Human Survival

[pineapplebunnybounce]

Obviously it's hard to say how long the human race will be around. We are the only species capable of making ourselves (and almost everything else) extinct. I tend to think that humans will be around for quite a while, while modern civilization is destined for a collapse from resource destruction/depletion in the next couple hundred years. It's hard to say what will arise out of it.

I tend towards this prediction as well. While it's hard to estimate the carrying capacity of earth, I'm on the side that thinks we're way, way over the capacity.

I don't think we'll die out as a result, but definitely a drop in population growth if not population itself. When people get desperate there'll be more wars, famine. Not to mention global warming and extreme weather patterns. Hm, that's starting to sound a little apocalyptic.

[Slave]

It's actually not true that religion was this great oppressor of science like so many atheists make it out to be. Truth is the relationship between religion and science was more complex. The first universities were maintained by the Church, derived from schools that were open and running in cathedrals around Europe. Religious institutions encouraged scientific and philosophical investigation after the fall of Rome and even some of the first scientists were priests such as Roger Bacon and Robert Grosseteste, who was a master of science and mathematics and one of the great thinkers of his time. The old thinking that religion is responsible for us not having a cure for mortality is just that; old thinking that needs to be discarded. Credit where it is due, religion has actually played a large role in science over the past thousand years.

[kılıç_mehmet]

It's actually not true that religion was this great oppressor of science like so many atheists make it out to be. Truth is the relationship between religion and science was more complex. The first universities were maintained by the Church, derived from schools that were open and running in cathedrals around Europe. Religious institutions encouraged scientific and philosophical investigation after the fall of Rome and even some of the first scientists were priests such as Roger Bacon and Robert Grosseteste, who was a master of science and mathematics and one of the great thinkers of his time. The old thinking that religion is responsible for us not having a cure for mortality is just that; old thinking that needs to be discarded. Credit where it is due, religion has actually played a large role in science over the past thousand years.

Similarly here in the east. Many of the eastern thinkers of the time were also well versed in İslamic theology. Some even wrote books about İslamic theology, while doing mathematics and other sciences at the same time.
There was also a time when Madrasas were great centres of learning of many sciences, but after a while, they just became a hiding place for deserters and other manners of scum.

[Severan]

The way I see it, the universe is just a sad game of "keep your species alive as long as possible".

[CapnAwesome]

I tend towards this prediction as well. While it's hard to estimate the carrying capacity of earth, I'm on the side that thinks we're way, way over the capacity.

I don't think we'll die out as a result, but definitely a drop in population growth if not population itself. When people get desperate there'll be more wars, famine. Not to mention global warming and extreme weather patterns. Hm, that's starting to sound a little apocalyptic.

The thing with over population is that it won't make our species go extinct, it'll just make a population reduction (through war or famine) mandatory at some point if we don't get population under control. Life on earth is going to get a lot shittier for most people.

[popeyespappy]

I don't know much about this subject, it's a gray area to me. Assuming we don't kill ourselves, I know that the Earth is habitable for about another billion years.

Depends on who you talk to. Estimates on how long the surface of Earth can support life vary greatly. Many think the oceans will only last another 500 million to 1 billion years. If that is true our planet won't be able to support much more than single cell organisms long before that. Some believe complex plant life could have as little as one or two hundred millions years left. When that is gone most of the rest of us will join it.

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Obviously it's hard to say how long the human race will be around. We are the only species capable of making ourselves (and almost everything else) extinct. I tend to think that humans will be around for quite a while, while modern civilization is destined for a collapse from resource destruction/depletion in the next couple hundred years. It's hard to say what will arise out of it.

I tend towards this prediction as well. While it's hard to estimate the carrying capacity of earth, I'm on the side that thinks we're way, way over the capacity.

I don't think we'll die out as a result, but definitely a drop in population growth if not population itself. When people get desperate there'll be more wars, famine. Not to mention global warming and extreme weather patterns. Hm, that's starting to sound a little apocalyptic.

It isn't so much about not enough resources as it is about poor allocation of those resources.

[pineapplebunnybounce]

@popeyespappy

Calculating the capacity requires that you determine how much resources one person would use up (this is of course highly variable in reality). Theoretically speaking, there are 3 models that a population might follow: one that stays at the capacity, one that oscillates above and below the capacity periodically, one that goes way above it, and then crashes. I read somewhere that the world can carry 9 billion if we all lived like poor people in third world countries live. But since I'm quoting on memory I don't remember what sort of resources (what we already have or including potential resources) they took into account in that calculation. We're getting close to that number and not living anything like poor people (here in north america), so ... still not looking too good if we were to allocate those resources evenly now. I mean it would definitely solve a lot of problems right now, but it wouldn't sustain the population growth in the future. So I'm still pessimistic about our future.

[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.

[CapnAwesome]

It isn't so much about not enough resources as it is about poor allocation of those resources.

I don't think that's the case at all. In fact if we tried to redistribute the resources more we'd only be in bigger trouble. We simply don't have enough to support the people on the globe now. For example we are depleting both wild and farm fish at breakneck rates. Fish account for almost 15% of all protein consumed on earth. That is one tiny example of what we are doing and no distribution scheme is going to change that people will starve because we are using up our resources.

[Anomalocaris]

Relying on the some version of the existing ecosystem to renew resources we need to support our population is hardly the most effective or most efficient way to maximize the carrying capacity of our planet. To maximize carrying capacity we need to start to get use to manufactured proteins and nutrients.