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World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)

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Re: World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)

#181

Post by gls2ro »

xtracto wrote: post #130
bojan wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes no sense whatsoever. 8 billion is too many, for what, for whom? Next to 8 billion of us, we also take the luxury of keeping and feeding billions of animals, which is enormously expensive and horrible for the environment. Let's start first by making sure we only keep and feed animals that we actually need, and then discuss if we are too many. I wonder how many humans this planet can sustain for every cow th…

IMHO 8 billion is too many for the size of the earth. With a total of 150 million km2 in land, each person corresponds to 0.018 km2 or 18000m2 which is equivalent to a 130x130 meter space. That includes sleeping, eating and "food growing" spaces. And the 150 million also includes inhospitable places. I think that no matter how efficient our food generation processes get, this is very little space per person. That's w…

While your math is correct it also contains a false assumption about how much land is needed:

What do you think about Netherlands? It seems to me they had a good way to use the space while keeping it green and also caring about nature.

Earth can support at least twice the current number of people with a better organisation while also disrupting less the natural habitat.

What makes it hard to achieve this is our focus on nationalities and countries instead of thinking about a global society combined with our greed and our individual/centrism way to think about the world as if the only way forward is us vs the forest or us vs the wild animals ... we should focus more on how to embed into nature and not how to change it to make it work for us.

Re: World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)

#182

Post by jotm »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #107
jotm wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you're right. In 1700, I don't think instant worldwide communication was in anyone's wildest predictions of the future. Or even weapons capable of leveling a city in seconds. I'll be happy if I get to see a scramble for the solar system thanks to some sort of anti-gravitational device or full dive VR tech (or isekai-as-a-service by Mitsubishi).

> isekai I didn't know what Isekai was, so I looked it up: [0] Isekai (Japanese: 異世界, transl. "different world" or "otherworld") is a Japanese genre of portal fantasy and science fiction. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isekai

That was a joke - the lazy way (and a meme) to transport people to another world in various manga/anime is by having them get hit by a truck.

Re: World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)

#183

Post by idlehand »

Tchakra wrote: post #125
b112 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I heard though, in Africa, population decline was due to endemic aids/hiv, and no real inexpensive treatment. And some refusal to use condoms. If this changes, the trend will sharply reverse.

In the grand scheme, HIV/Aids has not had a large effect on population growth in Africa (and unlikely to have for the future as it is a mostly localised to southern parts of Africa and has been coming down rapidly). Most forecast say population will peak at 10bn to 11bn - https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth - A big part of this increase in indeed from Africa which is expected to increase by 3bn - from…

I'm 99% sure that Africa is not going to reach 4.3 billion inhabitants. Climate change, food insecurity, economic growth and global instability will ensure that it doesn't turn out that way.

Re: World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)

#184

Post by stefl14 »

Jensson wrote: post #95
erklik wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? I don't genuinely understand this pessimism. More people means more brains, more intelligence, more energy to achieve things. More people means more Einstiens, Newtons, Da Vincis etc. I do think our systems need changing. Our society currently incentivizes the smart people into something that's not entirely productive but wishing for less people, hmm, I don't know. I feel like this is the start of history, not t…

> More people means more brains, more intelligence, more energy to achieve things. More people means less energy and resources per person though, and people with little resources wont be using their brains to solve problems. Likely more people would have the opportunity to become Einstein's or similar if the population stayed at 1 billion than at 10 billion simply because we would have so much more raw resources to i…

> More people means less energy and resources per person though

Malthusianism didn't work in 1700s and doesn't work now. Economists produced endogenous growth theories explaining how more population could lead to higher output per capita in the 80s. Romer won a Nobel prize for it.

The evidence we have now strongly supports their arguments. Productivity scales superlinearly with urban population so that each doubling leads to a 15% increase in p.c output. This is true everywhere we look i.e. regressing log(income per capita) on log(city population) produces near-perfect lines with slopes close to 1.15 whether you're looking at the U.S or Bangladesh. This is easily explicable in terms of the network externalities. Furthermore, studies comparing the networked lives of people living in more/less populous areas (inferred from phone usage data) show that people living in bigger cities do indeed communicate more. How much more? 15% for every doubling of city size! All of this can be explained in terms of graph theory. More nodes -> more cultural and technical niches (interconnected node clusters) -> more potential synergies as every niche has more niches to connect to. And so on. Connectivity increases faster than linearly, hence the superlinear scaling. Not coincidentally, the connectivity of brains seems to be the same (double the number of cortical neurons in a mammal, the number of synapses per neuron increases by 15-20%).

All this to say, we certainly aren't approaching a world of less abundance per capita as the world continues to urbanise. Anybody who thinks this just isn't acquainted with the evidence.

Re: World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)

#185

Post by stefl14 »

gonzo41 wrote: post #17

This is fine, it's a small blip. Millenials and Zoomers and some Gen Xers will do the environment a huge favor and keep the birth rate trending down.

