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.
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
@@தமிழோன் 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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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??
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!!!!! 😄
@@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
What are you on about most young people ea my gen, arw worried about surviving about never having a home, never having a career, never having a car .....never having kids....because of the price of everything.😊
@@Name..........You're worried about not keeping up with trends and being unable to buy the next iphone/water bottle some dipshit influencer tells you to buy. You love to complain about things, but take no action, while also self indulging and not working hard for the things you want.
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! 🖖😊
@@whowereweagain 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).
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.
@@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.
"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
@@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.
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.
With improved use of fertilizers and improved sources of fertilizer, we will be able to diminish pollution of streams, rivers, and coastal waters by ammonia and nitrates, also phosphates. Improper overuse of fertilizer also leads through bacterial action to the large scale production of nitrous oxide (NNO), which is a potent, long lived greenhouse gas, and a very effective destroyer of ozone in the upper atmosphere. Ozone protects us from UV radiation. Improving nitrogen utilization is both a scientific, technical, and "best practices" issue.
1930s had a potassium phosphate shortage of famine dustbowls for Nazi Germany to go "Soylent Green" of "recycled food" similar to Huxley's dystopia where they fly past "Chemical recovery furnaces" before boarding a rocket plane to "savage lands" of "families considered a dirty word".
@@willieverusethis The mere fact you had the ability to comment on a TH-cam 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.
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...
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.
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.
@Elijah Mergold ok at this point you're just being an ass. Both good quality food and bad quality food can expire. No one here is going to see your reply and think you're genuine.
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.
Don’t worry. Since modernity is turning out to be a total disaster at least socially depopulation is becoming a bigger concern. People are becoming so peculiar and out of touch with their instincts that half the population can no longer cope with mating and breeding.
> You can do the math: If you divide... I did the math just for grins about 20 years ago. I came up with 3/4 an acre per human (less than what you came up with). Do the flip-side: stand every human shoulder-to-shoulder and how large of a space do you need? About the size of the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. Look at a globe to see just how small a space that is. But neither of those really tell you anything because no society ever shapes its neighborhoods with an eye to either of those extremes. Here are 2 things that ought to affect our ideas of whether or not this planet is overcrowded: - how much land it takes to accommodate each human's consumption and waste. I don't know what that number is, and would be skeptical of anyone trying to tell me what that number is (just being honest). - how much untouched land is there on this planet? Google earth can help you with that. And quite frankly, there's so much untouched land one has to wonder why overpopulation is a topic. When I put those together, I come with one conclusion: it's our CITIES that are overpopulated. Not our planet.
@boydvanoosterhout7966 >Growth is exponential. ... population growth is declining, I think ^this^ is what happens when doomsday excitement slows down to catch its breath :) The short response for most of your statements is no, no and ..nope. Speaking of alarmist excitement, I wonder if you're aware of climate change hysterics and their utter inability to predict anything even remotely accurately over the past ~70 years. On the sane side of things, check out Bjorn Lomborg's take on climate change. Thanks.
. Do you mean what type of food is produced? A plant-based food production system would be the only sustainable option for a widespread method of feeding the growing population. If you meant what type of human population growth then growing a population who eats only plants would be the most sustainable
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.
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.
A study from the University of Minnesota found that a plant-based food production system would feed 4 billion more people than the current method of using animal agriculture. It would also preserve our natural environment and biodiversity plus address the threat of climate change.
Malthus was right just up to the point he was writing. He accurately described the the pre-1800 world. Then the world changed around him. Lots of technology changed not just fertilizer. Transportation was huge, allowing food to be moved vast differences meaning local populations were more insulated from local agricultural downturns. Of course he was also completely wrong about people's ability to control their own.
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?
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....).
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.
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 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?
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.
@@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.
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.
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".
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!
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...)
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.
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.
we are talking about humanity here, this is a longterm slow to react problem. obviously it will be the horsemen, since we will obviously wait until the last second.
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.
@@christianadam2907 brainS, as in not using what some people could benefit to society if their potential was not wasted on problems of immediate survival.
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.
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.
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 TH-camrs like you rather than influencers! Keep up the great work!
"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.
Interesting, but two things, carrying capacity has been exceeded for some time now, that's what overshoot day means! Also progress is nice but does not mean constant economic growth, the main resource which will dwindle is fossil fuels, so we must consume less energy and even tightent our belts until we reach 3 billion or so...and the only good thing about mentioning Musk is that he's putting the awareness of the situation up front and people are skeptic about his motives, essentially he wants to profit for ever. He might want to terraform Mars, but we are marsforming Earth in the meantime! I haven't even mentioned we have exceeded 7 of the 9 planetary boundaries and we are amidst a great species extinction with unpredictable consequences to our wellbeing! Hope youngsters take action soon!
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 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.
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.
@@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.
@@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/
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
@@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.
Nobody mentions noise and air pollution. Some of my neighbors are very noisy and pestilent, making air unbreathable with their car fumes and yard fires. Celebrations often involve explosions as loud as bombardment. A radio nun complained that fourth of July illegal explosions lasted past two in the morning. Since I was four I've wanted to live in the country away from the city. Can't afford it though. Many endure intolerable lives of noise, stress, sheer inescapable misery. Don't ask if the world is overpopulated, ask if there are too few or too many, too much or too little noise and stench on your street. "Carrying capacity" is a meaningless concept, like asking how many can ride on a bus. It varies, from twenty to a hundred and twenty, hanging from doors and windows, riding on the roof. Elevators have limits, usually ten, but twenty could squeeze in. It's all a matter of preference.
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.
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?
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…
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.
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).
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.
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.
@@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.
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.
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.
"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 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.
The biggest issue with overpopulation isn't resources, its quality of life. Sure, somehow a hundred billion people might be able to be squeezed onto the planet, but it would be extremely likely that you would be living in an extremely small space, due to high land prices, and a good chance that you wouldn't even own that space. Humans weren't made to live in closets, for the longest time in human history we lived in small tribes of less than about a hundred people. Whenever the tribe reached about a hundred people, conflicts would cause some people to split off, and there was a large amount of land for those people to move into. There's been evidence that shows when even animals are confined into tiny spaces, they show evidence of great stress and mental breakdown. I'd argue if all people are not capable of living in a home that they own and is large enough to comfortably accommodate all of its residents, then we are overpopulated, regardless if we can technically feed and maintain them.
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)
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
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.
So does well being necessarily have to include cheese? What *objectively* constitutes well being? Did any greek person 2000 years ago have 'well being'?
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.
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.
Born in 1960, my childhood was fun, and life was full of hope and possibilities. I remember learning Earth then had 5.5 Billion. To have undeveloped land was a wonderful feeling. Nature was thriving, except for Bison.
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.
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'
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?
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.
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 ❤
While some nations experience low population growth there are large parts of the world where population is growing exponentially and unfortunately those are often the parts that can least afford to.
