You don't say anything about the fact that earth is not just for humans - - or do you only value our resources from an anthropocentric point of view. Even considering 100 billion humans is an idea I find utterly abhorrent. I suggest you read 'The World Without Us' by Alan Weisman.
• This is why I said we could fit 100B humans in Algeria, and leave 98% of land without humans. That's substantially more than today, where we use for example 15% of usable land just for farming
• I also mentioned that a world with more CO2 is a world with more life
And yeah this post gives me similar vibes. The wold can support tens of billions of chickens, just not very comfortably. Maybe it can support tens of billions of people, but also not very comfortably.
Nobody is forgoing kids out of concern that the world can't carry enough people. It is more that advanced economies systematically stop being able to support people having kids. People are no longer able to bear the costs. Or we become unable to fit the things we need to raise children into cities (playgrounds or schools take up space, but produce less dollars than a office tower). Some fare worse than others — South Korea springs to mind. But even the Netherlands, famously good at building kid friendly suburbs, has a fertility rate well below 2.
Yeah it is definitely an intriguing proposition. We've come a long way, it wasn't that long ago that the place where the Burj Khalifa stands was basically desert. On a more positive note I think Hans Rosling was right about our ability to globally get out of poverty.
But regardless of level of progress, going from 10 to 100 billion people is always going to come with some compromises. We don't live in a Malthusian reality anymore, but a big reason behind that is exactly that we somehow *are* limiting how many kids we raise for some other reason than them literally starving to death.
Didn't "The Population Bomb" come out right at the moment when the Green Revolution was happening? (and also, everyone seems to have had 5 or so kids back then.) In retrospect none of the terrible stuff happened but I am not sure how obvious that outcome was at the time of writing.
Similarly, jury is still out today on whether or not we can deal with our current 1.5 degrees of warming. The thing that seems to get us most often is the extra water vapor in the air. One of the great feats of humanity in the last 100 years is to stop rivers and coastlines from moving around. Modern cities have way to much infrastructure to easily move them. Many places will be really badly screwed (eg. the Netherlands) if we lose that ability.
Maybe go for the sulphur in the stratosphere thing. People talk about terraforming Mars or Venus, but the Iron Law of Terraforming says it will always be easier to terraform Earth. Hopefully we can avoid another "nuclear powerplants in Germany" scenario.
Humanity will probably always be staring at some big sword of Damocles or another. So far we survived all of them. And if the population growth stalls out at 10 billion while we could go up to 100 billion, it is good to have some margin.
One thing I'll say about you, Tomas, is that you are indeed an original thinker. Your outside the box essays are always fascinating. I do appreciate the total debunking of Malthusian thinking. That's important, because a lot of climate dogma has a lot of people saying we need to reduce the population, which is an evil, anti-life, anti-God attitude.
With respect, I think that any world view that would wish to increase the human population further represents a profound misunderstanding of human nature, based largely on religious thinking. That we still imagine that humans are the only living things with intrinsic value is a residue of beliefs that we were made "in God's image", and were imbued with divine souls...and are thus separate from and superior to the natural world. Despite an intellectual acceptance of 'evolution', we haven't yet grasped and internalised the fact that we are OF the natural world, and we are each internally diminished by our psychological separation from it. It's why we can't seem to find 'meaning', 'purpose' or 'fulfillment' in life. It might not be a popular view but humans are no more precious than anything else, and human wellbeing will not be achieved in the reflexive 'breeding like rabbits' and living in megalopolises.
Let me put it this way. Homo sapiens has been around for 200-300,000 years, and we still haven't got around to understanding ourselves, and what we actually need to live lives worth living. I can guarantee you that increasing our numbers, and packing ourselves into high rises, isn't it. We've done that, and it hasn't worked out so well. (Eg. 75 million Americans just voted for a lying rapist thug with the IQ of a fence post.)
Today we are more than 8 billion. 8,000,000,000. There are 400,000 elephants left in the world….40,000 lions, 15,000 whales, 4500 tigers, 1800 pandas….insects...trees....habitats...etc etc
It was all of that worthless non-human life that created and sustained our biosphere. Much of that life has been extinguished or is currently under threat.
