![]() Figure shows that 123 years were necessary to add 1 billion humans in 1930, but it only took 24 years to add two billion people between 19. Notice that while the population in Asia (yellow line), which has many economically underdeveloped countries, is increasing exponentially, the population in Europe (light blue line), where most of the countries are economically developed, is growing much more slowly.Ī consequence of exponential human population growth is a reduction in time that it takes to add a particular number of humans to the Earth. Human population growth since 1000 AD is exponential (dark blue line). In spite of this fact, human population is still growing exponentially. Also, resources would have to be such that the environment would support such growth. To reach its biotic potential, all females would have to become pregnant every nine months or so during their reproductive years. The human population is currently experiencing exponential growth even though human reproduction is far below its biotic potential ( Figure). ![]() As some point out, it is likely that the negative effects of increasing carrying capacity will outweigh the positive ones-the world’s carrying capacity for human beings might actually decrease. The ultimate effect of these changes on our carrying capacity is unknown. The depletion of the ozone layer, erosion due to acid rain, and damage from global climate change are caused by human activities. Long-term exponential growth carries the potential risks of famine, disease, and large-scale death.Īlthough humans have increased the carrying capacity of their environment, the technologies used to achieve this transformation have caused unprecedented changes to Earth’s environment, altering ecosystems to the point where some may be in danger of collapse. Earth’s human population is growing rapidly, to the extent that some worry about the ability of the earth’s environment to sustain this population. And someday I, too, will be nothing more than a point on that line marking out the whole of humanity's story.įinding our place on that line gives us a great reason for reverence and humility, two emotions that are perfect for the holiday season.Population dynamics can be applied to human population growth. Each person represented in the population plot, as it marches across millennia, was just like me in his basic humanity. All those lives and all their stories.įor me, this video shows how important it is to try - even if just for a moment - to put myself in my proper place at the head of that line and see my commonality with all who have come before me. For now, it's enough to think about something simpler - but equally challenging to grasp.Īll those hopes, all that suffering, all that joy, all those birthdays and holidays lived year after year. Still, we can leave the lessons of climate change, etc., for another time. But after watching the population bloom, it's not hard to understand why we're reaching all kinds of critical thresholds now. Unfortunately, our evolutionary experience makes us ill-equipped to wrap our minds around exponential growth. That's the world we're experiencing now, in everything from population to fossil fuel consumption. Taken as a whole, this video gives us an example of exponential growth. In just two centuries, we add 6 billion more new human beings. Then - boom! - the population skyrockets. We reach 1 billion souls around 1800, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.You can actually see the world population decline - a rare event - during the Black Death.1 and the beginning of the Renaissance (almost 1,300 years) the human population barely doubled. That means metropolitan Tokyo (to take just one modern city) now houses one quarter of the entire human race as it was when Jesus was born. But then you realize that's the entire human population of the entire planet. At first, 170 million might seem like a lot of people. The video does a wonderful job of showing where all those people were living (mostly Han Dynasty China, northern India and the Roman Empire). 1 there were 170 million human beings on Earth. No matter how you slice it, farming and city building were revolutionary for us (and the planet). The development of agriculture 10,000 or so years ago drove an explosion in our numbers.While we had expanded across a lot of the world's land masses, there were fewer than a few million human beings in total. For the first 190,000 years of our existence, we were pretty sparse on the ground.Here are some of the highlights you can pick up from the video:
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