As someone who sees a lot of bird population numbers and often times the reasons for the fluctuations, I have long realized that the number of humans on this planet is a self-balancing system that will not (probably ever) be conquered by humans. There simply are too many random things that factor into population numbers... so while we can always make predictions for what the population numbers will be x years into the future, there is never any guarantee that the population will actually act that way; at some point you will get some "discrete" event that could change the whole "equation" completely, forcing you to make new predictions... that will be good for some time, and then change again.
People are very influenced by public opinion, which can be manipulated. About twenty years ago I read an article by Russian scientist Sergey Kapitsa, who looked at the population growth graph and compared it to graphs of some physical events (including nuclear explosion). His conclusion was that just as nuclear fission produces neutrons that hit other nuclei which in turn produce neutrons that hit more.. , etc., producing a nuclear chain reaction, so do statements and other "elements" of public opinion effect other people, eventually resulting in them having more or less children.
@@Kurtlane on point. Feminism ruined marriage for young males, and laws are designed to make having kids a high risk investment. I wonder how much of this stupid ideology was pushed by "elites" because of their fears of overpopulation. Sadly they should have done it in Africa, not in Europe and US
Having more quality people would mean progress. Having more drug addicts would not. It seems to me that we have more and more people doing unproductive work (especially in governments and its hanger-on's).
I gotta ask, what is desireable about cramming a few billion more people into this world while bending over backwards to accomodate them? Sometimes being able to do something is just not enough of an excuse to actually do it, since it's just not worth it in practice. Billionaires wanting more cheap labor/worshippers is a good reason for them, but the average joe doesn't get much out of that deal.
Things become more complex when you take automation into account: for the jobs and tasks that can be automated to be cheaper than humans, those jobs go away. What do you do with the humans that would otherwise work in those roles? So many people have a limited understanding of just how diverse humans are in intelligence and personalities, including drive: you can’t just tell people “learn to code!” Or something else, whatever it is: even if they can technically do it, they may end up being mediocre at best, and quite possibly and probably very unhappy, all assuming they have enough drive to learn that new thing and keep at it. That’s not a given! The logical scenarios I can readily see are both horrible: 1. A small class of people in the jobs that make good money or at least are highly skilled in something that can’t be automated, while the rest survive off of some sort of universal basic income, Great, those that can, work, but have the burden of being taxed absurdly to support the others that don’t work: humans aren’t stable in such a pattern for long. 2. A twist on the first one, but those that aren’t employed/employable for profit in the manufacturing of goods and rendering of services that can’t be automated, are otherwise idle with nothing better to do, so… well, too many idle people without an overarching goal are a menace to society, so people/governments will give them one: warfare. All those unemployed and just getting UBI seem likely to not have much of a chance escaping their station to become more well-off, what have they got to lose? They just largely exist, leading meaningless lives, have poor self-worth. Humans (on average) don’t thrive in that situation. I would like to think there are better scenarios that will play out, but the way things are going now look like one of those two as the most probable. Perhaps many of those on UBI become the youTube content creators, and the rest of those on UBI spend their time and quite a bit of their UBI supporting the content creators/influencers from what little they have. If others have scenarios they think are likely beyond what I’ve stated, I’d be curious to read them,
climate change and other looming environmental disasters renders this entire discussion asinine. externalities and unforeseen consequences are going to swamp our ability to innovate starting now. then there's all those nukes sitting over in Russia. We aren't going to last long enough to worry about overpopulation
@@strictnonconformist7369 Not really. "Doomsters" are worried about overpopulation. I'm not. Severe climate change is happening right now and it is going to get worse. It will cause political conflict and war, and eventually those nukes are going to get used. It's inevitable, and there's no way to invent our way out of it.
@@strictnonconformist7369 Caring for the elderly will be big business pretty soon, especially as they continue to live longer. I can't forsee us automating all of their needs. So maybe old people will stave off a world war or two.
Using data linked in the description, we can calculate, very crudely, how many Teslas Elon needs to sell to offset his 8 children. On average, a developed country individual emits ~58.6 tonnes of CO2 (tCOs) per year. Assuming an 80 year life expectancy, that means Elon's kids will produced approximately 80*8*58.6 ~= 37500 tCO2s*. Over it's lifetime, a Tesla reduces emissions by about 65% relative to a (nice) gas car. Living car-free reduces carbon emissions by ~2.4tCO2s per year, which means lifetime car ownership yields 2.4*80 ~= 200 tCO2s. An always-Tesla consumer will produce .35 * 200 = 70 less tCO2s over their lifetime. Assuming they would own 4.5 Tesla's over their lfetime, each Tesla saves 70 / 4.5 = ~15 tCO2s. That means Elon has to sell 37500 / 15 = 2500 Teslas to offset his children.. which is more than I expected. But considering he sold 310K Teslas last quarter, he offsets his children in less than 12 hours. * This is likely an underestimate, since they are the children of a mega billionaire.
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 ...
Having followed Elon Musk's progressions and predilections for more than a decade, it has occurred to me that his fixation on our species becoming multi-planetary correlates with my own realization that the undeniably most successful economics, capitalism, is dependent for its success on an ever increasing population. Either we radically change human nature, the basis for market success, and employ the "Malthusian Drill" described in Huxley's "Brave New World" to stabilize at a sustainable rate of births and deaths, or we find the ability to keep expanding. Philosophically, stasis seems stultifying. But expansion to multi-planetary "New Worlds" also seems risky beyond measurement. I Have been mainly a Doomster myself but I can see why Musk's optimism for a technological solution is so appealing. Who wouldn't want an ever burgeoning wealth of customers in his present position atop the world's billionaire elites?
Capitalism doesn't require an expanding population. What happens is the market changes. At present, high efficiency and throughput factories are the norm to produce for the market the goods in demand. Should the market become saturated, it will no longer support those institutions and the production of such goods and services will change form. For goods that won't so easily saturate or require replacement volumes of significant size, some metastable relationship will form. The wild card in all of this is politics and its capacity to influence market behavior - via fruad (fiat currencies) or sheer political influence (contract/bailout work). If the market is telling a business that it is not viable, and politics keeps propping it up - it will eventually lead to the collapse of the political system and, in fascist states like the West, the entire economic order.
Stasis is stultifying… stasis of what? Of population, that’s just one aspect of life. Nothing else is static. Life will be non-stultifying with a stable population or even a declining one. We certainly don’t need to expand our human-caused damage beyond this one planet. We shouldn’t go to Mars until we learn how to take care of this place.
My sentiments exactly when reading Musk's tea leaves: Capitalism requires an ever-increasing market size and therefore capitalists will always claim the birth rate is too low. They don't care about the quality of life, increasing its quantity is enough to satisfy their goals. But projections of resource availability are invalid if they don't consider the massive effects of global warming on the food supply chain. And those effects are inherently unpredictable. And this idea that humanity will ever advance technologically is contradicted by historical events where we've seen regressions such as the Bronze Age collapse and the Dark Ages, when complex trade networks and long established political entities were swept away in a very short period of time by political turmoil, resulting in reduced quality of life.
