Considering how lopsided the distribution of resource consumption is, I'll label this as skewed.
this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2026
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I’m sure there is an upper limit to the amount of humans that can live on the planet. I’m also sure that we’ll never reach that level because the wealth hoarders will have this planet uninhabitable before it occurs
Months ago someone shared a link to a study by a swedish or norwish institute where they had done those calculations.
Our species will top around the 11bn and slowly fall back to the 9,5/10bn, with optimist expectations. Lower numbers would be in 8/8,5bn.
Biggest problem? Resource sharing. We are able to feed our species two fold and then some. Just eliminating bad commercial practices and food waste, would nearly double the available food, as is.
Before, it was the rise of living standards cutting the birth rate down. Now, with poverty, inequality and automation on the rise, people have another reason to not raise families.
Our species will shrink and fast. Faster than anyone expects. Korea, Japan, Italy, even my country, are showing fast signs of aging.
What will they try to do? Conscript women's uterus like Russia is, supposedly, debating? Even China is doing the math and the numbers are not good.
We owe nothing to governments. They are our servants. People forgot about that. Allowed megalomaniac interests to takeover our lives.
Will things get grimmer? Yes. No doubt about it. But I hope I will live to see things get better.
This article so so fucked up I don't even know where to start. Like just the framing from the get-go treats economic development, human lives, and the ecology as equivalent in importance. But also, we know what sort of socioeconomic systems this sort of Malthusian ideology gets us, and we know what sort of socioeconomic systems (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2021.102287) lead to a sustainable future (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-018-0172-6 ).
This focus in academia on "what population can the earth sustain capitalism at" instead of "how can we shape our lives to live as one with the rest of the life on earth" is insidious. It stokes the fires of global fascism and manufactures consent for ethnic cleansing of the peoples who we should be most closely learning from.
It's never been a resource problem. It's always been a distribution issue.
Population is to blame only if you think that the depletion of resources is shared equally among all people and required for survival.
Correct and concise! I'm sick of hearing 'overpopulation is killing earth' when the reality is industrialised capitalism is the cancer killing us all
Well population rate is dropping so it will balance out. So long as birth control stays cheap, legal, and easy.
So long as birth control stays cheap, legal, and easy.
Unfortunately, a certain segment seems hell bent on changing this.
Can't read the article due to cloudflare blocking me, but it sounds implausible that barely populated planet can't sustain more than 2,5 billion people. Feels too much in line with techno-feudalist dreams.
The article says 2.5b people is the max for everyone to have a high standard of living. Lower standards of living could be supported for a larger population. At least that's the claim.
Idk if that's necessarily true, though I suppose it depends on what you define as the high standard of living. That isn't well spelled out. It also assumes there isn't significant change in energy input required for the high standard output.
Nah, Earth is fine. It's the human population that will reach a breaking point.
Do t worry, we'll take a significant portion of life down with us!
Let's revisit this in 2 or 3 years to see how those numbers look.
I found the study a but confusing at first
What they seem to have done is taken population data for humans (some of the early data has larger error bars) and mapped two population models to them:
- the Rickler model - used by fisheries to predict stock
- the Gompertz curve that is used for quite a few things
Both of these models have a carrying capacity that can be calculated.
I'm not sure how they took into account technological jumps that changed carrying capacity. They seem to have ignored that but I'd assume it would at the very least make the fit harder and I'm suspicious that either model can account for it.
Their conclusion actually both notes that technology can be important and that carrying capacity is tough to estimate:
A meta-analysis by van den Bergh and Rietveld examined 51 studies that produced 94 estimates of a limit to the global human population. Their median meta-prediction from these 51 studies was 7.7 billion people, but ranged from 650 million assuming a low-technology future where water availability is the main limiting factor, to 288 billion under the assumption of the ‘best’ future technology for all countries (with most estimates well above currently projected future global population sizes).
But I think it then goes on to overstate their contribution:
The uncertainty stems mainly from the many different assumptions and dimensions considered in the projections, a problem we avoided by basing our estimates of maximum and sustainable carrying capacity on the population data alone
This isn't my field though, I just struggled to understand what they were actually basing this claim on and figured I may as well share it.