I did a calculation in high school once using the exponential population growth equation to see what the population should be. My conclusion was that either the earth was actually very young, or we had almost gone extinct several times.
I went with the later, even though the equation turns out to not quiet be correct. Don’t know why I even remember doing that.
The logistic population growth formula is non-linear and has weird chaotic property when you feed back its own result recursively. Basically population growth doesn’t always go up, nor does it stabilise itself nicely (as one would expect), at least not without outside intervention.
What happens instead is a weird bifurcation where the population jumps closely between a minimum and a maximum one year after another, and it keeps bifurcing and getting more “random” the bigger and the longer the population has been going on.
This is the case for a whole bunch of stuff in nature, but population growth is really cool because it is somewhat easily observable outside physics and mathematics.
This mean if human population growth follow that of virtually every other animals on earth, it is likely to shake violently back and forth over and over again, up until maybe we reach a point where we do something about it. Hence it is very hard to guess the age of the specy or of the earth based on the current population, because the pattern is so wild and it goes in both directions. So I think your conclusion was correct, and it is likely to happen again, multiple times.
In 2021 the NYT ran an article on how the world’s population will be much lower by the middle of the century because people are having fewer children. @sj_zero This is not only a Western phenomenon. According to the data I’m citing, there is no mysterious natural cycle going on. People are having fewer children all around the world. We’ve known this for quite a while, now. It’s predictable because people are living longer, so not only is the world’s fertility rate plummeting, but the population that remains is getting older.
It’s pretty much undeniable given all the data that particularly in Western countries, but also in China and Japan, the population is about to collapse. It’s a natural part of a cycle of population growth and decline. Even though we have more than enough food to keep on growing, people can predict the overall cost of having kids, and have decided that they just can’t afford to pay that right now. As a result, we do have something of an economic boom in the short term, but in the long term expense of a population collapse.
That’s not such a bad thing. When the population shrinks, the importance of individual people rises, and the world tends to become more egalitarian. As the number of people increase, and the value of individuals tends to drop, leading to decrease in the value of individuals. If the future plays out the way that history did, we will probably see our kids or our grandkids living in a golden age where individuals have unprecedented Rights and freedoms because they’re so few of them.
I did a calculation in high school once using the exponential population growth equation to see what the population should be. My conclusion was that either the earth was actually very young, or we had almost gone extinct several times.
I went with the later, even though the equation turns out to not quiet be correct. Don’t know why I even remember doing that.
The logistic population growth formula is non-linear and has weird chaotic property when you feed back its own result recursively. Basically population growth doesn’t always go up, nor does it stabilise itself nicely (as one would expect), at least not without outside intervention.
What happens instead is a weird bifurcation where the population jumps closely between a minimum and a maximum one year after another, and it keeps bifurcing and getting more “random” the bigger and the longer the population has been going on.
This is the case for a whole bunch of stuff in nature, but population growth is really cool because it is somewhat easily observable outside physics and mathematics.
This mean if human population growth follow that of virtually every other animals on earth, it is likely to shake violently back and forth over and over again, up until maybe we reach a point where we do something about it. Hence it is very hard to guess the age of the specy or of the earth based on the current population, because the pattern is so wild and it goes in both directions. So I think your conclusion was correct, and it is likely to happen again, multiple times.
In 2021 the NYT ran an article on how the world’s population will be much lower by the middle of the century because people are having fewer children. @sj_zero This is not only a Western phenomenon. According to the data I’m citing, there is no mysterious natural cycle going on. People are having fewer children all around the world. We’ve known this for quite a while, now. It’s predictable because people are living longer, so not only is the world’s fertility rate plummeting, but the population that remains is getting older.
It’s pretty much undeniable given all the data that particularly in Western countries, but also in China and Japan, the population is about to collapse. It’s a natural part of a cycle of population growth and decline. Even though we have more than enough food to keep on growing, people can predict the overall cost of having kids, and have decided that they just can’t afford to pay that right now. As a result, we do have something of an economic boom in the short term, but in the long term expense of a population collapse.
That’s not such a bad thing. When the population shrinks, the importance of individual people rises, and the world tends to become more egalitarian. As the number of people increase, and the value of individuals tends to drop, leading to decrease in the value of individuals. If the future plays out the way that history did, we will probably see our kids or our grandkids living in a golden age where individuals have unprecedented Rights and freedoms because they’re so few of them.