this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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Damn, that's interesting!
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The visualization is strange for this because the hour glass implies that the is a finite number of humans that can live but at the same time it is refilled from the top continously.
What happens in a billion years will it overflow?
Am I the only one with this problem?
Then God will turn it over and it starts going backwards. All the dead people will be born again in reverse order, it's gonna be real weird.
Phew, luckily religion has all the answers.
They’ll just draw it bigger.
We’ll just add a zero to each of the population counts.
“Each grain of sand represents 100 million people …”
Currently our world wide birthrate is trending towards an average of 1.9-2.1 children per woman, which is basically just enough to maintain a stable population. The main reason we exploded in population in the last couple centuries is that our kids stopped dying so frequently, so as people notice that they no longer need to have 15 kids so that 3 of them make it to puberty, they stop having huge families.
Maybe we die out because we failed to take care of the planet.
More like because we failed to take care of ourselves, by taking care of the biosphere we relied on to stay alive.
Well. Human societies have an upper limit on the amount of population they can sustain, determined by their access to natural resources, technology, and social organization.
Malthus got a lot of shit because he came up with his theories exactly when civilization was entering into a period where the advancements in technology were drastically expanding those limits, and because his ideas were instrumentalized by a lot of unsavory types, but he did find a (very incomplete) segment of truth.
Right now, the biggest danger of it all becoming relevant again is the possibility that sustained ecological disaster might dramatically lower our population upper limit without us having the capacity to react fast enough.
But that would be represented in this analogy by a limited size on the top half of the hourglass, not the bottom one.
The glass will have to become a lot bigger if we start building civilization beyond our little solar system, haha.
I had the same thought. The top part is filling up faster than it's emptying out... At some point it's going to be too full. Was that point like 100 years ago?