In the world of the 'real'....in the world beyond the complex and delusional intellectual ideation, and the narratives of prosperity imperatives...a single tree, an insect, a blade of grass, has infinitely more value than a 'superior and separate' human being. The objectively precious biosphere needs less of these, not a 100 billion of them, in my view.
The human life worth living is one of psychological connectedness to the world of living things, and awareness of our collective role in sustaining that life.
"I'd like to share a revelation I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with their surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to another area, and you multiply, and you multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure."
Surprised to see an unusual level of negativity toward this article in the comments. The reasoning seems quite straightforward that space, food, water, and energy pose no real threat of a ceiling. After reading this and the premium article it seems the most plausible threat to expansion would be exhaustion of a critical resource like lithium or phosphorus. As pointed out, each time we approach that point a new reserve is discovered. Maybe that will continue to be the case but it seems within the realm of possibility that those reserves might eventually be tapped out. However, there is no way of predicting how many undiscovered reserves are present so to bet against human expansion on that basis does seem ill informed.
Which leads me to the question: why so much negativity? The solutions to sustaining 100B humans while preserving existing biodiversity seem straightforward even barring unexpected future technological developments which might make the job even easier. Why does >50% of your relatively progressive audience seem disturbed by the idea of multiplying the population by 10x?
Off the cuff I wonder if it's a symptom of the culture wars and interpersonal malaise facilitated by our online social echo chambers. "My neighbors are all assholes so why would I want a world filled with more like them?"
When I picture 100B I picture more families, artists, thriving social niches, scientists expanding the limits of what it means to be human. Maybe we need more social optimism not just techno optimism.
Curious your thoughts on the surprisingly negative general sentiment which has been otherwise often absent in other articles (except in the culture wars article, and that's just poking the bear!). Anyway, keep the great content coming!
Using population density averaged over a whole country actually *underestimates* the density people live in. I prefer the median population weighted density instead. It's the local housing density that the typical *person* experiences instead of the density that the typical piece of land experiences. In the Netherlands it's 1637 people/km2, over 3 times the normal estimate!
Someone I follow, Simon Michaux who I want to say is an australian geometallurgist just published a big review on minerals required to make the energy transition supported by the Finnish govt (interesting to see that Finland is #1 on happiness)
So ~20x more energy use we will reach the level of current global warming(*). So yes, reaching 120x is possible by pumping greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and injecting sulfur in the stratosphere.
I would like to point out that a huge chunk of future energy use will be compute power. And datacenters can actually be installed in space where solar energy is virtually unlimited (and heat can be radiate away easily). And this is already happening: each generation of starlink satellites have more compute power than the previous.
(*) All energy we use eventually end up in heat. Solar energy whether we use or not will heat Earth the same, but nuclear, fusion or fission, do produce heat that has to be evacuated to space to avoid global warming.
What about our ecological overshoot? We've been wasting more resources than the planet can renew since 1970, the current rate is at 1,7 planet per year. How could a higher overshoot be sustainable?
Technology will come to the rescue? But technologies are tools, they most of the times end up making our impact on earth more powerful.
And I hope your premium article covers the very strategic points (regarding population) of:
1- what is the society model for 10+B people? Consumption and capitalism for all? (Check the circularity gap report please)
2- what about the pollution in all human bodies especially the ones affecting fertility (for instance the spermatozoids, impacted by micro-plastics and other compounds)?
3- we not only have a CO2 issue, the oceans have been getting all the pollutions and the marine biodiversity has been collapsing under that impact (+ over-fishing), there's a tipping point in the 2030es (acidity & marine food chain) as a point of no return...
I saw the beginning of your new premium post: how can you keep it behind the paywall when your post seems to reject what many scientists have brought forward publicly and beyond peer-reviewed processes?
I wonder what in your reasoning makes you somehow blind to the limits of human civilizations.
The point is 2 centuries ago, humans couldn't imagine so many ppl alive today, and would have had the same fears about you today. But I'm going to guess you're mostly happy to be alive today, and likely the same logic applies to 100B ppl in the future
I am happy to be alive today. But I also know that the luxuries I enjoy are not very much tied to my personal ability to be productive, so it fills me with apprehension to know that they could easily be taken away from me at any moment. That dread is probably a significant factor in why so many people living in this modern luxury do not want to have children.
