The World's Population Is Projected To Peak At 10.3 Billion In the 2080s (un.org) 108
Long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis writes: According to a new report from the United Nations, the world population is expected to grow to an estimated peak of 10.3 billion people in the mid-2080s, an increase over the current global population of 8.2 billion people.
The estimated world population at the end of the century (2100) is now expected to be 6% less than estimates from a decade ago.
However, calculating the number of future people is not a perfect science, with "many sources of uncertainty in estimating the global population," according to the U.S. Census Bureau. It estimated the world reached 8 billion people last September, while the U.N. timed the milestone nearly one year earlier.
The estimated world population at the end of the century (2100) is now expected to be 6% less than estimates from a decade ago.
However, calculating the number of future people is not a perfect science, with "many sources of uncertainty in estimating the global population," according to the U.S. Census Bureau. It estimated the world reached 8 billion people last September, while the U.N. timed the milestone nearly one year earlier.
Let's hear it for climate change (Score:2, Interesting)
As temperatures increase, men produce fewer sperm, lower quality sperm, and less mobile sperm [nih.gov]. This leads to lower birth rates. In addition, higher temperatures lead to more deaths. In short, higher overall temperatures combined with more sustained and severe heat waves are a good thing.
No, I will not be taking any questions.
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There might also be some cultural issues in the developed world that are also reducing birth rates.
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Meanwhile in reality all we have to do is look at India
OK. Here's the birth rate in India: https://pop.org/wp-content/upl... [pop.org]
Birth rate dripped by over a factor of two from 1950 to 2018
to know this notion is bunk.
Looks like a drop to me.
another graph, from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Decreased birth rates has jack shit to do with sperm count. Decreased birth rates in modern times are by choice. For better or for worse, birth control and abortion made pregnancy an optional choice to be undertaken only when one wished, rather than a natural consequence of sexual intercourse.
Its a multi-faceted issue to be sure - wealthy societies tend to stop reproducing whilst poor societies don't, but it still ties back to making pregnancy something you schedule rather than something that just happens
Re:!!! LET'S HEAR IT FOR THE VACCINES !!! (Score:5, Insightful)
People can die or be injured by the vaccine ergo it's not safe and never was.
No vaccine is "safe" according to your bullshit. Not the smallpox vaccine which has wiped out smallpox from the planet, not polio vaccien which has all but eradicated polio from the planet, not the one for rinderpest which has wiped out rinderpest from the planet. But please go on and tell us how getting a vaccine is so much more dangerous compared to being killed.
Trapping CO2 and moisture against your face for prolonged periods carries it's own risks
Because all those surgeons who get pneumonia wearing masks for hours on end doing open heart surgery or organ transplants or joint replacement. Will the whining over something so insignifcant never end? Americans are the biggest whiners on the planet.
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All widely used vaccines are much safer than peanut butter & waaay safer than alcohol. However, you should check that you aren't allergic to the ingredients of vaccines, e.g. eggs, so that you can choose safer alternatives. Apart from that, your chances of longevity increase with appropriate vaccine use.
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Yes, all those medical professionals are at heightened risk of a multiple complications that arise from wearing masks. That's literally the cohort that has been
Nothing is safe. (Score:5, Interesting)
Driving to work can get you killed. Traffic accidents are a leading cause of death in the developed world, in fact.
Healthy freshly cut fruit bought at the supermarket can give you listeria. Those fresh healthy salads are some of the most likely foods to give you food poisoning. You could try restricting your diet to ONLY foods that are too heavily processed for any disease to survive in them....and suffer all the health consequences of malnutrition.
All medicines carry risks too, not just vaccines. But going medicine-free is risky too.
So, nothing is "perfectly safe." Therefore, the phrase "perfectly safe" is not very useful. It refers to an imaginary thing that simply doesn't exist. So why talk about it?
Out in the real world, we use our highly evolved ability of risk-assessment to determine that some risks are small enough that we can call them "safe" even if they are not perfectly safe. And that IS a useful word, in that case.
This applies to vaccines. Even though they are not "perfectly safe" (which absolutely nothing is), they are safe enough that we can meaningfully refer to them as "safe."