@@bobdinitto While civilizations do indeed tend to cycle, your view is completely at odds with history and the data. There was no "dark age." Rome collapsed, economically, over the course of centuries. Or, more accurately, the Senate of Rome transformed into the Catholic Church. Rome was one of the first powers of its kind and the state, as we understand the concept, much less a nation, did not truly exist. The Catholic Church supported various families within what would now be called Western Europe. This is evident in the Latin base of French and even English (which is nothing like their germanic root tongues). Whereas the Roman State imploded and declined, the trade arts continued in many other reaches of its empire, now governed under the Church. Bloomery furnaces were replaced with blast furnaces and iron supplanted bronze. Alchemy began to find some of its first emperical purchases and took its first steps into chemistry and what would become the groundwork for the scientific method. Socially, the magna carta was written to establish rules between the king and nobles - but as the French peoples fell into wars and the legend of Jean De Arc spread, the concept of a nation truly began to take hold - the notion that the king and his administration was a steward of a grand tribe bound by duty ... was new, and an idea that would form the crux of the later U.S. Constitution. Prior to the advent of enclosure farming, the king owned the land and just didn't bother the common folk. Seed return ratios were very low and one might only get 8x the yield of what was seeded. Slash and burn devastated the local ecology and there are more trees, today, than in the 1500s, specifically because enclosures led to rotation and fertilization strategies that radically improved yields. 30:1 returns are common even in poor soil conditions. While civilizations do wax and wane, we are not helpless victims of our own shortcomings. See my first comment in this thread in regard to capitalism and the shrinking markets theorem you're invoking from Marx.
@@Aim54Delta capitalism requires constant growth and new exploitable resources, labor and materials, hence the unhealthy obsession with constant expansion. Capitalism grew out of colonialism, and continues to exploit the third world even now
@@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.
@@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.
Hi Sabine, maybe I didn't notice it before, but I have the impression that you have greatly improved your style compared to the older videos from over a year ago or more. I have the impression that it is now not only very informative but also very entertaining! I will stay tuned!👍
She improved the background a lot. It was usually pretty uniform in old video. Now it actually support what she says with graphs, images, etc. Even just a slighly related image does help. For example the background in this is a city when nothing else is shown.
One of the most fun talks yet Sabine! I am so glad the world population will take care of itself. We do not need more brains, just need to engage more of those we have.
At some point every advanced civilization will have to balance their birthrates and death rates if they're gonna avoid constant population collapses. Our species just hasn't come to grip with this yet.
that or maybe stuff like homosexuality and asexuality are sorts of psicological handbrakes our species has ... when the population increases the population of non reproductive individuals increases and that slows the birth rate enough before carrying capacity is reached ... but idk i am just hypotesizing
I guess it comes down to politics. Many (1st world) countries are going to balance the population with migration, but sooner or later we have to give better benefits to families. My parents raised 3 children with one income (no high education). Try that now and you will quickly see one (out of many) reasons ppl stopped having kids these days.
@@davidegaruti2582 The proportion of "non reproductive individuals" doesnt change with population size. I think, the main factors are: - medicine (with higher survival rates, you dont need as much children) - education (less unintended pregnancies) - maybe population density (when your environment is flooded with people, you mabe dont want it to be even more)
I agree with the importance you place on cheese. Specifically I am very concerned about the supply of Limburger here in Canada. As a side note, this video was a very informative synopsis of a rather existential problem.
@@pex3 Good! Carbon dioxide is a fertilizer - eat cheese and don't feel guilty about it! www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth
It’s really bad for your hormones and practically every aspect of your health but it’s also incredibly cruel to the cows. The moms are separated from their babies and cry all night long over it. And the babies are used for veal. And it’s obviously horrible for the environment.
Elon says a lot of words. “Post hoc ergo propter hoc” are never among them. I hope our slowing population growth will come into equilibrium with renewable resources in my lifetime. And I hope we will learn to stop celebrating Elon as an authority figure on much of anything other than investing.
Have you ever listened to any of his interviews? They are very revealing. You learned he is and entitled poser, that only uses people's minds and claims he himself is the one that's smart. He's a joke and the ideas that he promotes that are his own are so very flawed. He really says stuff that an person that doesn't understand science of any discipline would say. When he get called out on it, he's like that other entitled cult leader and hits the correct person with insults and false accusations.
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...
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
The forecast you're using sounds rather extreme. Nonlinear factors are likely to take over. Nigeria, for example, may start to experience overcrowding, while countries with precipitous population declines may start programs to promote fertility. The "carrying capacity" isn't just an issue for the planet but for individual nations.
Excellent video Sabine. Thanks. I wish the dutch would have been more wisely with the gas resource. We found an enormous gas bulb in the netherlands an 1959 and have been selling it for very cheap to many countries. Today there still is a lot but extracting it has become problematic. The soil lowers and that has many consequences for buildings structure for example. We still have a lot of cheese though ...
@@karlsjostedt8415 Perhaps, just perhaps, rocks aren't fluid enough to get them trough a pump and a pipe down into these cavities. That said, pumping down CO2 extracted from the atmosphere might be an option. Once we have enough renewable energy to feed the extraction and pumping process.
@@hanslepoeter5167 They only want left wing solutions to the problem. That isn't a left wing solution. Chimate science is 90% politics and 10% science.
@@engineeringvision9507 I do not agree. Science is science. When politics is involved resulting in something not true it is false science. Not that that does not happen. Assume Putin declares pythagoras wrong. Is it wrong ?
When you have a ponzi scheme involving a social safety net that requires multiple workers to support one retired individual, population loss is bad. If we didn't, it would be a problem.
There is a lot of talk about the sun's activity reaching a worrying level where it could result into worldwide catastrophe together with magnetic field weakening and pole reversal. It would be interesting to hear what your take is.
The question is simply if an average extra person has a nett positive or negative impact on society, civilisation and the planet as a whole. I’m an environmentalist, but I think that if a person lives and behaves in alignment with nature, it’s absolutely possible to have a nett positive impact on biodiversity and the overall health of the local and even global ecosystem. In the Brazilian rain forest, you can see the remnants of ancient civilisation, not by the buildings they left (they are all gone), but because there are more edible plants growing in an area where there used to be a village. Even the soil is more fertile in those areas. Archeologists call it “terra preta” (black earth).
Another important factor is humanity's reaction to changes. Right now overpopulation is a philosophical question, which will gradually turn into an economic one (it partly already has), and finally become an existential question in a few thousand years (60th century ballpark). At that point, humans will radically change their approach, if they exist long enough to see it happen. Being worried about humans not breeding enough is like being worried that humans will suddenly stop eating - possible, yes, but inconsistent with all observations.
The observable reality shows that humans are way too complex to be predictable with base biological models. Carrying capacity could by set almost anywhere depending on whether we are farmers, herdsmen, fishers, or all 3. It's not like coyotes where we can count the number of rabbits and predict the maximum population. If we perfectly allocated and used the earth's resources the maximum population of humans could be in the trillions. But if we even just screw up what we already have, like if we ban all fossil fuels tomorrow, the actual sustainable population is already 7 billion lower than the existing population.
