Are we too many people, or too few?

Should we worry about overpopulation or, as Elon Musk has argued, should we worry more about underpopulation? How many people could live on our planet and how close are we to reaching the "Limits to Growth"? In this video we look at how much we know and what we can conclude from this.

The paper I mention at 2 mins 50 seconds that looked at how good the Club of Rome predictions were is here:

The paper about how much carbon dioxide emissions you save by not having children that I discuss at 5 minutes 30 seconds is this:

0:00 Intro
1:33 Doomsters
6:39 Boomsters
10:08 What does science say?
17:17 What do we learn from this?
18:32 Sponsor message

[marcuscarana]

Ahh yes, as a Filipino, I knew our overpopulated country would be mentioned in a topic like this. Another reason why we are overpopulated here is because many in the slum areas, the poorest of the poor, have 7-10 children while being unemployed and uneducated. The church supresses the release of free birth control handed to the poor cause they consider it as a sin. Then the middle class to upper middle class have less children, sometimes only one to two children, because they are more educated and more aware of the cost of having too many children. So the poor keeps having children while the middle class produce less. The church opposes the government from logical solutions and now Filipinos just voted the previous Dictator's son back to presidency. For you Americans out there complaining about how much of a mess your government and country is, I'm telling you, you haven't had the slightest idea of how bad a country like mine can get.

[zalllon]

This has quickly become one of my favourite channels. Not because of the factual content (which is excellent), but for her dry sense of humour … just love 😄

[ehrenmurdick]

Elon saying Japan will eventually cease to exist reminds me of a conversation I had about a time when I lost a lot of weight all at once. I told my colleague that I was losing a pound a day. He said, "How long do you think you could keep that up?" And I said, "well, I was 150 pounds when I started, so 150 days."

[Ericwvb]

One thing not mentioned in this video is once you exhaust resources, the carrying capacity of the system plunges to a small fraction of what it was before. Imagine if you have the only forest logging operation in the world that produces wood and the forest grows 1, 000 trees per year if the forest is healthy. If you cut 1, 000 trees per year to produce wood products you can do this indefinitely. Now you switch to cutting 5, 000 trees per year and the people are happy because all this increase in wood has made the products cheaper and they can consume more of them. This mirrors the "Simon index" mentioned in the video where the amount of wealth required to obtain goods & services goes down over time. As you keep cutting more and more trees each year, improving your wood harvesting efficiency, the products you produce keep becoming cheaper and easier to obtain. But eventually you exhaust the entire forest and it's no longer healthy. Now it only produces 10 trees per year worth of growth. You've destroyed the forest's ability to grow trees quickly and wood changes from a cheap commodity into a luxury for the elite.

[earthknight]

The carrying capacity argument is somewhat flawed as it ignores having a healthy, intact, and biodiverse ecosystem. Most of the carrying capacity arguments don't really factor environmental health into the picture, they look at the planet as being essentially a pure food producing system for us, rather than us being part of a larger working ecosystem that we rely on.

I was born in the early 70s and the world was already a crowded place. Since I was born the global population has more than doubled. In that time we have also lost more than 60% of the large animals on the planet (numbers and biomass, not species). It's difficult to calculate how much forest has been lost in that time as agricultural mono-crop tree plantations are counted as forests in most assessments, despite having little to no ecological value, resulting in a situation where many nations claim to have "reforested", but if you look closer they actually have fewer intact forests than they did in the 70s (by which point we'd already destroyed roughly 2/3 of the global forests).

From an ecological perspective, we are already far beyond the planet's carrying capacity. The only way we maintain even the current population level is by sacrificing the planet's ecosystem to so so, leaving tiny, fragmented patches of it in existence and converting the rest to a human support system.

[RobWhittlestone]

I love Sabine's humour. Her deadpan delivery means that anyone who is not really listening may miss her quips.

[DeclanMBrennan]

14:31 "If you extrapolate this trend indefinitely, Japan will cease to exist" However as they are currently one of the biggest cheese importers in the world, this will mean more for the rest of us.

[LakelandRussell]

Unfortunately many people are not concerned about progress, they were concerned about having power over other people.

[asinglebraincell]

"Honey I shrunk the resources" is the best thing I've heard all week
Amazing content this was so informative and listenable I' m so grateful for content like this

[MCsCreations]

The fertility question is really interesting. Here in Brazil people used to have 10 kids or more in the past, when now it's pretty difficult to see a family with 3 kids.
But the thing is the mentality of the time and it's context. Back then we were a mostly an agrarian country, so people had lots of kids to help them to take care of plantations and farm animals. While today we're mostly a... I forgot the word... We live mostly in cities. Where life's expensive!
Anyway, thanks for the video, Sabine! 😊
Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊

[just_hexxy]

Dear Sabine, I really love how you have, through concise yet easy to understand videos sprinkled with humor, made it more accessible for the average person to also learn from the studies of technical sources such as The Lancet. You are doing great work, and I appreciate you very much.

[intothevoid]

Another line from Phil Collins: "... been talking to cheeses, all my life..."
You can do the math: If you divide all the habitable surface area of Earth with the number of people already living today, you get an average of 2 football fields per person. That area has to accommodate not only the resources for that person but also the necessary infrastructure and the rest of the ecosystem on land.
In fact, if you place all living people in a regular grid on the usable land surface, you could send messages around the planet by semaphore from person to person easily.
It doesn't matter if the population still grows - we are too many already! And do not forget: Every technological progress as so far only good for a part of humanity and always been bad for the rest of the ecosphere in one way or another, not least for bio diversity. This is what everyone forgets: It's not about how many humans the planet can carry, it's about how many humans the ecosystem can survive with, and we can all see that even 7 billion humans have damaged the ecosystem already beyond repair.
If you have 100 billion humans on this planet, there will be no other species left.

[christhomas]

Even if there is a specific carrying capacity for our planet and limit to technological productivity, doesn't mean we have to or should reach it. I think a great progressive move for humanity would be to give back large swaths of our planet to nature instead of dominating every last square inch and resource. Biodiversity is important for the evolution of life and for the maintenance of our planet and its life-giving environment. Let's take a few steps back from controlling it all and playing gods.

[xNameless]

I have only recently become a subscriber and love that we visit the different points of views of each respective camp then go into the science behind it. We need more YouTubers like you rather than influencers! Keep up the great work!

[jbtechcon]

This is like asking if you need to eat more food or less food, while giving zero thought to the quality of your food.

[bvrb]

The Haber-Bosch process is the reason why we have such large populations. Fixing N2 and digging out fertilizers (Phosphates and Nitrates) using Diesel Engines are essential. Perhaps this sort of thing will always stay ahead of the needs of a large population, forever.

I would not bet on that.

[pi]

Some countries population are shrinking but real state is more and more expensive. As a software developer, buying a flat is proportionally many times more expensive that it was for my father, a factory worker... People don't have children just because the oligarchs stole their future, and nobody wants to bring a children without a future.

[edwardschneider]

" The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor."~ Voltaire

[vast]

Malthus was not wrong about the limit of food production: from the late 18th century viewpoint and tech level. What actually caused mass population growth in the 20th century was the invention of cheap artificial fertilizer.

[datamesh]

If the overshoot of resources is now in August and has steadily gotten earlier over the years in the face of expanding technology, and expanding population, how can we expect innovation to answer the problem of future overshoot?