- Soviet and Russian physicist, educator, TV presenter, editor-in-chief of the magazine "In the world of science", vice-president of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. Since 1973, he has continuously hosted the popular science TV program "Obvious - Incredible". Son of the Nobel Prize Laureate Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa.
This is one of the last articles by SP Kapitsa with answers to many questions of our time.
After the collapse of science in our country, I was forced to spend a year abroad - in Cambridge, where I was born. There I was assigned to Darwin College; it is part of Trinity College, of which my father was once a member. The college focuses primarily on overseas scholars. I was given a small scholarship that supported me, and we lived in a house that my father had built. It was there, thanks to a completely inexplicable coincidence of circumstances, that I stumbled upon the problem of population growth.
I have dealt with global problems of peace and balance before - something that made us change our point of view on war with the emergence of an absolute weapon that can destroy all problems at once, although it is not able to solve them. But of all the global problems, in fact, the main one is the number of people who live on Earth. How many of them, where are they being driven. This is the central problem in relation to everything else, and at the same time it was least solved.
This is not to say that no one thought about it before. People have always worried about how many there are. Plato calculated how many families should live in an ideal city, and he got about five thousand. Such was the visible world for Plato - the population of the policies of Ancient Greece numbered tens of thousands of people. The rest of the world was empty - it just didn't exist as a real arena for action.
Strange as it may seem, such a limited interest existed even fifteen years ago, when I began to deal with the problem of population. It was not customary to discuss the problems of the demography of all mankind: just as in a decent society they do not talk about sex, in a good scientific society it was not supposed to talk about demography. It seemed to me that it was necessary to start with humanity as a whole, but such a subject could not even be discussed. Demography has evolved from small to large: from the city, the country to the world as a whole. There was the demography of Moscow, the demography of England, the demography of China. How to deal with the world when scientists can barely cope with areas of one country? To get through to the central problem, it was necessary to overcome a lot of what the British call conventional wisdom, that is, generally accepted dogmas.
But, of course, I was far from the first in this area. The great Leonard Euler, who worked in various fields of physics and mathematics, wrote the main equations of demography back in the 18th century, which are still used today. And among the general public, the name of another founder of demography, Thomas Malthus, is best known.
Malthus was a curious figure. He graduated from theology department, but was very well mathematically prepared: he took ninth place in the Cambridge mathematics competition. If Soviet Marxists and modern social scientists knew mathematics at the level of the ninth rank of the university, I would calm down and think that they are sufficiently mathematically equipped. I was in Malthus's office in Cambridge and saw Euler's books there with his pencil marks - it is clear that he was completely master of the mathematical apparatus of his time.
Malthus's theory is quite coherent, but built on the wrong premises. He assumed that the number of people grows exponentially (that is, the growth rate is higher the more people already live on the earth, give birth and raise children), but growth is limited by the availability of resources, such as food.
Exponential growth to the point of complete depletion of resources is the dynamic that we see in most living things. This is how even microbes grow in the nutrient broth. But the point is, we are not microbes.
People are not beasts
Aristotle said that the main difference between man and animal is that he wants to know. But to notice how much we differ from animals, there is no need to crawl into our heads: it is enough just to count how many we are. All creatures on Earth, from a mouse to an elephant, are subject to dependence: the more body weight, the fewer individuals. There are few elephants, many mice. Weighing about one hundred kilograms, there should be about hundreds of thousands of us. Now in Russia there are one hundred thousand wolves, one hundred thousand wild boars. Such species exist in balance with nature. And man is a hundred thousand times more numerous! Despite the fact that biologically we are very similar to large monkeys, wolves or bears.
There are few hard numbers in the social sciences. Perhaps the population of the country is the only thing that is unconditionally known. When I was a boy, I was taught in school that there are two billion people on Earth. Now it is seven billion. We have experienced this kind of growth over the course of a generation. We can roughly say how many people lived at the time of the birth of Christ - about a hundred million. Paleoanthropologists estimate the population of Paleolithic people at about one hundred thousand - exactly as much as we are supposed to in accordance with body weight. But since then, growth has begun: at first barely noticeable, then faster and faster, nowadays it is explosive. Never before has humanity grown so rapidly.
