“A passing star shifting Neptune’s orbit could cause the collapse of the solar system”
The good news: you have about the next 100 billion years to relax and sip your coffee.
(Headline is misleading. It kinda-sorta implies that there is such a thing on the horizon, while the actual study is just a hypothetical calculation.)
But climate change ie rising surface temps will probably make the earth unliveable in less than 90 yrs. So party like it’s 1999.
See, religion is not necessary to show people an apocalypse is right around the corner.
Sure, Stick, but religion is good for making people believe there is somewhere to go after the apocalypse – IF they follow orders in this world. And pony up some righteous bucks, too.
Even more urgent is something called peak arable land, i.e. means land suitable for crops, google it and you’ll see some nice graphs. It peaked like 20-30 years ago, and may now be declining as ever more people need ever more space.
What we’re seeing now is persistent famine among large populations in Asian and Africa, this means less healthy people, which means more likely to contract disease, and because they’re moving into previously uninhabited areas, means exposure to new diseases. Monkeypox is likely the first of many.
Where I am in Ontario, Canada, we’re truly perverse in that we use the best farmland for suburban residential development. It’s really depressing.
To some extent, the decline of agricultural land can be balanced by increased agricultural efficiency, but your point remains the same. At some point the combination of declining agricultural land, the impact of severe climate, and a constantly increasing population will become so critical that population growth must decline as a result, whether through warring over limited resources, starvation or disease. (Those factors combine in powerful ways. A concrete example: War in Ukraine results in starvation in Africa, resulting in death at both ends. A hypothetical example: An increase in population means people need more land for habitation, therefore less for agriculture – thus increasing the demand for food while simultaneously diminishing the ability to produce it, as your Ontario example suggests.)
Malthus may not have been exactly right on all the details, and he seemed like an alarmist in his own time, but he was definitely onto something, and now seems prescient.
Nobody seems to have a practical solution that might have a chance of working politically, and a good chunk of the world’s leaders won’t even acknowledge that action is necessary. I used to think that I’d like to live for centuries, just to see how we turn out, but now … I think I’d rather not know.
Reference ~ Cowspiracy (2015) It’s always darkest just before it turns pitch black!
I’ve read that if all you care about is the availability of food and not especially its quality (think fast food chains), then we still have more than enough raw capability world-wide to feed everyone even if the population would
The limitations are the practical aspects of access, distribution, cost, amd preferences (i.e, vegans, etc.). It would probably also mean doing things that many find distasteful, such as consolidating to large mega-farms and use of GMO. I’m not advocating this, just saying that at least in theory, capacity can be expanded.
Then of course, there’s always Soylent Green.
From my observations, the source material for Soylent Green is also declining in quality.
The “genius” that goes by the name Elon Musk thinks the planet needs more people…
ISWYDT 😉