Your accusation, that the entire medical community is lying, is made in bad faith. You know perfectly well what they mean when they say "safe" in this context, just like all other educated people do. You are clinging to a linguistic technicality which does not help clarify meaning, and only serves to cause harm.
Please, mend your ways.
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Amen brother. You articulated that more beautifully and simplistically than I could've. Cheers!
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they are safe enough that we can meaningfully refer to them as "safe."
To add to this, the bar for "safe enough" doesn't need to be very high when we're talking about something life threatening. It just needs to be "safer" than the alternative, which all the vaccines effectively have to be to be rolled out.
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Re:Nothing is safe. (Score:4, Insightful)
Out in the real world, we use our highly evolved ability of risk-assessment to determine that some risks are small enough
I have to quibble with your wording here. Whether you intended it or not, saying we're using a "highly evolved ability of risk-assessment" implies that we're relying on the abilities given us by evolutionary development, and we absolutely are not. Not directly, anyway, because our inborn risk assessment abilities are utterly incapable of evaluating distinctions between small but non-zero risks, and suffer from a raft of biases that steer our assessments in essentially random directions.
No, what we use in the real, modern world is not the risk assessment abilities that were evolved over millions of years, but the methods of statistical analysis that we have created through centuries of painstaking and rigorous reasoning. The problem is that most people are unwilling or unable to invest the years of skull sweat required to understand and perform that sort of analysis, or to understand the ways in which it can be done correctly and incorrectly, nor are they willing or able to invest the tremendous amount of time and effort it takes to collect and sift all of the data needed to feed the analysis. And no one has the time to do it for all relevant fields.
This means that we have to rely on experts, on people who have devoted their professional lives to collecting and analyzing the data in a particular, narrow area.
In the current atmosphere of deep division and suspicion, it has become very popular to either ignore or outright shit on such analyses, and to fall back instead on "highly-evolved risk assessment ability". This is exactly what NomDeAlias and the millions like him do on a regular basis. They're turning back the clock on the enlightenment that has made the current generation the healthiest, wealthiest, longest-lived and happiest that humanity has ever seen, and it's precisely because they refuse to accept expert opinions, or to become experts themselves. Caveman intuition over specialist scientific analysis.
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In the real world we don't call something so dangerous that medical professionals are kept in the vicinity on stand by for immediate treatment of expected complications to be safe. We have rules surrounding informed consent precisely because we know it isn't safe and carries risk.
Re:!!! LET'S HEAR IT FOR THE VACCINES !!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Vaccines and the word 'safe.'
So, if a vaccine is 95% effective against a disease that kills 99% of those infected, and for 20 in a million it may hold a risk of death, you seem to be suggesting that it not being 100% safe means no one should use it. That is 100% Bull Shit. Learn math. Learn probability and statistics.
No, I don't care what your opinion is.
No, I am not going to argue this with you.
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You know it occurs to me (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think the population's peaked at 10 billion I doubt it's going to get all that much bigger. Rapid modernization in the last remaining second and third world countries is going to mean birth rates simply grind to a halt within about 20 years tops. We're not going to get anywhere near 2080 before we start shrinking in total population size.
Children are no longer property and/or retirement plans they used to be but rather a kind of fun trophy the extremely well to do get to enjoy. This all of course assumes we don't collapse into a theocratic dictatorship in the next 10 years but if we do that we are probably going to have a nice big world war and it's probably going to be nuclear. We may or may not survive that as a species.
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What's even just as interesting, isn't the number of people we will have, but the composition. Alright, so we will have 10.3 billion people, cool. How many of them will be working adults, compared to how many will be elders in need of care. If life is already getting real tough for the younger generations today, What will it look like for the ones at the peak of population?
I agree with you that there will be some form of collapse long before we see that mark.
At the rate automation devours jobs (Score:1)
Oh we're going to have to get serious about automating farming. Large swathes of Europe have already done this where they just can't get cheap slave labor to do it for them beca
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Children are no longer property and/or retirement plans they used to be but rather a kind of fun trophy the extremely well to do get to enjoy.
Don't you have children? When did you become "extremely well to do?"
I'm one of the dirt poor idiots (Score:1)
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As I understand, most western countries, and China, Russia, Japan, etc are facing population declines.
