed slowly, conversion of primitive land to cultivation happened slowly. The carrying capacity of land changes slowly. Most regions of the world was near its population carrying capacity much of the time. The occurrance of a plague might knock the population down a lot, but it would bounce back to more or less the figure as before, and then stay there, limited by the same carrying capacity as before. The death toll of plagues of ancient era, and the black death of the middle ages, probably had negligible direct effect on the world's population today.

The single largest plague induced depopulation event in history is likely the result of the Columbian exchange. More recent research suggests that pre-contact population of North and South America may have been in the 100 million range. The native Americans lack both immunity to old world diseases to which they have not previously been exposed, as well as genetic diversity that would have limited fatality even amongst other populations without immunity. As a result, 95% of the pre-exchange population may have been wiped out in the 100 years after Columbus first made contact. So the total death toll was in the ball park of 100 million, or about the same as the death toll of Hitler, Stalin and Mao combined, and 4 times that of European black death.