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By 2050 there will be 9 billion carbon-burning, plastic-polluting, calorie-consuming people on the planet. By 2100, that number will balloon to 11 billion, pushing society into a Soylent Green scenario. Such dire population predictions aren't the stuff of sci-fi; those numbers come from one of the most trusted world authorities, the United Nations.
But what if they're wrong? Not like, off by a rounding error, but like totally, completely goofed?
That's the conclusion Canadian journalist John Ibbitson and political scientist Darrel Bricker come to in their newest book, Empty Planet, due out February 5th. After painstakingly breaking down the numbers for themselves, the pair arrived at a drastically different prediction for the future of the human species. "In roughly three decades, the global population will begin to decline," they write. "Once that decline begins, it will never end."
The World Might Actually Run Out of People (archive)
Who do you think is right ? The United Nations or Darrel Bricker/John Ibbitson ?
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday February 05 2019, @01:08AM (3 children)
> "Once that decline begins, it will never end"
Suuuure. A planet with 10 or 100 million humans will see them acting exactly as they do in a world with 7 or 10 billion.
Morons.
Don't they realize that after humanity drops below a million people, there just won't be enough to make the computers, networks, and all that other stuff that distracts us from banging around like rabbits, nor make contraceptives ?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 05 2019, @01:48AM
You know, those two sentences work even better if you remove the period and line feed after "billion".
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 05 2019, @03:04AM
Exactly. There are plenty of sci-fi stories about overreacting to global warming and letting loose the next ice age, and that's many orders of magnitude more predictable and controllable than the current human population.
New summary: "Some guys wrote a book and made shtuff up about future population trends. They imagined a scenario different from the one published by the UN. Their scenario is just as credible as the UN scenario because it's all a bunch of guessing and both are going to miss several important factors that mean neither is even close to correct."
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 05 2019, @03:58AM
10 to 100m people is probably too few. However you'd probably see the distribution change to maintain similar population densities.