Elon Musk tends to get pretty excited about stuff. I'm the same way and sometimes I'll passionately discuss my ideas and concerns before realizing later my thoughts were incomplete. Further, I'm weirded out how not ok that is to others, in my case, because I'm not a billionaire or government official.
@@gedrias5817 that's the thing though. There's nothing wrong with it in the first place. It's not causing harm, and if we don't have freedom of expression we have nothing. This entire attitude of judging people and/or giving them crap for having an opinion is cruel, unreasonable, and dangerous af.
@@tysonfromearth I don't want to give someone crap for having an opinion *. Now I'm not sure if I understood your comment correctly; didn't you say, as self-criticism, it's not ok to make points not thought through? The idea of my remark is that status means responsibility, making it even less ok. Also I didn't mean it so serious but more tongue-in- cheek, that probably didn't come across. Here I tried to be deadpan myself, but it seems I'm not good at this :P * not generally at least; it depends on the opinion
@@gedrias5817 didn't mean to say your currently doing it necessarily, sorry if that came out wrong. Meant to get more at the general social pattern. With power comes Spider-Man quotes so that's a good point. Also, freedom of speech to criticize. I think the important part of what I have to contribute is that if hot takes start a mature conversation where people try to come to higher truth together it's a win-win.
Ironically the same can be said for Sabine when it comes to topics that she actually has strong opinions about, particularly in her field of theoretical physics
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 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.
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.
Great video and great delivery. I was hoping you would mention how animal populations in the wild will regulate their own populations during good and bad times by having fewer babies when things are rough like when food is scarce and then have more babies when things are going well. I'd be interested in how much we might self-regulate our populations based off of our environmental pressures.
@@glasslinger I learned recently that when they reintroduced wolves to Yellowstone national Park it reduced the elk population which then helped the beaver population thrive because the elk were eating the food supply that the beavers depended upon. It's all about a balance.
If she did any research you'd find facts in her videos but there aren't any. If you know the basics you wonder what sort of drivel she spouts without ever touching any facts at all.
There are rural areas where people have to live in deep poverty and in crazy conditions, and there are highly populated countries like Japan where the mega city Tokyo is very clean and healthy.
But why? Carryinng capacity is a lousy metric because it doesn't care about quality of life. 250 million people would live far better lives than 10 billion would.
Here in the UK there's less and less green space (I'm getting on a bit so have seen this fairly clearly over the years ...and worked a lot with maps and mapping in the past ...and it's pretty obvious looking through the ages) and this is despite the current population staying fairly stable. Currently, there's a lot of building on good farm land, which makes little sense ...and sometimes on poor land for farming but land great for wildlife. More efficient farming with high yield crops often come with health issues and can cause significant damage to biodiversity. Having said that, as a side (I've been doing research on ancestry), a few generations ago many families were much larger than they are today. However lifespan was generally less. Overall I think just considering human carrying capacity is short-sighted and a little sad as we're just one of the many species sharing this planet. Among other things, maybe we should strive for quality rather than quantity.
That's really interesting. Do you know if what you experienced holds true for Scotland or is it more England centric and to the same degree for each country?
@@Ian_Carolan It's all a bit subjective, based on my own experience. I live in NE England, so have probably more in common with southern Scotland than southern England ...but expect stuff like new building projects are dependent on projected demand in the various areas and how individual local authorities plan or develop strategies to cope with this. It does concern me that because currently many small farms struggle financially, they are tempted to sell off 'good' farmland, with developers (and partly local authorities) taking minimum consideration for the wider infrastucture and environment (also to maximize profits or just to make them financially viable). My mapping background just reveals the evidence of previous population increases. And with my interest in nature, I've witnessed destruction of habitat ...although this is tending to be considered a little more nowadays.
While the average lifespan was shorter, individuals who survived childhood tended to live just as long as we do today. Plenty of old gravestones in the churchyards with ages of 80+ carved on them. But childhood mortality was a huge problem in the past. Typically only two out of ten children would be expected to survive to adulthood in poorer households. This is in the UK but other European countries have broadly similar figures.
@@michaelkaliski7651 The life style and the quality and comfort standards were different also. Now, each human being "costs" too much to the whole planet.
Putting upward pressure on the availability of decent enough jobs: carry on as usual vs what methods need to go, and what methods need to be updated / improved?
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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
@@தமிழோன் 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
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!
🤣
😂😂😂
WWII was a Politically Correct war used to justify American racism so Detroit Autoworkers murdered Vincent Chin
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.
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.
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
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?
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
Unfortunately many people are not concerned about progress, they were concerned about having power over other people.
What are you on about most young people ea my gen, arw worried about surviving about never having a home, never having a career, never having a car
.....never having kids....because of the price of everything.😊
@@Name..........You're worried about not keeping up with trends and being unable to buy the next iphone/water bottle some dipshit influencer tells you to buy.
You love to complain about things, but take no action, while also self indulging and not working hard for the things you want.
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?
@@whowereweagain 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.
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.
"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.
I. Q. shrinkage only,
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.
With improved use of fertilizers and improved sources of fertilizer, we will be able to diminish pollution of streams, rivers, and coastal waters by ammonia and nitrates, also phosphates. Improper overuse of fertilizer also leads through bacterial action to the large scale production of nitrous oxide (NNO), which is a potent, long lived greenhouse gas, and a very effective destroyer of ozone in the upper atmosphere. Ozone protects us from UV radiation. Improving nitrogen utilization is both a scientific, technical, and "best practices" issue.
1930s had a potassium phosphate shortage of famine dustbowls for Nazi Germany to go "Soylent Green" of "recycled food" similar to Huxley's dystopia where they fly past "Chemical recovery furnaces" before boarding a rocket plane to "savage lands" of "families considered a dirty word".
" 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 TH-cam 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...
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.
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.
@Elijah Mergold I'd rather eat shitty food than no food but yes maybe agriculture and energy should be nationalized.
@Elijah Mergold Idk I live in a food desert . I have plenty of cans stocked up alrdy in my pantry. Thank goodness for canned foods.
@Elijah Mergold ok at this point you're just being an ass. Both good quality food and bad quality food can expire. No one here is going to see your reply and think you're genuine.
yeah, I don't think we have to low quantity of brains, but we need higher quality through education.
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.
Depends on what you grow...
Don’t worry. Since modernity is turning out to be a total disaster at least socially depopulation is becoming a bigger concern. People are becoming so peculiar and out of touch with their instincts that half the population can no longer cope with mating and breeding.
> You can do the math: If you divide...
I did the math just for grins about 20 years ago. I came up with 3/4 an acre per human (less than what you came up with). Do the flip-side: stand every human shoulder-to-shoulder and how large of a space do you need? About the size of the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. Look at a globe to see just how small a space that is.
But neither of those really tell you anything because no society ever shapes its neighborhoods with an eye to either of those extremes.
Here are 2 things that ought to affect our ideas of whether or not this planet is overcrowded:
- how much land it takes to accommodate each human's consumption and waste. I don't know what that number is, and would be skeptical of anyone trying to tell me what that number is (just being honest).