For how long? Being recent (on evolutionary timescales), evolution has created selection pressures on previously irrelevant variables (the desire to have children, in particular). Without contraception or female labor force participation, people didn't decide how many children to have before urbanisation: everyone who didn't die just kept having kids. The poorest places are still like this. But in evolutionarily novel urban contexts, people choose how many kids to have; if this decision has a genetic component, that means the current urban millieu selects for people who want more kids. Basic genetics tells us that the number of people who "want more kids" will grow exponentially (so long as culture doesn't keep driving preferences for children down). The key question, of course, is "what's the exponent?". It depends on the heritability of fertility, and data from behavioural genetics indicates that it's high in urbanised societies. If your parents had more kids than average, you probably will (even if you were adopted at birth and didn't grow up with your parents). The effect is large enough that it would have a big impact on the UN population estimates by 2100. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10905...

The cultural offset is an important caveat, but it's possible that most of the cultural fertility decline due to urbanisation has been exhausted in urban socities, in which case the heritability effect will become more important.

I find it strange that natural selection is never part of the argument on debates like this. It's laughable that it's completely ignored by the UN. I suspect the tendency of humans to view themselves as separate from the animals meakes selection seem irrelevant. But we shouldn't forget its power: the types of people who deciding not to reproduce today are the types of people who won't be there to make that decision tomorrow.

All this to day, our contemporary perspective might seem very parochial in a few generations and while we can't predict future culture, the power of selection should never be ignored.

Re: World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)

#186

Post by psandersen »

oezi wrote: post #7
xcom86 wrote: post #2

Happy to see the world population growing. Unlike many here I don't believe the world is overpopulated and that we need more people to grow and expand beyond the planet. Located in the U.S. where we could double the population without starting to feel cramped. We can and we should.

Luckily growth mostly slowed and we are just seeing the effect of longer lifes. Talk by Hans Rosling worth watching: https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_global_population_gro...

Sorry for the off topic reply, but I saw your post "Ask HN: Variable naming guide of matching length?" when looking for the same thing and couldn't find a way to contact you on your profile; is this what you were looking for? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26359214

Re: World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)

#187

Post by esrauch »

joshuahedlund wrote: post #144
esrauch wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no matter how you measure it, the absolute number of people living in poverty has decreased even as population increased Surely not based on any way of measuring it, since in some reasonable definitions you could say there's 1.5bn people living in poverty right now and only 1bn total humans existing two centuries ago.

I mean, If you want to be pedantic you could define poverty in such a relative way that we’re all poor compared to Musk and Bezos. But I think you’d be surprised how much you have to inflate the definition of poverty to still fit 1.5 billion people into it. It’d certainly be the richest definition of poverty the world’s ever seen, with the lowest numbers of starvation, malnutrition, infant mortality, etc

Just put off curiosity, it looks like only 689 million are "living in extreme poverty" but 1.3 billion people are "multidimensionality poor" which seems to be trying to capture some the things you're talking about.

https://www.worldvision.org/sponsorship-news-stories/global-...

Even the 689 million "extreme poverty" number does at least mean there's more people in poverty today than were total alive approx 300 years ago.

Re: World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)

#188

Post by Tchakra »

idlehand wrote: post #183
Tchakra wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the grand scheme, HIV/Aids has not had a large effect on population growth in Africa (and unlikely to have for the future as it is a mostly localised to southern parts of Africa and has been coming down rapidly). Most forecast say population will peak at 10bn to 11bn - https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth - A big part of this increase in indeed from Africa which is expected to increase by 3bn - from…

I'm 99% sure that Africa is not going to reach 4.3 billion inhabitants. Climate change, food insecurity, economic growth and global instability will ensure that it doesn't turn out that way.

No one knows the future - but all we do know points that the future is far more optimistic than people realise. If Africa fails to reach 4.3bn then it will most likely be because of faster prosperity and not due to the pessimistic causes you mention.

To illustrate the point: The last 40 years have been the worst we will see in terms of stability, economic growth etc .... yet Population growth in Africa thrived and the % of people living in poverty reduced dramatically and the current population is healthier, wealthier, and more educated than ever before (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/above-or-below-extreme-po... ).

Re: World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)

#189

Post by sacrosanct »

erklik wrote: post #132
birksherty wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> poverty has decreased even as population increased. Innovation is amazing That's because humans exploited all natural recourses to the max and it created climate change and extinction of many species, exploited so many animals too, just look at Earthling the documentary. But whenever people talk about progress they don't care about this and turn a blind eye.

> That's because humans exploited all natural recourses to the max and it created climate change and extinction of many species, exploited so many animals too, just look at Earthling the documentary. But whenever people talk about progress they don't care about this and turn a blind eye. the max? I don't know about max. However, yeah, you're right. That does not mean we cannot continue in the future and do it better.…

EVs powered by burning coal

Re: World Population Clock: 7.96B People (2022)

#190

Post by irthomasthomas »

Veedrac wrote: post #141
irthomasthomas wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love your optimism. Fusion is only 10-20 years out, after all.

It is legitimately coming sooner than that.

I can't wait for my fusion powered Tesla self driving cars and robots, next year.
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