Some Hard Truths About Human Population Growth
6 min readApr 26, 2024
- In 1800, the total human population on our planet was only 1 billion people. It took 127 years for that number to double to 2 billion. But then it took only 33 years to add the next billion. Since then, we’ve been adding another billion every 11–14 years, and doubling our population about every fifty years. At this point, in 2024, we now have in excess of 8 billion people on our planet — and we’re adding another quarter million every day.
- We live on a finite planet, with finite resources. Therefore we must recognize that the size of our human population cannot continue to grow indefinitely.
- Past worries about population growth (see Malthusianism and The Population Bomb) were centered around food supplies and the possibility of widespread famine. These concerns are still with us, but are now accompanied by concerns about adequate water supplies, sufficient housing, species extinction and environmental pollution. And we are now seeing cascading effects from these issues, including global warming and disastrous changes in long-established weather patterns.
- Human numbers are not the primary cause for any of these problems, but they are a direct multiplier for all of them: twice as many people means doubling the sizes of all the problems.
- If we don’t want to be accused of extending phonebooth…