One problem: there are vanishingly few signs that we can evade the demographic transition (fewer kids, more long-lived elders). Only a few small groups of religiously intense people have combined embracing modernity while their women still have children at scale.
Guess what happens with these unusual groups given their fertility. They become proportionally larger and larger until they are the majority of humanity.
You don't say anything about the fact that earth is not just for humans - - or do you only value our resources from an anthropocentric point of view. Even considering 100 billion humans is an idea I find utterly abhorrent. I suggest you read 'The World Without Us' by Alan Weisman.
I do!
• This is why I said we could fit 100B humans in Algeria, and leave 98% of land without humans. That's substantially more than today, where we use for example 15% of usable land just for farming
• I also mentioned that a world with more CO2 is a world with more life
but less diversity
Not necessarily. Diversity is very highly concentrated. If you keep these places pristine, you can easily keep diversity intact.
The problem is what we've done so far, not what we would do to get to 100B
Go and talk everyone into living in one cramped, giant version of Hong Kong. Good luck.
..but you’ll have plenty of tasteless, cheap tomatoes to snack on for comfort!
Greetings from the Netherlands.. ;)
😅 we will call that the tomato tax
I mean this just biochemistry. We’re just beginning our innovation process. I’m pretty sure future Dutch tomatoes will be juicy and delicious!
I just happened to stumble upon "The domestication of people and animals" on Matthew Yglesias' substack.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-domestication-of-people-and-animals
And yeah this post gives me similar vibes. The wold can support tens of billions of chickens, just not very comfortably. Maybe it can support tens of billions of people, but also not very comfortably.
Nobody is forgoing kids out of concern that the world can't carry enough people. It is more that advanced economies systematically stop being able to support people having kids. People are no longer able to bear the costs. Or we become unable to fit the things we need to raise children into cities (playgrounds or schools take up space, but produce less dollars than a office tower). Some fare worse than others — South Korea springs to mind. But even the Netherlands, famously good at building kid friendly suburbs, has a fertility rate well below 2.
You should re-read the article! I gave one specific example of one person thinking this, and I know there are many more!
Yeah it is definitely an intriguing proposition. We've come a long way, it wasn't that long ago that the place where the Burj Khalifa stands was basically desert. On a more positive note I think Hans Rosling was right about our ability to globally get out of poverty.
But regardless of level of progress, going from 10 to 100 billion people is always going to come with some compromises. We don't live in a Malthusian reality anymore, but a big reason behind that is exactly that we somehow *are* limiting how many kids we raise for some other reason than them literally starving to death.
Didn't "The Population Bomb" come out right at the moment when the Green Revolution was happening? (and also, everyone seems to have had 5 or so kids back then.) In retrospect none of the terrible stuff happened but I am not sure how obvious that outcome was at the time of writing.
Similarly, jury is still out today on whether or not we can deal with our current 1.5 degrees of warming. The thing that seems to get us most often is the extra water vapor in the air. One of the great feats of humanity in the last 100 years is to stop rivers and coastlines from moving around. Modern cities have way to much infrastructure to easily move them. Many places will be really badly screwed (eg. the Netherlands) if we lose that ability.
Maybe go for the sulphur in the stratosphere thing. People talk about terraforming Mars or Venus, but the Iron Law of Terraforming says it will always be easier to terraform Earth. Hopefully we can avoid another "nuclear powerplants in Germany" scenario.
Humanity will probably always be staring at some big sword of Damocles or another. So far we survived all of them. And if the population growth stalls out at 10 billion while we could go up to 100 billion, it is good to have some margin.
One thing I'll say about you, Tomas, is that you are indeed an original thinker. Your outside the box essays are always fascinating. I do appreciate the total debunking of Malthusian thinking. That's important, because a lot of climate dogma has a lot of people saying we need to reduce the population, which is an evil, anti-life, anti-God attitude.
Thank you!