So where is this population increase supposed to come from? Africa / Latin America mostly? I understand India is still increasing in population as well.
If there is lesser immigration allowed, alot of places are going to have lesser people around, and alot of places are probably going to increase population by huge numbers.
Lesser people around for an aging population is going to be a huge pain point in the f
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Modern countries are not the ones contributing the most to population rise. https://www.cia.gov/the-world-... [cia.gov] here's a list.
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Rapid modernization in the last remaining second and third world countries is going to mean birth rates simply grind to a halt within about 20 years tops. We're not going to get anywhere near 2080 before we start shrinking in total population size.
Only if Islam in particular undergoes massive change.
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Rapid modernization in the last remaining second and third world countries is going to mean birth rates simply grind to a halt within about 20 years tops. We're not going to get anywhere near 2080 before we start shrinking in total population size.
Only if Islam in particular undergoes massive change.
Fertility rates are nosediving even in Muslim countries. Interestingly, studies that apply large-scale multivariate regression analysis to global fertility rates don't find that religion is even a significant factor in them. The biggest factors that affect birthrates are wealth and education, especially female education, and both relationships are inversely proportional, meaning that more wealth and more education mean lower birthrates. Of course, there is some correlation between religion, wealth and edu
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...Aboriginal people in North America have that too....
Be careful talking about the "aboriginal people of North America" as if before the Europeans arrived they all have the same culture, the same beliefs, the same social structures. The pre-European people of North America comprised a large number of completely different cultures, speaking vastly different languages.
(by the way, the phrase "aboriginal people" is rarely used for the Americas (common in Australia, though). Usually we'd say "indigenous" (or, if you're Canadian, "first nations"). )
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...Aboriginal people in North America have that too....
Be careful talking about the "aboriginal people of North America" as if before the Europeans arrived they all have the same culture, the same beliefs, the same social structures. The pre-European people of North America comprised a large number of completely different cultures, speaking vastly different languages.
(by the way, the phrase "aboriginal people" is rarely used for the Americas (common in Australia, though). Usually we'd say "indigenous" (or, if you're Canadian, "first nations"). )
Or injuns. :P
But, yes, the native tribes of North America were a wealth of distinct languages, cultures and practices. I'm not aware of any who considered the Chief to own everything, especially not the land or his people.
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Every modern country already has below-replacement population.
The population of South Korea is on track to go extinct within the next 60-100 years (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/opinion/south-korea-birth-dearth.html) . Other western nations are not far behind. China is also not far behind.
All population growth comes from more impoverished areas of the world.
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Every modern country already has below-replacement population. The population of South Korea is on track to go extinct within the next 60-100 years (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/opinion/south-korea-birth-dearth.html) .
Exponential declines do not go to zero in finite time.
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Tom Murphy agrees with you. [ucsd.edu] The UN projections have a kink which is not really justified. If you continue the current trends instead population will peak as soon as 10 years out, depending on some other assumptions.
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Reminds me of The White Plague [wikipedia.org]
Stupid idiot conspiracy theories (Score:2, Interesting)
One of the thi
Re: You know it occurs to me (Score:2)
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Ok, I know this is a stupid troll post, but:
Don't bother with sterilizing males, they are not the ones who can be taken out of rotation for 9 months at a time.
Wouldn't that be the opposite. A man can conceive any number of children, a woman can only conceive once per 9 months, so male contraception would be more bang for your buck.
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Ok, I know this is a stupid troll post, but:
Don't bother with sterilizing males, they are not the ones who can be taken out of rotation for 9 months at a time.
Wouldn't that be the opposite. A man can conceive any number of children, a woman can only conceive once per 9 months, so male contraception would be more bang for your buck.
Experience with stray cats and dogs shows this to not be the case. Turns out a single un-neutered male will impregnate all the females in roving distance.
Did you not read what you replied to? Your response 100% supports the comment you replied to...
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Ok, I know this is a stupid troll post, but:
Don't bother with sterilizing males, they are not the ones who can be taken out of rotation for 9 months at a time.
Wouldn't that be the opposite. A man can conceive any number of children, a woman can only conceive once per 9 months, so male contraception would be more bang for your buck.
