There are now about 8 billion humans living on Earth. The population now is very different from what it was 300,000 years ago when Homo sapiens first arose. Only tens of thousands, maybe a hundred thousand, people lived at that period and place.
Joel E. Cohen, director of the Population Laboratory at Rockefeller and Columbia universities, was reported in Live Science as saying that increasing the human population would take around 35,000 years.
The human population doubled between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago, when agriculture was first developed. This process took another 1,500 years. Then, starting in the 16th century, human population growth took 300 years. 130 years was all it took in the nineteenth century. That begs the question, can Earth really support more people than it already has?
With over 40 years of study under his belt, the Head of the Population Laboratory at Rockefeller and Columbia Universities has amassed a whopping 65 theories, with estimates ranging from 1 billion to 1 trillion. According to Cohen’s interview with Live Science, populations may be kept constant in a given environment so long as the rate of reproduction is equal to the rate of mortality.
But pollution and illness are only two examples of environmental changes that might lessen a habitat’s capacity to support a population. According to him, environmental limits and human decisions determine how many people Earth can support.
Food shortage and an unwelcoming natural environment are two examples of environmental limitations. Then, the connections between the economy and culture, such as the production and consumption of products, birth rates, migration, and others, may be considered human choice.
UN Population Division expert Patrick Gerland offered a different point of view. “The population may be more stable if each couple has two children, but this is only a guess. On the other hand, population declines when the birth rate falls below replacement levels, “It was his words.
If the numbers are higher than that, and most individuals are able to stay alive, the population will increase, he said. Conversely, many nations with low per capita income have high birth rates and big family sizes, despite high infant death rates and poor life expectancy.
When a country reaches a particular level of economic and cultural development, the average number of children per couple drops to two. The birth rate has declined even as health care and life expectancy have improved.
The population of the whole planet reached its maximum in the 1960s and has been gradually declining ever since. According to the United Nations Population Division, the birth rate for women dropped from 5.05 in 1950 to 2.44 in 2020.
In the 2080s, the world’s population is expected to hit 10.4 billion, and remain there until 2100. However, Gerland notes that demographers’ projections get increasingly speculative and unclear as time goes by.
There is some uncertainty about how many people the planet can support at once. The ability of the natural world to provide for humanity in the future is in part determined by how people use and abuse its resources.
A research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for instance, indicated that if Americans adopted a vegetarian diet, 350 million more people could be fed from the land that would otherwise be used to raise animals. many.
