How many people do you think Earth can take? 9 billion? 12 billion? 30 billion?
What do you think should be Earth's capacity, as in what do you think should be the maximum amount of people in the world? 2 billion? 4 billion? 6 billion?
Take deer populations, with their predators on the decline, they have exploded. However, lack of food, infections like wasting disease, and other things, the number of deer living in a certain area is set and can be mathmatically derived.
Perfect, now what do you think Earth's capacity is?
I don't think that takes into account the vast effect we have to our environment and our advances in our technologies. Who are we to say that we won't live in a multilayered world spanning the whole surface of earth and have a highly efficient form of agriculture in the future? You can't say definitively what the limit is.
Actually estimates vary widely among scientists in the field. Much of it centers around our usage and pollution of water, surface area in which to cultivate both livestock and plants. Too lazy to dig up the reports I was reading on it a while back, but I seem to remember most estimates falling roughly on the lower end of a scale between 9 billion and 40 billion people.
well, for closed systems, calculations using the Lotkaâ�"Volterra equation
The Lotka-Volterra equation is involved in predator-prey interactions, and thus is not applicable to humans. I mean, we can look at, like MRWalker said, usage of resources, but it's tough to collect this sort of data, and this could change in the near future.
It's like if I made a thread and I asked all the people in WEPR to do some math problem, and since they couldn't do it, I told them to guess at it.
A lot of discussions in this forum have no right or wrong answer. That's sort of the point. If there was a correct answer, there wouldn't be any need to discuss it. If you don't like it, don't post.
How many people do you think Earth can take? 9 billion? 12 billion? 30 billion?
What do you think should be Earth's capacity, as in what do you think should be the maximum amount of people in the world? 2 billion? 4 billion? 6 billion?
@Einfach.... I believe you are misreading the op's intention... he wasn't saying "should" as in if you could decide how many people the earth could sustain what would it be... Progress made from a group of people is usually more than progress made by a lone individual. Now I think this is a totally relevant question... b/c at the rate we're going we will at some point in the future reach that max capacity mark and we won't be able to sustain ourselves w/ the way we use our resources now. Its identifying and solving a problem before it adversely affects us.
as for your math symbolism. Instead of asking for people to guess at something, I'm sure it would be more along the lines of asking people to take an "educated guess" at it.... they're similar in name, but different in concept. Instead of blindly firing off random numbers, we would break it down and use what we know to be similar to that problem and see what the general trend should be... and what the different parts mean.
There are modes of conversation other than debate... you don't always have to try and prove someone wrong.
the "keep debates friendly" tag doesn't mean its solely for arguing things.
opinionated discussions.... right or wrong discussions....abortion
"What do you think?"
you can apply that to probably anything opinion related.
A lot of discussions in this forum have no right or wrong answer
what if that was posed in a different way....? A lot of discussions in this forum have no right or wrong answer that can be 100% proven by any means known to us at this current time. I would think that would apply to a lot of the religious based threads... which most of the time ( a large portion of the time) consume ~75% of the first page.
what I'm wondering is why you're so adamantly opposing this thread.
i don't know numbers right now... i might try and fish something out of the interwebs later when i'm not procrastinating on muh studying for muh med phys test that's tomorrow ( DX )
Like what? Name some, other than the "What do you think?" ones.
Any religion based ones. In addition to that, I opened a random topic in the list, and guess what I found? The topic was called Justice System, and the very last line in the OP was this:
What do you guys think?
Sure, one topic, that's not too much. So I opened another, the one about the sled dogs. Quote from the OP again:
What do you think about all this. And do you think people care more about dogs being killed then people??
Any religion based ones. In addition to that, I opened a random topic in the list, and guess what I found? The topic was called Justice System, and the very last line in the OP was this:
OK - but the difference between this and the others is that just because the OP asks that does not imply that the answer cannot be determined.
Too lazy to dig up the reports I was reading on it a while back, but I seem to remember most estimates falling roughly on the lower end of a scale between 9 billion and 40 billion people.
According to this the estimates fall between 2 to 40 billion.
OK - but the difference between this and the others is that just because the OP asks that does not imply that the answer cannot be determined.
Are you saying the answer can be determined in a discussion about the existance of God?
Really, if you don't like the thread, you can just go away. No need to come here and act childish. ----------------- Now, about the question of how many humans the world can sustain, I'd say it'd rely more on the area we have to live on, rather than resources, assuming the population does not increase to rapidly. The more scarce food will become, the more emphasis research will put on fixing this problem, and if science gets enough time to do it's thing, I bet new technology would take care of the food problems.
However, one problem with too many humans could be that we'll need more energy and such, and this will lead to increased pollution. What I wonder is not how many people can live on our Earth, but how many people our Earth can live with.