Experience with stray cats and dogs shows this to not be the case. Turns out a single un-neutered male will impregnate all the females in roving distance.
Did you not read what you replied to? Your response 100% supports the comment you replied to...
It actually doesn't. It's an understandable confusion. I had your thought at first but a couple seconds of mentally running through the if>then cases turned on the light bulb.
If your approach is to spay all females and leave males un-neutered, and you have a 20% failure rate, the resulting population will still be heavily limited by the fact that each instance of failure can only produce at most 1 new child per year.
If your approach is to neuter all males and leave females un-spayed, and you have even a
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I'm not really aware of any failure rates in neutering since, at least in the US, neutering of (most) male dogs is castration. Granted a random, unneutered stray male could wonder through and knock up any un-spayed females. I think that is much more likely than failure of neutering and in that case I do agree with you.
Oh, I see. You thought we were talking about failure of the individual surgical procedures.
No, that isn't what we're talking about. We are talking about which strategy is more likely to fail. A strategy based on neutering males is significantly more likely to fail than a strategy based on spaying females.
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I'm not really aware of any failure rates in neutering since, at least in the US, neutering of (most) male dogs is castration. Granted a random, unneutered stray male could wonder through and knock up any un-spayed females. I think that is much more likely than failure of neutering and in that case I do agree with you.
Sorry, poor word choice on my part. I just realized what's tripping you up is when I said "approach" it would have been better to say "goal". I was speaking in pragmatic real-life terms. You thought I was speaking in idealized terms.
I was taking it as an implicit assumption that we obviously cannot successfully catch and alter ALL the population of animals within a city or region. When I said "failure" I didn't mean "Suppose we have the ideal approach where we neuter all males, but 20% of the surgical
There will be war (Score:1)
Re:There will be war (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure I see a climate based scenario that makes sense given who has them and who doesn't.
Re: There will be war (Score:2)
People in arid regions will fight to acquire adjacent more fertile regions.
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Well considering America is losing its shit over a few thousand people on the souther border I can envisage a future where someone lobs a nuke or two down at mexico. It's just that kind of weird fucked up time we live in.
Re:There will be war (Score:4, Informative)
Well considering America is losing its shit over a few thousand people on the souther border
lol, there were 2.5 million in 2023 [migrationpolicy.org] alone.
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War against who? This isn't a foreign adversary. The reality is that the drain on resources will be internal. When 20% of your working aged population is trying to produce enough output to provide for the other 80% who are retired, then the answer won't be war, but rather an inevitable revolt and some sort of euthanasia routine. IE forced end of life at a certain age a la Logan's Run.
Modern medicine introduced the concept of "retirement". People can live beyond the years when they're still capable of d
Re:There will be war (Score:5, Funny)
IE forced end of life at a certain age a la Logan's Run.
Damn you Microsoft!
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Re:One Green Myth overturned (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a pretty big assumption that the environment isn't currently wrecked or that it won't be my 2080.
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it's not an assumption. It's a complacent lie to yourself. A delusion.
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It's a pretty big assumption that the environment isn't currently wrecked or that it won't be my 2080.
It's a category error to think of the environment as something that is either "wrecked" or "not wrecked".
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Now we see that every country had its birth rate drop below the replacement rate of 2.1 after the country develops and people got out of poverty.
So your argument is that the current mass of excess humanity is perfectly fine because it's looking to stabilize in 70 years or so?
This despite the overwhelming evidence that we exceeded tolerable levels of pointless consumers somewhere in the 70's and are destroying the only environment capable of supporting human life at a pace that could be called "stupidly reckless"?
I get we're a species that prefers to opt for zero effort, but come on.... at some point arguing like this is just... ludicrous. It also
Boy, the nutters are out! (Score:5, Insightful)
Somehow I did not expect this level of nuttery on this article. It seemed like a pretty mundane conclusion.
Re:Boy, the nutters are out! (Score:4, Insightful)
Which nutters?
The 85% or more of Westerners are repeating like zombies "There are too many people on the planet" even though peak child was 30 years ago (1994 - check it on worldmeter.org)? The nutters that claim the carrying capacity of Earth is about 500 million and only if they are vegans?