With respect, I think that any world view that would wish to increase the human population further represents a profound misunderstanding of human nature, based largely on religious thinking. That we still imagine that humans are the only living things with intrinsic value is a residue of beliefs that we were made "in God's image", and were imbued with divine souls...and are thus separate from and superior to the natural world. Despite an intellectual acceptance of 'evolution', we haven't yet grasped and internalised the fact that we are OF the natural world, and we are each internally diminished by our psychological separation from it. It's why we can't seem to find 'meaning', 'purpose' or 'fulfillment' in life. It might not be a popular view but humans are no more precious than anything else, and human wellbeing will not be achieved in the reflexive 'breeding like rabbits' and living in megalopolises.
Let me put it this way. Homo sapiens has been around for 200-300,000 years, and we still haven't got around to understanding ourselves, and what we actually need to live lives worth living. I can guarantee you that increasing our numbers, and packing ourselves into high rises, isn't it. We've done that, and it hasn't worked out so well. (Eg. 75 million Americans just voted for a lying rapist thug with the IQ of a fence post.)
Today we are more than 8 billion. 8,000,000,000. There are 400,000 elephants left in the world….40,000 lions, 15,000 whales, 4500 tigers, 1800 pandas….insects...trees....habitats...etc etc
It was all of that worthless non-human life that created and sustained our biosphere. Much of that life has been extinguished or is currently under threat.
In the world of the 'real'....in the world beyond the complex and delusional intellectual ideation, and the narratives of prosperity imperatives...a single tree, an insect, a blade of grass, has infinitely more value than a 'superior and separate' human being. The objectively precious biosphere needs less of these, not a 100 billion of them, in my view.
The human life worth living is one of psychological connectedness to the world of living things, and awareness of our collective role in sustaining that life.
"I'd like to share a revelation I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with their surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to another area, and you multiply, and you multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure."
- Agent Smith
Surprised to see an unusual level of negativity toward this article in the comments. The reasoning seems quite straightforward that space, food, water, and energy pose no real threat of a ceiling. After reading this and the premium article it seems the most plausible threat to expansion would be exhaustion of a critical resource like lithium or phosphorus. As pointed out, each time we approach that point a new reserve is discovered. Maybe that will continue to be the case but it seems within the realm of possibility that those reserves might eventually be tapped out. However, there is no way of predicting how many undiscovered reserves are present so to bet against human expansion on that basis does seem ill informed.
Which leads me to the question: why so much negativity? The solutions to sustaining 100B humans while preserving existing biodiversity seem straightforward even barring unexpected future technological developments which might make the job even easier. Why does >50% of your relatively progressive audience seem disturbed by the idea of multiplying the population by 10x?
Off the cuff I wonder if it's a symptom of the culture wars and interpersonal malaise facilitated by our online social echo chambers. "My neighbors are all assholes so why would I want a world filled with more like them?"
When I picture 100B I picture more families, artists, thriving social niches, scientists expanding the limits of what it means to be human. Maybe we need more social optimism not just techno optimism.
Curious your thoughts on the surprisingly negative general sentiment which has been otherwise often absent in other articles (except in the culture wars article, and that's just poking the bear!). Anyway, keep the great content coming!
Because, in practice, twice as many US “city” residents actually live in suburbs and exurbs than live in dense urban areas.
Using population density averaged over a whole country actually *underestimates* the density people live in. I prefer the median population weighted density instead. It's the local housing density that the typical *person* experiences instead of the density that the typical piece of land experiences. In the Netherlands it's 1637 people/km2, over 3 times the normal estimate!
https://www.worldpop.org/methods/pwd/
I talk about this more here:
https://splittinginfinity.substack.com/p/theres-room-for-more-people
Interesting!
Thanks, good point indeed, followed.
Whatever happened to the original ecosystem- plants and wildlife- of the Netherlands? 100% destroyed.