- how much untouched land is there on this planet? Google earth can help you with that. And quite frankly, there's so much untouched land one has to wonder why overpopulation is a topic.
When I put those together, I come with one conclusion: it's our CITIES that are overpopulated. Not our planet.
@boydvanoosterhout7966 >Growth is exponential. ... population growth is declining,
I think ^this^ is what happens when doomsday excitement slows down to catch its breath :)
The short response for most of your statements is no, no and ..nope.
Speaking of alarmist excitement, I wonder if you're aware of climate change hysterics and their utter inability to predict anything even remotely accurately over the past ~70 years.
On the sane side of things, check out Bjorn Lomborg's take on climate change.
Thanks.
. Do you mean what type of food is produced? A plant-based food production system would be the only sustainable option for a widespread method of feeding the growing population.
If you meant what type of human population growth then growing a population who eats only plants would be the most sustainable
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.
A study from the University of Minnesota found that a plant-based food production system would feed 4 billion more people than the current method of using animal agriculture. It would also preserve our natural environment and biodiversity plus address the threat of climate change.
Malthus was right just up to the point he was writing. He accurately described the the pre-1800 world. Then the world changed around him. Lots of technology changed not just fertilizer. Transportation was huge, allowing food to be moved vast differences meaning local populations were more insulated from local agricultural downturns. Of course he was also completely wrong about people's ability to control their own.
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.
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.
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.
@@bikecontroller3268 So did Jesus. So did Thoms Malthus. So did Ehrlich. None of their predictions panned out.
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.
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
Lancet Microbe - Impact Factor: 86.208
World Psychiatry - Impact Factor: 79.683
Nature Reviews Microbiology - Impact Factor: 78.297
Lancet Psychiatry - Impact Factor: 77.056
Nature Reviews Materials - Impact Factor: 76.679
Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology - Impact Factor: 73.082
Lancet Public Health - Impact Factor: 72.427
Chemical Reviews - Impact Factor: 72.087
Lancet Infectious Diseases - Impact Factor: 71.421
Nature Reviews Cancer - Impact Factor: 69.8
Nature - Impact Factor: 69.504
Nature Biotechnology - Impact Factor: 68.164
Nature Energy - Impact Factor: 67.439
Cell - Impact Factor: 66.85
Nature Reviews Disease Primers - Impact Factor: 65.038
Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology - Impact Factor: 65.011
Science - Impact Factor: 63.714
Chemical Society Reviews - Impact Factor: 60.615
Lancet Neurology - Impact Factor: 59.935
Nature Reviews Genetics - Impact Factor: 59.581
Psychological Science in the Public Interest - Impact Factor: 56.2
Lancet Oncology - Impact Factor: 54.433
Annals Of Oncology - Impact Factor: 51.769
Annals Of Internal Medicine - Impact Factor: 51.598
Journal Of Clinical Oncology - Impact Factor: 50.717
Reviews Of Modern Physics - Impact Factor: 50.485
Clinical Microbiology Reviews - Impact Factor: 50.129
Nature Reviews Cardiology - Impact Factor: 49.421
Progress In Materials Science - Impact Factor: 48.165
Nature Methods - Impact Factor: 47.99
Nature Materials - Impact Factor: 47.656
Nature Reviews Endocrinology - Impact Factor: 47.564
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!
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.
we are talking about humanity here, this is a longterm slow to react problem. obviously it will be the horsemen, since we will obviously wait until the last second.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 TH-camrs like you rather than influencers! Keep up the great work!
"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.
"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
@@annamyob if only there was something we could do?
@@gregsonvaux4492 🤣
Interesting, but two things, carrying capacity has been exceeded for some time now, that's what overshoot day means! Also progress is nice but does not mean constant economic growth, the main resource which will dwindle is fossil fuels, so we must consume less energy and even tightent our belts until we reach 3 billion or so...and the only good thing about mentioning Musk is that he's putting the awareness of the situation up front and people are skeptic about his motives, essentially he wants to profit for ever. He might want to terraform Mars, but we are marsforming Earth in the meantime! I haven't even mentioned we have exceeded 7 of the 9 planetary boundaries and we are amidst a great species extinction with unpredictable consequences to our wellbeing! Hope youngsters take action soon!
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.
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/
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!
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!
I think the problem is the change in demographics.
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
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.
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.
Nobody mentions noise and air pollution. Some of my neighbors are very noisy and pestilent, making air unbreathable with their car fumes and yard fires. Celebrations often involve explosions as loud as bombardment. A radio nun complained that fourth of July illegal explosions lasted past two in the morning. Since I was four I've wanted to live in the country away from the city. Can't afford it though. Many endure intolerable lives of noise, stress, sheer inescapable misery. Don't ask if the world is overpopulated, ask if there are too few or too many, too much or too little noise and stench on your street. "Carrying capacity" is a meaningless concept, like asking how many can ride on a bus. It varies, from twenty to a hundred and twenty, hanging from doors and windows, riding on the roof. Elevators have limits, usually ten, but twenty could squeeze in. It's all a matter of preference.
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.
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.
I am really starting to like your way of presenting science. You're a gem :)
Gobbledygook without the science
Coomsters?
Excellent video...as always. Love this channel....always fascinating. Thank you for your content, viewpoint, and humor.
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).
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.
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.
Sabine, I LOVE your blogs. You tackle many topics that I have questioned (and with "wicked" humor). Please keep up your good work.
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??
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.
"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.
The biggest issue with overpopulation isn't resources, its quality of life. Sure, somehow a hundred billion people might be able to be squeezed onto the planet, but it would be extremely likely that you would be living in an extremely small space, due to high land prices, and a good chance that you wouldn't even own that space.
Humans weren't made to live in closets, for the longest time in human history we lived in small tribes of less than about a hundred people. Whenever the tribe reached about a hundred people, conflicts would cause some people to split off, and there was a large amount of land for those people to move into. There's been evidence that shows when even animals are confined into tiny spaces, they show evidence of great stress and mental breakdown.
I'd argue if all people are not capable of living in a home that they own and is large enough to comfortably accommodate all of its residents, then we are overpopulated, regardless if we can technically feed and maintain them.
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
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.
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 ;)
Born in 1960, my childhood was fun, and life was full of hope and possibilities. I remember learning Earth then had 5.5 Billion. To have undeveloped land was a wonderful feeling. Nature was thriving, except for Bison.
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...
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.
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.
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.
While some nations experience low population growth there are large parts of the world where population is growing exponentially and unfortunately those are often the parts that can least afford to.
But aren't we seeing an overall decline worldwide ?
@@justwannabehappy6735 yes, but sub-saharan Africa is still growing
As someone who sees a lot of bird population numbers and often times the reasons for the fluctuations, I have long realized that the number of humans on this planet is a self-balancing system that will not (probably ever) be conquered by humans. There simply are too many random things that factor into population numbers... so while we can always make predictions for what the population numbers will be x years into the future, there is never any guarantee that the population will actually act that way; at some point you will get some "discrete" event that could change the whole "equation" completely, forcing you to make new predictions... that will be good for some time, and then change again.
