World Population
May 9th, 2008
news, sustainabilitySlashdot had a post noting that today the world population will surpass 6.666666666 billion people, right on track to hit 7 billion by 2012. Many people, including myself, think the world is radically overpopulated with humans, but I’m no longer worrying about it. It’s just how life goes: a new replicator (species) struggles to survive, and if it doesn’t go extinct, it becomes dominant and tries to convert all matter into copies of itself. Eventually, it suffers a massive population reduction, whether from a cataclysmic event, a new dominant predator, or by choking on its own waste. Then it has another chance to go extinct, but if all “goes well”, it settles into a comfortable equilibrium with the rest of the replicators, and the cycle repeats.
| Year | World Population |
|---|---|
| 1600s | 500 million |
| 1800s | 1 billion |
| 1930 | 2 billion |
| 1960 | 3 billion |
| 1975 | 4 billion |
| 1987 | 5 billion |
| 2000 | 6 billion |
| 2012 (predicted) | 7 billion |
A friend of mine, Joe Ardent, believes that the Singularity is nigh upon us, and with it comes the end of resource scarcity. I happen to believe that energy will be a limiting factor for some time to come–I don’t think we will manage to create a viable fusion or antimatter or other essentially “limitless” energy source in my lifetime. That’s not to say it won’t happen ever. The concept of the Singularity emerges naturally from exponential growth, and in time, I suppose all things are possible. But this is a battle of the exponents: just as our technological and production capabilities grow exponentially, so does our population and its consumption (and I’m not even taking into account the emergent problems that come with scaling all new technology).
So I bet this friend a year’s supply of energy (about 300 GJ, or 10kW-years) that before we achieve the Singularity–for the purposes of the bet, defined as a billion people having programmable nano-factories that can make unlimited copies of those same nano-factories–the world will see a huge population reduction, defined by the bet as a 15% population drop (the loss of 1 billion people from today’s world population).
That is a nearly unfathomable number of people–the entire world population in A.D. 1800–and the events that could cause such a massive loss of population are certainly not going to be pleasant. For comparison, the Black Plague killed 100 million people, reducing the world population by 25%.
But let’s put this in perspective: If something does happen in 2012 to knock a billion people off the earth’s roster, that would merely set the world’s population back to 6 billion, which we had just 12 years prior in 2000. Honestly, as a planet and a species, we would scarcely notice such a minor disturbance in the Force.
I of course hold out hope that our awakening superbeing becomes aware of its plight, and takes active steps to limit its population and reverse the last century’s hypergrowth. But this looks like it will take a very long time–the annual growth rate did peak (at 2.2%) in the ’60s, which is good news, but 40 years and 3.5 billion people later, we’re still headed the wrong direction (over 1% annual growth). More developed countries which already have a negative population growth (like Italy), are worried that their particular breed of human will be overrun by a swarm of another particular breed of human, and so they’re encouraging their breed to, well, breed. Which is not a real solution to any real problem.
Effective solutions, like encouraging widespread contraceptive use or offering impoverished parents a few bucks to get their children sterilized, are not widely pursued for so-called “moral” reasons. So it looks like, we humans are going to keep procreating ourselves into an ever-deeper hole, and regardless of technological progress will eventually suffer the same plight as every dominant lifeform before us. Ah well. We all know that it will be the poorest and ugliest who will die first, so assuming we don’t go completely extinct, our descendents will be richer and more beautiful than we are. Maybe they’ll be smarter too, but I’m not going to bet on it.
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3 Responses to “World Population”
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Hey, Saul, feel free to identify me by name. You can tell the world that I’m the one against whom you’re betting.
Anyway, I wanted to clarify the conditions. I propose that if the population were to drop 15% due to abundance correllating with lower fertility rates, that is not a trigger of your victory. In practice, of course, I think that abundance could only come via elimination of energetic (fusion) and material (molecular manufacturing) scarcity.
That makes sense, and I agree to your clarification. I don’t think it’s possible to achieve a 15% population drop with peaceful negative population growth, at least not in our lifetimes; I’d be even more amazed if humanity got our act together enough to enact such policy, than if we actually had rampant nano-factories making anything and everything possible simultaneously. But, I have been wrong before!
The fertility rates chapter in “Common Wealth” was pretty interesting.
http://www.amazon.com/Common-Wealth-Economics-Crowded-Planet/dp/1594201277