Even before the war, Scottish demographer Paul Mackendrick proposed a formula for human growth. And this growth turned out to be not exponential, but hyperbolic - very slow at the beginning and rapidly accelerating at the end. According to his formula, in 2030 the number of humanity should tend to infinity, but this is an obvious absurdity: people are biologically incapable of giving birth to an infinite number of children in a finite time. More importantly, such a formula perfectly describes the growth of humanity in the past. This means that the rate of growth has always been proportional not to the number of people living on earth, but to the square of this number.
Physicists and chemists know what this dependence means: it is a "second-order reaction", where the speed of the process depends not on the number of participants, but on the number of interactions between them. When something is proportional to "en-square", it is a collective phenomenon. Such is, for example, a nuclear chain reaction in an atomic bomb. If each member of the "Snob" community writes a comment to everyone else, then the total number of comments will just be proportional to the square of the number of members. The square of the number of people is the number of connections between them, a measure of the complexity of the "humanity" system. The greater the difficulty, the faster the growth.
No man is an island: we don't live and die alone. We reproduce, we eat, differing little from animals in this, but the qualitative difference is that we exchange knowledge. We pass them on by inheritance, we pass them on horizontally - in universities and schools. Therefore, our dynamics of development is different. We are not just multiplying and multiplying: we are making progress. This progress is quite difficult to measure numerically, but for example, energy production and consumption can be a good measure. And the data show that energy consumption is also proportional to the square of the number of people, that is, the energy consumption of each person is the higher, the larger the population of the Earth (as if every contemporary, from Papuan to Aleut, shares energy with you. - Ed.).
Our development lies in knowledge - this is the main resource of humanity. Therefore, to say that our growth is limited by the depletion of resources is a very crude formulation of the question. In the absence of disciplined thinking, there are a lot of all kinds of horror stories. For example, a couple of decades ago, there was serious talk about the depletion of silver reserves, which is used to make films: supposedly in India, in Bollywood, so many films are being shot that soon all the silver on earth will go into the emulsion of these films. It might have been so, but magnetic recording was invented here, which does not require silver at all. Such assessments - the fruit of speculation and sonorous phrases that are designed to amaze the imagination - have only a propagandistic and alarmist function.
There is enough food for everyone in the world - we discussed this issue in detail in the Club of Rome, comparing the food resources of India and Argentina. Argentina is one-third smaller in area than India, but India has forty times the population. On the other hand, Argentina produces so much food that it can feed the whole world, not just India, if it strains properly. It’s not a lack of resources, but their distribution. Someone seemed to be joking that under socialism the Sahara will have a sand shortage; it is not a question of the amount of sand, but of its distribution. Inequality of individuals and nations has always existed, but as growth processes accelerate, inequality increases: balancing processes simply do not have time to work. This is a serious problem for the modern economy, but history teaches that in the past, humanity solved similar problems - the unevenness was leveled in such a way that on the scale of humanity the general law of development remained unchanged.
The hyperbolic law of human growth has demonstrated amazing stability throughout history. In medieval Europe, plague epidemics carried away in some countries up to three quarters of the population. There are indeed dips on the growth curve in these places, but after a century the number returns to the previous dynamics, as if nothing had happened.
The greatest shock experienced by humanity was the First and Second World Wars. If we compare the real demographic data with what the model predicts, it turns out that the total losses of humanity from the two wars are in the order of two hundred and fifty million - three times more than any estimates of historians. The population of the Earth has deviated from the equilibrium value by eight percent. But then the curve steadily returns to the previous trajectory over several decades. The “global parent” has proved to be stable despite the terrible catastrophe that has affected most countries in the world.
The link of times has broken
In history lessons, many schoolchildren are perplexed: why do historical periods become shorter and shorter over time? The Upper Paleolithic lasted about a million years, and only half a million remained for the rest of human history. The Middle Ages are a thousand years old, only five hundred remain. From the Upper Paleolithic to the Middle Ages, history seems to have accelerated a thousandfold.
This phenomenon is well known to historians and philosophers. Historical periodization does not follow astronomical time, which flows evenly and independently of human history, but the system's own time. Its own time follows the same relationship as energy consumption or population growth: it flows the faster, the higher the complexity of our system, that is, the more people live on Earth.
When I started this work, I did not assume that the periodization of history from the Paleolithic to the present day logically follows from my model. If we assume that history is measured not by the revolutions of the Earth around the Sun, but by the lives of human lives, the shortening historical periods are instantly explained. The Paleolithic lasted a million years, but the number of our ancestors was then only about one hundred thousand - it turns out that the total number of people living in the Paleolithic is about ten billion. Exactly the same number of people passed through the earth in a thousand years of the Middle Ages (the number of humanity is several hundred million), and in one hundred and twenty-five years of modern history.