People are very influenced by public opinion, which can be manipulated.
About twenty years ago I read an article by Russian scientist Sergey Kapitsa, who looked at the population growth graph and compared it to graphs of some physical events (including nuclear explosion). His conclusion was that just as nuclear fission produces neutrons that hit other nuclei which in turn produce neutrons that hit more.. , etc., producing a nuclear chain reaction, so do statements and other "elements" of public opinion effect other people, eventually resulting in them having more or less children.
@@Kurtlane on point. Feminism ruined marriage for young males, and laws are designed to make having kids a high risk investment. I wonder how much of this stupid ideology was pushed by "elites" because of their fears of overpopulation. Sadly they should have done it in Africa, not in Europe and US
@@ineffige , OK, I never said what you said. Don't hold me responsible.
That sounds rather grim
Having more quality people would mean progress. Having more drug addicts would not. It seems to me that we have more and more people doing unproductive work (especially in governments and its hanger-on's).
I gotta ask, what is desireable about cramming a few billion more people into this world while bending over backwards to accomodate them? Sometimes being able to do something is just not enough of an excuse to actually do it, since it's just not worth it in practice. Billionaires wanting more cheap labor/worshippers is a good reason for them, but the average joe doesn't get much out of that deal.
Things become more complex when you take automation into account: for the jobs and tasks that can be automated to be cheaper than humans, those jobs go away. What do you do with the humans that would otherwise work in those roles? So many people have a limited understanding of just how diverse humans are in intelligence and personalities, including drive: you can’t just tell people “learn to code!” Or something else, whatever it is: even if they can technically do it, they may end up being mediocre at best, and quite possibly and probably very unhappy, all assuming they have enough drive to learn that new thing and keep at it. That’s not a given!
The logical scenarios I can readily see are both horrible:
1. A small class of people in the jobs that make good money or at least are highly skilled in something that can’t be automated, while the rest survive off of some sort of universal basic income, Great, those that can, work, but have the burden of being taxed absurdly to support the others that don’t work: humans aren’t stable in such a pattern for long.
2. A twist on the first one, but those that aren’t employed/employable for profit in the manufacturing of goods and rendering of services that can’t be automated, are otherwise idle with nothing better to do, so… well, too many idle people without an overarching goal are a menace to society, so people/governments will give them one: warfare. All those unemployed and just getting UBI seem likely to not have much of a chance escaping their station to become more well-off, what have they got to lose? They just largely exist, leading meaningless lives, have poor self-worth. Humans (on average) don’t thrive in that situation.
I would like to think there are better scenarios that will play out, but the way things are going now look like one of those two as the most probable. Perhaps many of those on UBI become the youTube content creators, and the rest of those on UBI spend their time and quite a bit of their UBI supporting the content creators/influencers from what little they have.
If others have scenarios they think are likely beyond what I’ve stated, I’d be curious to read them,
climate change and other looming environmental disasters renders this entire discussion asinine. externalities and unforeseen consequences are going to swamp our ability to innovate starting now. then there's all those nukes sitting over in Russia. We aren't going to last long enough to worry about overpopulation
@@scambammer6102 so, you’re clearly of the Doomster category.
@@strictnonconformist7369 Not really. "Doomsters" are worried about overpopulation. I'm not. Severe climate change is happening right now and it is going to get worse. It will cause political conflict and war, and eventually those nukes are going to get used. It's inevitable, and there's no way to invent our way out of it.
@@strictnonconformist7369 Caring for the elderly will be big business pretty soon, especially as they continue to live longer. I can't forsee us automating all of their needs.
So maybe old people will stave off a world war or two.
Using data linked in the description, we can calculate, very crudely, how many Teslas Elon needs to sell to offset his 8 children.
On average, a developed country individual emits ~58.6 tonnes of CO2 (tCOs) per year. Assuming an 80 year life expectancy, that means Elon's kids will produced approximately 80*8*58.6 ~= 37500 tCO2s*. Over it's lifetime, a Tesla reduces emissions by about 65% relative to a (nice) gas car. Living car-free reduces carbon emissions by ~2.4tCO2s per year, which means lifetime car ownership yields 2.4*80 ~= 200 tCO2s. An always-Tesla consumer will produce .35 * 200 = 70 less tCO2s over their lifetime. Assuming they would own 4.5 Tesla's over their lfetime, each Tesla saves 70 / 4.5 = ~15 tCO2s. That means Elon has to sell 37500 / 15 = 2500 Teslas to offset his children.. which is more than I expected.
But considering he sold 310K Teslas last quarter, he offsets his children in less than 12 hours.
* This is likely an underestimate, since they are the children of a mega billionaire.
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 ...
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!
Having followed Elon Musk's progressions and predilections for more than a decade, it has occurred to me that his fixation on our species becoming multi-planetary correlates with my own realization that the undeniably most successful economics, capitalism, is dependent for its success on an ever increasing population. Either we radically change human nature, the basis for market success, and employ the "Malthusian Drill" described in Huxley's "Brave New World" to stabilize at a sustainable rate of births and deaths, or we find the ability to keep expanding.
Philosophically, stasis seems stultifying. But expansion to multi-planetary "New Worlds" also seems risky beyond measurement. I Have been mainly a Doomster myself but I can see why Musk's optimism for a technological solution is so appealing. Who wouldn't want an ever burgeoning wealth of customers in his present position atop the world's billionaire elites?
Capitalism doesn't require an expanding population.
What happens is the market changes. At present, high efficiency and throughput factories are the norm to produce for the market the goods in demand. Should the market become saturated, it will no longer support those institutions and the production of such goods and services will change form. For goods that won't so easily saturate or require replacement volumes of significant size, some metastable relationship will form.
The wild card in all of this is politics and its capacity to influence market behavior - via fruad (fiat currencies) or sheer political influence (contract/bailout work). If the market is telling a business that it is not viable, and politics keeps propping it up - it will eventually lead to the collapse of the political system and, in fascist states like the West, the entire economic order.
Stasis is stultifying… stasis of what? Of population, that’s just one aspect of life. Nothing else is static. Life will be non-stultifying with a stable population or even a declining one. We certainly don’t need to expand our human-caused damage beyond this one planet. We shouldn’t go to Mars until we learn how to take care of this place.
My sentiments exactly when reading Musk's tea leaves: Capitalism requires an ever-increasing market size and therefore capitalists will always claim the birth rate is too low. They don't care about the quality of life, increasing its quantity is enough to satisfy their goals. But projections of resource availability are invalid if they don't consider the massive effects of global warming on the food supply chain. And those effects are inherently unpredictable. And this idea that humanity will ever advance technologically is contradicted by historical events where we've seen regressions such as the Bronze Age collapse and the Dark Ages, when complex trade networks and long established political entities were swept away in a very short period of time by political turmoil, resulting in reduced quality of life.