Someone I follow, Simon Michaux who I want to say is an australian geometallurgist just published a big review on minerals required to make the energy transition supported by the Finnish govt (interesting to see that Finland is #1 on happiness)
Thought you might be interested in his work
https://tupa.gtk.fi/julkaisu/bulletin/bt_416.pdf?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR3yo51QU33H_EkDXJMocM7pKBbEb1ZK1SpT70O_UGyUCCBI-e5MLtBmEac_aem_S7smFiRKgAsvfiFdc-yGkg
Great info and optimism for the world 🌎🌍🌏
Keep up the great work Tomas 🍀
I don't know Anders Sandberg did his but I was trying to come up with a estimate of how much energy we can use. Today we use ~20TW and the Earth energy imbalance (ie global warming) is 460TW (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget#Earth's_energy_imbalance_(EEI) )
So ~20x more energy use we will reach the level of current global warming(*). So yes, reaching 120x is possible by pumping greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and injecting sulfur in the stratosphere.
I would like to point out that a huge chunk of future energy use will be compute power. And datacenters can actually be installed in space where solar energy is virtually unlimited (and heat can be radiate away easily). And this is already happening: each generation of starlink satellites have more compute power than the previous.
(*) All energy we use eventually end up in heat. Solar energy whether we use or not will heat Earth the same, but nuclear, fusion or fission, do produce heat that has to be evacuated to space to avoid global warming.
Yes!
Caveat: for example solar panels can decrease albedo
Your creative imagination, backed by in-depth research and a can-do spirit, is truly inspiring. I deeply admire your work!
Thanks!
The only thing is it'd be a bit of a bummer if most of the world looked like the Netherlands.
What about our ecological overshoot? We've been wasting more resources than the planet can renew since 1970, the current rate is at 1,7 planet per year. How could a higher overshoot be sustainable?
Technology will come to the rescue? But technologies are tools, they most of the times end up making our impact on earth more powerful.
And I hope your premium article covers the very strategic points (regarding population) of:
1- what is the society model for 10+B people? Consumption and capitalism for all? (Check the circularity gap report please)
2- what about the pollution in all human bodies especially the ones affecting fertility (for instance the spermatozoids, impacted by micro-plastics and other compounds)?
3- we not only have a CO2 issue, the oceans have been getting all the pollutions and the marine biodiversity has been collapsing under that impact (+ over-fishing), there's a tipping point in the 2030es (acidity & marine food chain) as a point of no return...
I cover most of these in the premium article.
Acidity is solved when we solve CO2 (but note that sea acidity was much higher in the past and there was no pbm!)
Over-fishing is solved by farmed fish as I explain in this article.
We don’t need to solve the societal model to get to 100B, although improvements are welcome.
"we don't need to solve the societal model", why? How could we continue to have an even bigger "take-make-waste" linear economy?
What about the ecological overshoot?
Are you considering the system dynamics of the biosphere and especially of the ethnosphere (the humans, our psyche and the stories we tell ourselves)?
I saw the beginning of your new premium post: how can you keep it behind the paywall when your post seems to reject what many scientists have brought forward publicly and beyond peer-reviewed processes?
I wonder what in your reasoning makes you somehow blind to the limits of human civilizations.
The biggest issue with this number of humans is political overpopulation.
You can probably, with the right accommodations, feed and house this many people. But what exactly will they do with their time?
Malthus wondered the same thing about you.
Unlike with food, no one has answered Malthus's question well in that time.
The point is 2 centuries ago, humans couldn't imagine so many ppl alive today, and would have had the same fears about you today. But I'm going to guess you're mostly happy to be alive today, and likely the same logic applies to 100B ppl in the future
I am happy to be alive today. But I also know that the luxuries I enjoy are not very much tied to my personal ability to be productive, so it fills me with apprehension to know that they could easily be taken away from me at any moment. That dread is probably a significant factor in why so many people living in this modern luxury do not want to have children.
Tomás, podrías escribir sobre la posibilidad de ser inmortales. LLegaremos a serlo? Cuando?
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/the-4-ways-you-might-live-forever
Thank you for this clear, data-backed scenario.
One problem: there are vanishingly few signs that we can evade the demographic transition (fewer kids, more long-lived elders). Only a few small groups of religiously intense people have combined embracing modernity while their women still have children at scale.
Key for another article!
Guess what happens with these unusual groups given their fertility. They become proportionally larger and larger until they are the majority of humanity.
Thanks Tomas for these estimates! It’s always nice to put some order-of-magnitude numbers on such future scenarios.