Thus, our demographic model cuts the entire history of mankind into identical (not in terms of duration, but in terms of content) pieces, during each of which about ten billion people lived. The most amazing thing is that such a periodization existed in history and paleontology long before the appearance of global demographic models. Yet the humanities, for all their problems with mathematics, cannot be denied intuition.
Now ten billion people walk the earth in just half a century. This means that the "historical era" has shrunk down to one generation. It is already impossible not to notice this. Today's adolescents do not understand what Alla Pugacheva sang about thirty years ago: "... and you can't wait out three people at the machine" - which machine? Why wait? Stalin, Lenin, Bonaparte, Nebuchadnezzar - for them this is what is called "pluperfect" in grammar - a long past tense. Nowadays it is fashionable to complain about the breaking of the connection between generations, about the dying of traditions - but, perhaps, this is a natural consequence of the acceleration of history. If each generation lives in its own era, the legacy of previous eras may simply not be useful to it.
The beginning of a new
The compression of historical time has now reached its limit, it is limited by the effective duration of a generation - about forty-five years. This means that the hyperbolic growth of the number of people cannot continue - the basic law of growth is simply bound to change. And he is already changing. According to the formula, there should be about ten billion of us today. And there are only seven of us: three billion is a significant difference that can be measured and interpreted. Before our very eyes, a demographic transition is taking place - a turning point from the unrestrained growth of the population to some other way of progress.
For some reason, many people like to see in this signs of impending disaster. But the catastrophe is more in the minds of people than in reality. A physicist would call what is happening a phase transition: you put a pot of water on fire, and for a long time nothing happens, only lonely bubbles rise. And then suddenly everything boils. This is how humanity is: the accumulation of internal energy slowly proceeds, and then everything takes on a new form.
A good image is the rafting of the forest along the mountain rivers. Many of our rivers are shallow, so they do this: they build a small dam, accumulate a certain amount of logs, and then suddenly they open the floodgates. And a wave runs along the river, which carries the trunks - it runs faster than the current of the river itself. The most terrible place here is the transition itself, where the smoke is like a rocker, where a smooth flow above and below is separated by a section of chaotic movement. This is what is happening now.
Around 1995, humanity went through its maximum growth rate, when eighty million people were born a year. Since then, growth has noticeably decreased. A demographic transition is a transition from a growth regime to a stabilization of the population at the level of no more than ten billion. Progress, of course, will continue, but it will go at a different pace and at a different level.
I think that many of the troubles that we are experiencing - both the financial crisis, and the moral crisis, and the disorder of life - are a stressful, disequilibrium state associated with the suddenness of the onset of this transition period. In a sense, we got into the very thick of it. We are used to the fact that uncontrollable growth is our law of life. Our morality, social institutions, values \u200b\u200bhave been adapted to the mode of development that has been unchanged throughout history and is now changing.
And it is changing very quickly. Both the statistics and the mathematical model indicate that the width of the transition is less than a hundred years. This despite the fact that it does not occur simultaneously in different countries... When Oswald Spengler wrote about "The Decline of Europe", he may have had in mind the first signs of the process: the very concept of "demographic transition" was first formulated by the demographer Landry on the example of France. But now the process is also affecting less developed countries: the growth of the population of Russia has practically stopped, the population of China is stabilizing. Perhaps, the prototypes of the future world should be looked for in the regions that were the first to enter the area of \u200b\u200btransition, for example, in Scandinavia.
It is curious that during the "demographic transition" countries lagging behind quickly catch up with those who took this path earlier. For the pioneers - France and Sweden - the process of population stabilization took a century and a half, and the peak fell on the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. And for example, in Costa Rica or Sri Lanka, which went through the peak of the growth rate in the eighties, the entire transition takes several decades. The later a country enters the stabilization phase, the more acute it goes. In this sense, Russia gravitates more towards the countries of Europe - the peak of the growth rate was left behind us in the thirties - and therefore can count on a milder scenario of transition.