@@bobdinitto
While civilizations do indeed tend to cycle, your view is completely at odds with history and the data. There was no "dark age." Rome collapsed, economically, over the course of centuries. Or, more accurately, the Senate of Rome transformed into the Catholic Church. Rome was one of the first powers of its kind and the state, as we understand the concept, much less a nation, did not truly exist.
The Catholic Church supported various families within what would now be called Western Europe. This is evident in the Latin base of French and even English (which is nothing like their germanic root tongues).
Whereas the Roman State imploded and declined, the trade arts continued in many other reaches of its empire, now governed under the Church. Bloomery furnaces were replaced with blast furnaces and iron supplanted bronze. Alchemy began to find some of its first emperical purchases and took its first steps into chemistry and what would become the groundwork for the scientific method.
Socially, the magna carta was written to establish rules between the king and nobles - but as the French peoples fell into wars and the legend of Jean De Arc spread, the concept of a nation truly began to take hold - the notion that the king and his administration was a steward of a grand tribe bound by duty ... was new, and an idea that would form the crux of the later U.S. Constitution.
Prior to the advent of enclosure farming, the king owned the land and just didn't bother the common folk. Seed return ratios were very low and one might only get 8x the yield of what was seeded. Slash and burn devastated the local ecology and there are more trees, today, than in the 1500s, specifically because enclosures led to rotation and fertilization strategies that radically improved yields. 30:1 returns are common even in poor soil conditions.
While civilizations do wax and wane, we are not helpless victims of our own shortcomings.
See my first comment in this thread in regard to capitalism and the shrinking markets theorem you're invoking from Marx.
@@Aim54Delta capitalism requires constant growth and new exploitable resources, labor and materials, hence the unhealthy obsession with constant expansion. Capitalism grew out of colonialism, and continues to exploit the third world even now
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.
Hi Sabine, maybe I didn't notice it before, but I have the impression that you have greatly improved your style compared to the older videos from over a year ago or more. I have the impression that it is now not only very informative but also very entertaining! I will stay tuned!👍
she was always entertaining, once you get her humor
She improved the background a lot. It was usually pretty uniform in old video. Now it actually support what she says with graphs, images, etc. Even just a slighly related image does help.
For example the background in this is a city when nothing else is shown.
But also way more political…. Which is very bad…
@@toocooldk why is it bad?
@@toocooldk you mean she doesn’t hold her punches with people who say stupid things that the science doesn’t support?
One of the most fun talks yet Sabine! I am so glad the world population will take care of itself. We do not need more brains, just need to engage more of those we have.
At some point every advanced civilization will have to balance their birthrates and death rates if they're gonna avoid constant population collapses. Our species just hasn't come to grip with this yet.
that or maybe stuff like homosexuality and asexuality are sorts of psicological handbrakes our species has ...
when the population increases the population of non reproductive individuals increases and that slows the birth rate enough before carrying capacity is reached ...
but idk i am just hypotesizing
Poor china. Maybe less communists in the future. Need to go back to one child policy
@@davidegaruti2582 pretty sure people in ancient times were still gay, arguably more than now.
I guess it comes down to politics. Many (1st world) countries are going to balance the population with migration, but sooner or later we have to give better benefits to families.
My parents raised 3 children with one income (no high education). Try that now and you will quickly see one (out of many) reasons ppl stopped having kids these days.
@@davidegaruti2582 The proportion of "non reproductive individuals" doesnt change with population size.
I think, the main factors are:
- medicine (with higher survival rates, you dont need as much children)
- education (less unintended pregnancies)
- maybe population density (when your environment is flooded with people, you mabe dont want it to be even more)
I agree with the importance you place on cheese. Specifically I am very concerned about the supply of Limburger here in Canada. As a side note, this video was a very informative synopsis of a rather existential problem.
I love cheese but the carbon emissions from cheese production are insane.
@@pex3 I have a plan to store carbon in the holes.
@@pex3 Good! Carbon dioxide is a fertilizer - eat cheese and don't feel guilty about it! www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth
It’s really bad for your hormones and practically every aspect of your health but it’s also incredibly cruel to the cows. The moms are separated from their babies and cry all night long over it. And the babies are used for veal. And it’s obviously horrible for the environment.
@@tnijoo5109 THIS IS REAL MASS MURDER AND TORTURE! WHY DOESN'T YOUR COMMENT HAVE A BILLION LIKES?!
Elon says a lot of words. “Post hoc ergo propter hoc” are never among them.
I hope our slowing population growth will come into equilibrium with renewable resources in my lifetime. And I hope we will learn to stop celebrating Elon as an authority figure on much of anything other than investing.
That won't stop until the stupid Media stop asking him to talk. He's a big ego and right wing nutjob.
So true. The guy has a cult of personality following that is not only dangerous, but sickening as well.
Yes, Elon says a lot of words that mean nothing, everything he touches turns into dust.
Elon and his illegitimate children with many women
Have you ever listened to any of his interviews? They are very revealing. You learned he is and entitled poser, that only uses people's minds and claims he himself is the one that's smart. He's a joke and the ideas that he promotes that are his own are so very flawed. He really says stuff that an person that doesn't understand science of any discipline would say. When he get called out on it, he's like that other entitled cult leader and hits the correct person with insults and false accusations.
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...
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
The forecast you're using sounds rather extreme. Nonlinear factors are likely to take over. Nigeria, for example, may start to experience overcrowding, while countries with precipitous population declines may start programs to promote fertility. The "carrying capacity" isn't just an issue for the planet but for individual nations.
Excellent video Sabine. Thanks. I wish the dutch would have been more wisely with the gas resource. We found an enormous gas bulb in the netherlands an 1959 and have been selling it for very cheap to many countries. Today there still is a lot but extracting it has become problematic. The soil lowers and that has many consequences for buildings structure for example. We still have a lot of cheese though ...
As part of payment asked for the gas, include dirt or rocks of similar volume to use to fill the space... problem solved.
@@karlsjostedt8415 Perhaps, just perhaps, rocks aren't fluid enough to get them trough a pump and a pipe down into these cavities.
That said, pumping down CO2 extracted from the atmosphere might be an option. Once we have enough renewable energy to feed the extraction and pumping process.
@@traumflug for now all these options are way to expensive. That will not change soon.
@@hanslepoeter5167 They only want left wing solutions to the problem. That isn't a left wing solution. Chimate science is 90% politics and 10% science.
@@engineeringvision9507 I do not agree. Science is science. When politics is involved resulting in something not true it is false science. Not that that does not happen. Assume Putin declares pythagoras wrong. Is it wrong ?
You take on some really great topics. An engrossing walk-through of the whole spectrum of speculations, and then some nicely grounded analysis.
When you have a ponzi scheme involving a social safety net that requires multiple workers to support one retired individual, population loss is bad. If we didn't, it would be a problem.
There is a lot of talk about the sun's activity reaching a worrying level where it could result into worldwide catastrophe together with magnetic field weakening and pole reversal. It would be interesting to hear what your take is.
The joke about Elon having new children by the end of this video must be the best aging joke of all time.
