Human Survival

[Rahul]

No. There has been a lot of conflicting ideas on population levels with humanity and whatnot, but here's the thing. The animal biomass on Earth is pretty much consistent. It doesn't flucuate very much. So for every extra human, that much biomass replaces some other lifeforms on the planet. Not exactly that amount, but the total biomass doesn't swing in wide variables. It actually is a very narrow range. Even after major extinction events it's a relatively brief reduction in planetary biomass before that carrying capacity is gobbled up by other critters.

Now the study about how certain species outstrip their resources and then collapse, not to extinction, but a massive starvation situation where there is a sudden die off, humans are in a certain niche that has provided us with a special protection here. We're omnivores. We'll eat any and everything that is edible. We're not specialists. If a species becomes a specialist like it only basically eats one type, or small numbers of types of prey animal or types of plants, you are setting up your species to go extinct. Our species never did that. Most primates have never done that. A few have, but those are the exceptions. Unusual for primates.

Pigs are like this too. They eat anything, just like us. They don't specialize, which is why they overrun any environment they have ever been introduced to. Just like us. I'm talking about their eating habits and behavior. Their biological bodies, like hooves, that's a specialization. We primates didn't go there. We're even less specialized than the porcines in that manner.

And then you throw in our hyper-intelligence, way above pigs, and we can go crazy. Farmers in the US today can produce 10 times the food energy output that farmers 100 years ago could do per acre. We can face with the vast, vast, vast majority of us experiencing some big collapse of any reasonable change in our environment. Even this horrendous anthropogenic driven global climate change. At most maybe 5% of our population starving to death. And practically 99% of those in undeveloped countries.

The main issue is fresh water. That's going to cause all the coming war and bloodshed. Now of course the official reasons won't be fresh water disputes. It'll be all kinds of official reasons. But it'll be the real reason at the heart at most of them. We have to have the fresh water. For everything. And we have, all countries, a large population of people that would rather die in war than to suffer, whither into barely surviving "relatively", or our lives being horribly downgraded than to go through that.

Human population growth is already slowing down really fast. Population experts just 10 years ago had much more dire predictions for human population growth than they do today. Fifty years ago population experts were really freaking out about our future population numbers. We are slowing way down. If I'm lucky enough to live to the average lifespan of people where I live I will see the decline of total human population for at least the last two decades of this existence.

Oddly enough our warming of the planet will offset this briefly. It will slightly increase the amount of fresh water from evaporation of the seas and precipitation. But not near enough to prevent the inevitable. Not enough water.

Fresh water. Food will be a byproduct because we need that water for food production. But it'll be because we don't have enough fresh water for irrigation. It won't be energy. I know we freak out about fossil fuels, I agree, it's an issue, a major issue, but it's not going to be the big thing. It's not going to be how many people. It's going to come down to how much fresh water comes out of your tap.

Bank on it.