Do you know how many times have I called the nutters to at least stop with that lie? Here on /., home of fact and logical thought /s. And every time I get down-modded, while some ignorant, genocidal fuck is getting +5 Insightful by stating the fallacy over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again....
But hey, there is no helping gretins!
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peak child was 30 years ago (1994 - check it on worldmeter.org)?
I tried. I tried reeeeally hard. But I failed.
> server 8.8.8.8
Default Server: dns.google
Address: 8.8.8.8
> set type=soa
> worldmeter.org
Server: dns.google
Address: 8.8.8.8
*** dns.google can't find worldmeter.org: Server failed
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peak child was 30 years ago (1994 - check it on worldmeter.org)?
Do you have a link? I've been looking for a site that provides global total births by year for most of a decade now, and been unable to find it. I scoured https://worldometers.info/ [worldometers.info] (it's moved there from worldometer.org) and didn't find that data.
Do worry, the bots will soon start (Score:2)
...eating us for fuel. Let's hand over the lawyers, telemarketers, and politicians first.
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That will be OK, because AI will have taken away all our jobs, leaving us with nothing to do but wait to be eaten.
Nerds could get lucky (Score:1)
Re:Nerds could get lucky (Score:4, Interesting)
In my experience, working 35 years with other programmers (nerds), nearly all of them have been married. It seems that, after high school, girls start to realize that nerds tend to be intelligent, stable, and financially well off. These traits are attractive to many, despite the otherwise nerdy quirkiness. Meanwhile, the high school jocks are working at the local gym or grocery store. Nerds tend to settle down and have families, they just start their dating life a little later.
Lets kill the earth faster! (Score:4, Insightful)
Nevermind the population has become unsustainable sometime in the 1970's. Why do we need more people?
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According to the USDA, the land area used for agriculture has been decreasing since the 1950s, despite the world's population tripling since then. Worldwide, agricultural land use has leveled off over that same time period.
What exactly is your basis for saying that population growth has become unsustainable since the 1970s?
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-... [usda.gov].
https://ourworldindata.org/lan... [ourworldindata.org]
If Climate Change forces temps up more, then Nope (Score:1)
With or without WW3? (Score:2)
Predictions are hard.
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Predictions are hard.
Especially when they concern the future.
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The deadliest war in history was WWII, which killed 75 million people, 4% of the world's population. https://courses.lumenlearning.... [lumenlearning.com].
COVID-19 killed 7 million people, or https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info]
Even wars and pestilence are unlikely to change the overall trajectory of the world's population by a significant degree.
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You're both on the bad drugs. We have all kinds of technologies which could improve carrying capacity which we aren't using because nobody can make a jillion dollars from them. Practices as simple as regenerative agriculture could flip that script immensely.
Of course, AGW is destroying arability, so the carrying capacity (whatever it might actually be exactly) is going down fast. Food insecurity is rising rapidly. A lot of people are just going to starve before they get a chance to die from heatstroke.
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Regenerative agriculture both produces way more food per acre than current industrial farming but also requires far more human labor to do effectively. We'd have to entirely retool the world economy to do that. It would mean going back to having 80-90% of the population engaged in agriculture. People who advocate for regenerative farming usually imagine themselves as in the 10-20% that would of course not be in the fields. I have absolutely no respect for anyone advocating for regenerative farming who isn't
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With the amount of land area already covered by either roads or houses, if you cover them with solar power systems, you can easily generate around 5x the amount of power the world currently generates. That's just solar. With air liquefaction as storage, and a change in the construction of new homes for efficiency gains, and electric rail for robust mass transit, you can get a lot of energy sustainably.
Not new, very similar numbers from 15yr ago (Score:3)
I remember seeing a similar prediction from the UN that population would stabilize by 2050 around 10 billion
Using that number, I tried to predict future population growth around 2010
http://younelan.com/tomorrow/t... [younelan.com]
Looks like we are right on schedule
Quite optimistic (Score:2)
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That was my first thought as well. One thing climate change will do and already has started to do is massively decrease livable and arable land on the planet. No, you cannot do agriculture on former permafrost, that takes 10'000 years or so to become possible.
2080's? (Score:2)
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Melania?
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Melania?
No, that's an entirely different form of devil.