Of course, there are reasons to fear this unevenness of the process in different countries, which may lead to a sharp redistribution of wealth and influence. One of the popular horror stories is “Islamization”. But Islamization comes and goes, as religious systems have come and gone more than once in history. The law of population growth was not changed by either the Crusades or the conquests of Alexander the Great. The laws will operate just as immutably during the demographic transition. I can’t guarantee that everything will happen peacefully, but I don’t think the process will be very dramatic either. Perhaps this is just my optimism against the pessimism of others. Pessimism has always been much more fashionable, but I'm more of an optimist. My friend Zhores Alferov says that there are only optimists left here, because the pessimists have left.
I am often asked about recipes - they are used to asking, but I am not ready to answer. I cannot offer ready-made answers to pose as a prophet. I am not a prophet, I am only learning. History is like the weather. There is no bad weather. We live under such and such circumstances, and we must accept and understand these circumstances. It seems to me that a step towards understanding has been reached. I don’t know how these ideas will develop in the next generations; These are their problems. I did what I did: showed how we got to the transition point, and indicated its trajectory. I cannot promise you that the worst is over. But "scary" is a subjective concept.
Today, more than 7.5 billion people live on Earth, while 2.7 billion are citizens of only two countries - India and China. The demographic picture of the world is much more interesting than just dry numbers reflecting the size of the population. It includes information about the ethnic composition, age structure, migration processes, age parameters of the inhabitants of our planet.
More recently, at the beginning of the 20th century, the world's population was about 1.6 billion people. After just 60 years, the world celebrated the birth of the 3 billionth inhabitant of the Earth. And since the mid-1960s, world leaders have become seriously concerned with the problem of overpopulation, as the world's population has grown so rapidly. According to experts' forecasts, the number of the world's inhabitants by the end of the XXI century will cross the threshold of 11 billion.
African children But population growth is not observed in all parts of the planet. Over the past 20-30 years, the regions with rapidly increasing indicators include the countries of Southeast Asia and Africa, such as India, China, Indonesia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Egypt, Congo, Thailand, and the Philippines. Slightly less, but also stable growth, is observed in the countries of America: Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina.
This is what most trains in India look like. Despite the fact that the population of India today is less than that of China (1.348 billion Indians and 1.412 Chinese), scientists predict that by 2020 India will rank first in the world for this indicator. This is partly because China has had long-term birth control measures. But today, due to a sharp decline in the share of children and youth in Chinese society, the country's leadership has decided to lift these bans.
China But the indigenous population of Europe, on the contrary, is rapidly decreasing, which is associated with the demographic aging of the population. This process leads to an increase in the proportion of older people compared to children and young people. A similar problem is familiar to most of the developed countries of the world. Apart from Europe, a similar process is observed in Australia, Canada, the USA and Japan. This situation is partly mitigated by the stable number of labor migrants arriving in the developed countries of the world. Unfortunately, Russia is no exception, and our country also has a large number of elderly people compared to the able-bodied population.
Seniors are very active in Japan At the initiative of American researchers, an information project called Worldometers was created, in which demographic and some other parameters for different countries of the world were collected. Of course, the data displayed here is often derived from modeling and forecasting, but it's very interesting anyway. We offer you to see how quickly the population of the Earth is growing in real time.
How many people live on Earth? Probably, every person sometimes asked a similar question. Population growth on our planet has always occurred: climate change, droughts, hunger, predators, the struggle between tribes only slowed down the demographic process.
6.7 billion people - this is the figure indicating how many people live on Earth today, which is 6% of the total population (107 billion) who have ever walked on its surface. Of course, this number is approximate, since it is difficult to imagine what happened in ancient times, and even more so to count.
How many people can "fit" on Earth
If we imagine how many people live on Earth, then we can understand that with the growth of the population, the needs of the population also grow, and the lack of control of the demographic process can lead to an ecological catastrophe: epidemics, hunger, the growth of crime, poverty.
Many people often ask the question: how many people can the Earth withstand? More than he lives today. But the planet is not dimensionless, nor is its patience and endurance. The German Foundation for the Population of the Earth has calculated that every minute its population is increasing by 155 people. In the total annual quantity, this can be represented as the emergence of another Germany. How many people on Earth can "fit in" depends on their consumption of the planet's strategic reserves, in which, of course, the Americans are in the lead. If all inhabitants consumed the Earth's resources with the same appetite, then the limit of ecological endurance would remain in the distant past. With the thrifty lifestyle of the Brazilian Indians, the planet could feed 30 billion people.