The question is simply if an average extra person has a nett positive or negative impact on society, civilisation and the planet as a whole.
I’m an environmentalist, but I think that if a person lives and behaves in alignment with nature, it’s absolutely possible to have a nett positive impact on biodiversity and the overall health of the local and even global ecosystem.
In the Brazilian rain forest, you can see the remnants of ancient civilisation, not by the buildings they left (they are all gone), but because there are more edible plants growing in an area where there used to be a village. Even the soil is more fertile in those areas. Archeologists call it “terra preta” (black earth).
Another important factor is humanity's reaction to changes. Right now overpopulation is a philosophical question, which will gradually turn into an economic one (it partly already has), and finally become an existential question in a few thousand years (60th century ballpark). At that point, humans will radically change their approach, if they exist long enough to see it happen. Being worried about humans not breeding enough is like being worried that humans will suddenly stop eating - possible, yes, but inconsistent with all observations.
I think we won't make it to that ballpark. Homo sapiens may have earned extinction.
The observable reality shows that humans are way too complex to be predictable with base biological models. Carrying capacity could by set almost anywhere depending on whether we are farmers, herdsmen, fishers, or all 3. It's not like coyotes where we can count the number of rabbits and predict the maximum population. If we perfectly allocated and used the earth's resources the maximum population of humans could be in the trillions. But if we even just screw up what we already have, like if we ban all fossil fuels tomorrow, the actual sustainable population is already 7 billion lower than the existing population.
It’s coming a lot sooner than that, noodlehead.
Elon Musk tends to get pretty excited about stuff. I'm the same way and sometimes I'll passionately discuss my ideas and concerns before realizing later my thoughts were incomplete. Further, I'm weirded out how not ok that is to others, in my case, because I'm not a billionaire or government official.
I'd say it would be even less ok if you were.
@@gedrias5817 that's the thing though. There's nothing wrong with it in the first place. It's not causing harm, and if we don't have freedom of expression we have nothing. This entire attitude of judging people and/or giving them crap for having an opinion is cruel, unreasonable, and dangerous af.
@@tysonfromearth I don't want to give someone crap for having an opinion *. Now I'm not sure if I understood your comment correctly; didn't you say, as self-criticism, it's not ok to make points not thought through? The idea of my remark is that status means responsibility, making it even less ok. Also I didn't mean it so serious but more tongue-in- cheek, that probably didn't come across. Here I tried to be deadpan myself, but it seems I'm not good at this :P
* not generally at least; it depends on the opinion
@@gedrias5817 didn't mean to say your currently doing it necessarily, sorry if that came out wrong. Meant to get more at the general social pattern. With power comes Spider-Man quotes so that's a good point. Also, freedom of speech to criticize. I think the important part of what I have to contribute is that if hot takes start a mature conversation where people try to come to higher truth together it's a win-win.
Ironically the same can be said for Sabine when it comes to topics that she actually has strong opinions about, particularly in her field of theoretical physics
Thank you for putting your ideas together on this topic and share it, Sabine & team!
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?
Finally some intelligent speak on the topic.
I'd love to see more ecosystem sustainability and environmental balance into the discussion.
I'm definitely in favor of limiting population to sustainable cheese supply levels.
Right. Priorities.
Maximum priority 😂
Hmmm...do you think we can maybe turn *people* into cheese?
🧀
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.
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.
Great video and great delivery. I was hoping you would mention how animal populations in the wild will regulate their own populations during good and bad times by having fewer babies when things are rough like when food is scarce and then have more babies when things are going well. I'd be interested in how much we might self-regulate our populations based off of our environmental pressures.
There currently is a deer overpopulation crisis in many states because of a shortage of large cats.
@@glasslinger I learned recently that when they reintroduced wolves to Yellowstone national Park it reduced the elk population which then helped the beaver population thrive because the elk were eating the food supply that the beavers depended upon. It's all about a balance.
is there a study about them having fewer babies or is it due to predation and death by scarcity
@@zazugee Incredibly, in areas where people are starving it is found that virtually every woman that can be pregnant is pregnant! Go figure!
@@zazugee I have seen it in animal documentaries but can't recall which ones. I think I saw it in a documentary about snowy owls.
What I love about Ms. Hossenfelder, she does the research and includes references. When Elon Musk tweets, it just worthless opinions.
What’s her explanation for reversing the falling birth rates though? If they stay below 2.1, by her own admission, we go extinct.
If she did any research you'd find facts in her videos but there aren't any. If you know the basics you wonder what sort of drivel she spouts without ever touching any facts at all.
@@hans-joachimbierwirth4727 You poor thing.
There are rural areas where people have to live in deep poverty and in crazy conditions, and there are highly populated countries like Japan where the mega city Tokyo is very clean and healthy.
Maybe genetic
But why? Carryinng capacity is a lousy metric because it doesn't care about quality of life. 250 million people would live far better lives than 10 billion would.
Here in the UK there's less and less green space (I'm getting on a bit so have seen this fairly clearly over the years ...and worked a lot with maps and mapping in the past ...and it's pretty obvious looking through the ages) and this is despite the current population staying fairly stable. Currently, there's a lot of building on good farm land, which makes little sense ...and sometimes on poor land for farming but land great for wildlife. More efficient farming with high yield crops often come with health issues and can cause significant damage to biodiversity. Having said that, as a side (I've been doing research on ancestry), a few generations ago many families were much larger than they are today. However lifespan was generally less. Overall I think just considering human carrying capacity is short-sighted and a little sad as we're just one of the many species sharing this planet. Among other things, maybe we should strive for quality rather than quantity.
That's really interesting. Do you know if what you experienced holds true for Scotland or is it more England centric and to the same degree for each country?
@@Ian_Carolan It's all a bit subjective, based on my own experience. I live in NE England, so have probably more in common with southern Scotland than southern England ...but expect stuff like new building projects are dependent on projected demand in the various areas and how individual local authorities plan or develop strategies to cope with this. It does concern me that because currently many small farms struggle financially, they are tempted to sell off 'good' farmland, with developers (and partly local authorities) taking minimum consideration for the wider infrastucture and environment (also to maximize profits or just to make them financially viable). My mapping background just reveals the evidence of previous population increases. And with my interest in nature, I've witnessed destruction of habitat ...although this is tending to be considered a little more nowadays.
While the average lifespan was shorter, individuals who survived childhood tended to live just as long as we do today. Plenty of old gravestones in the churchyards with ages of 80+ carved on them. But childhood mortality was a huge problem in the past. Typically only two out of ten children would be expected to survive to adulthood in poorer households. This is in the UK but other European countries have broadly similar figures.
@@michaelkaliski7651 The life style and the quality and comfort standards were different also. Now, each human being "costs" too much to the whole planet.
"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them".
~Albert Einstein
The question is when will thinking begin?
Aaaaaaand it was just revealed that Elon musk has now 10 children 🤣🙌
Putting upward pressure on the availability of decent enough jobs: carry on as usual vs what methods need to go, and what methods need to be updated / improved?