This is it. Today the world population is officially 8 billion people.
The United Nations has declared that the world's population will pass 8 billion people on 15 November, but future growth is expected to slow as fertility rates fall across the globe https://t.co/oSbblnhHQu
— New Scientist (@newscientist) November 10, 2022
Covid needs to step up its game and do a better job of thinning the herd. /snark... or is it?
Why mess around with such an inefficient killing mechanism when nuclear weapons are available? Russia, China and the US alone have something like 3,000 deliverable weapons among them.
Nuclear weapons have undesirable side effects for those who remain.
I'll go out on a limb and suggest this is somewhere around humanity's high water mark.
Ecologically speaking, we're far into overshoot territory. The correction is is going to be horrible.
but future growth is expected to slow
This makes it sounds as if the growth hasn't already started to slow. But it's been slowing for about four decades now—indeed ever more dramatically in recent years. The epic slowdown in the growth of the human population is one of our species's most unsung accomplishments.
Not only have fertility rates been slowing for decades, average life expectancy is getting closer to plateauing as regional disparities have been shrinking.
We have many more people today than a century ago (<2 billion). While birth rates have declined, life expectancy has grown.
While true, the dynamic you describe helps sew the seeds of even further slowdown.* And that's because the situation ultimately translates into an older population; and a population with a lot of old people is a population too old to have a lot of babies. To put it another way, a society like, say, China, is seeing dramatically fewer births both because women of childbearing age aren't giving birth as frequently, but also because women of childbearing age are a smaller percentage of the population than 10 years ago (and much smaller than 50 years ago). It's just the opposite for seniors, of course; their numbers have skyrocketed. And the narrative describes a growing number of countries.
*Before century's end the human population is expected to begin shrinking.
Title for a new TV series: The Naked World
"There are 8 billion stories in the naked world." I guess that will be a loooooonnnng running series.
Naked City was also noted for its long episode titles like "Today the Man Who Kills the Ants is Coming" and "If Any Are Cold, To Warm Them". They'll have to be a thousand times longer now.
Barring something weird in terms of life extension technology or culture shift, it looks like it's going to more or less flatten out at around 11 billion people and then only very slowly grow from there.
Not the first time that's happened through history. US population growth was insanely high in the 19th century, but population growth rates in Europe were a lot slower.
This is great news! California's population doubled in 50 years from 20 million to 40 million, and everybody is better off as a result. Looking forward for the state to have 200 million residents - which will be utopia - or so the "greater density is better living" crowd keeps telling us.