Scientists theoretically tried to weigh how many people are on Earth in weight units, and found that obesity, which half of humanity suffers, harms not only a particular person who consumes a large amount of food, but also the planet as a whole, increasing the load on it.
Population density examples
Surprisingly, 7% of the entire territory of the Earth is crowded with 70% of the population. In Moscow alone, there are about 13,000 people per square kilometer, while Canada, an entire country, is empty. Conventionally, it can even be called deserted, because in certain areas for every Canadian there is about 100 square meters. kilometers. Thus, the uneven distribution of people on the planet is an extremely important issue that interests the minds of many ordinary people.
The most populous country is China, whose government has already begun to take measures to slow down the process of overpopulation in the country. In second place are India and the United States, which are inactive in the demographic issue. It is India, according to UN forecasts, that in the near future will become the leader in population growth, the number of which in 50 years will reach 1.5 billion people on Earth.
How many years has such a rapid demographic progress last, which, in addition to having a detrimental effect on the ecosystem, breaks the fate of people, forcing them to leave their inhabited lands due to climate change, lack of water and food? Migration occurs due to disruption of the natural habitat. In 1996, the UN made an attempt to calculate how many people lived on Earth and how many people tried to leave their inhabited lands. The results were shocking: the number of environmental migrants was 26 million; 137 million are going to leave their country.
The reasons for the growing demographic growth
A number of studies have shown that the main population growth occurs in countries with a low standard of living.
To answer the question: how many people are on Earth now, you need to understand the reasons for increased fertility, especially in countries with a low standard of living:
- the biological law of the struggle for survival, implemented at a subconscious level and consisting in the opinion: the less chances for offspring, the higher the birth rate;
- procreation, supported by economic considerations: the number of children in the family guarantees the number of planned work hands, on which the provision of old age for disabled parents depends;
- socio-psychological characteristics: customs, traditions, religious dogmas that have evolved over the centuries, taking into account the economic and social characteristics of life at different stages of the development of society.
In poor countries, which are characterized by high infant mortality and short life expectancy, the birth rate is very high, so almost all families there have many children. The aid that is annually allocated to the poor population to improve their standard of living, no matter how paradoxical it sounds, only worsens it. That is, the effect is not on the causes, but on the effect. In addition, the poor countries that exist on subsidies from the richer countries get used to them and stop any attempts to correct the situation to reduce the birth rate.
High standard of living - low birth rate
While uncontrolled reproduction is taking place in poor countries, developed countries are trying to cope with the problem of extinction, even applying systems of incentives and bonuses. For example, in France, every child born is estimated at $ 10,000. Russia pays parents $ 11,000, however, under certain conditions. The leader in remuneration for every child born ($ 13,000) is Italy, or rather its small town of Laviano, with a population of 2,000 inhabitants.
With a high degree of material well-being, the need for fertility decreases, the death rate falls, and the average life expectancy increases. As an example, we can consider Thailand, where over 25 years (from 1965 to 1990) the standard of living has increased almost 12 times, and the birth rate has dropped sharply. Such dynamics is observed in most countries that have embarked on the path of industrialization.
With the growth of living standards of the population and a well-developed pension system, children are no longer an economic priority for parents, as is the case in traditional society. The number of families with two or more children is decreasing; many parents have enough of one child. Moreover, the decision to have a baby is taken deliberately, taking into account all the pros and cons, since individualistic claims to their own happiness become predominant in modern society. Therefore, many couples remain childless, and this directly affects how many people live on Earth.
Forecasts
According to conservative projections, the world's population will reach approximately 9 billion by 2075, after which this figure will decline.
The assumption of how many people on Earth there will be is conditioned by the following reasons:
- Growth in the welfare of the population of developing countries.
- The rapidly growing level of education in developing countries, which sharply increases the possibility of increasing the well-being of the population. The income of skilled professionals is much higher than that of uneducated people. The high level of education reduces the need for large offspring.
- The steady growth of urbanization (movement of people from rural areas to cities) in all regions of the planet. The higher the percentage of urban residents, the higher the level of education of the population and, accordingly, its income. And this again affects the decrease in the birth rate.
- The growing mortality rate from epidemics and AIDS, which infected more than 60 million people in 20 years and killed more than 22 million. Especially from AIDS, people suffer from poor countries who experience a catastrophic lack of general medical culture, hospitals and medicines.
Natural selection?
The current size of the world's population is undoubtedly large. Apparently, therefore, catastrophes began to occur more and more often, the number of which has tripled compared to the last century. How many people lived on Earth? How many more will be born? How many people are there on Earth today? Perhaps the planet independently regulates the population size and tries to restore the natural balance, freeing itself from its surplus.
The planet is over seven billion people. According to statistics from the US CIA, in July 2013 the number of people on Earth was approximately 7,095,217,980. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at the 47th session of the UN Commission on Population and Development in early 2014 said in his report that the population was 7.2 billion people.
According to experts, there is currently a slowdown in the growth of the world's population.
How is the counting going
To determine how many people live on Earth, it is necessary to determine their number in individual regions and countries of the planet. In many countries, for this purpose, general population censuses are carried out at regular intervals - once every five, ten years, etc. But there are also countries where censuses were conducted for a very long time, or were not conducted at all. Therefore, special calculations are used to determine the total population in the world.
Dynamics
For more than one millennium, earthlings were relatively small and increased slowly. Gradually, population growth accelerated, and in the 20th century its pace became especially rapid. On average, there are 250 thousand more people on the planet every day.
At the beginning of our era, the population of the planet did not exceed 300 million people. This figure doubled only by the 17th century. Endless wars, epidemics significantly slowed down the demographic. The growth of production, industry contributed to an increase in the population - at the beginning of the 19th century it was already a billion. By the 30s of the 20th century, this billion doubled, and after 30 years - tripled. As of October 12, 1999, 6 billion people lived on Earth. In the 20th century, despite the great loss of life in the First and Second World Wars, the population grew at a rapid pace thanks to a decrease in mortality from disease and hunger, advances in science and medicine.
According to UN forecasts, by 2025 the world's population will exceed 8 billion, by 2050 it will be 9 billion.
In different regions of the Earth in different periods, the value varies. Here the birth rate, mortality rate and life expectancy of people play a role, which, in turn, depends on various factors - the standard of living, the level of crime, military conflicts, etc. In the so-called developed countries, the birth rate is low and life expectancy is long. Conversely, in countries that are considered to be underdeveloped, fertility rates are high, but high mortality and short life expectancy.
Earthlings are not counted out of simple curiosity. For a normal life, each of us needs a certain amount of water, air, minerals, food. In turn, each of the inhabitants of the Earth affects the environment. Therefore, it is very important to know how many people live on our planet.
In order to find out how many people live on Earth, you need to identify their number in individual countries and regions of the planet.
In most countries, the population is determined using general population censuses. They are held regularly once every 5 or 10 years. But in some countries and areas of the world, censuses were either not conducted at all, or were conducted for a very long time.
Therefore, the total population of the world is determined using special calculations.
How many people are there now?
Currently, just under 7.4 billion people live on Earth.
For many millennia, the number of people on Earth was small and did not increase very quickly. But since the 19th century. began a rapid population growth, which continues to this day.
What influences the growth of the number of people?
The growth in the number of people depends on many reasons.
This is the level of development of the country, and the well-being of people, and national traditions. Until now, the reasons for the change in the number of the world's inhabitants are hunger, disease and war, as well as natural disasters.
Population change is determined by the ratio of fertility and mortality.
World population by years
At present, 21 people are born every second in the world, and 18 people die. As a result, the Earth's population is growing by 250 thousand people every day. But in different periods of human history and in different regions of the Earth, the magnitude of population growth is not the same.
The average age of the inhabitants of these countries also depends on the state of fertility and mortality in different countries. Countries with high population growth have many children and young people.
Low-growth countries have a high proportion of older people.
The age of the country's inhabitants and population growth are largely determined by life expectancy, which, in turn, depends on the level of development of the country. In developed countries, life expectancy and average age are high, and population growth is generally low.
How many people live on Earth?
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Population growth
Population growth is very rapid (Table 1).
The world's population increases by 60-80 million people every year.
person. The population is projected to reach 8 billion and 2100-11 billion by 2024.
Population density
Population density shows the average number of inhabitants per 1 sq. Km. km. To determine the density of the world's population, the population must be divided by the area occupied by land.
In 2013, every square kilometer of land averages 52 people.
In terms of the number of countries with the highest population density, South Asia is topped, followed by Europe.
There are no permanent residents in Antarctica.
Planet acceleration
Some scientists are studying the death of humanity from overpopulation. "Such a large number of inhabitants," they say, "will not be able to feed the land."
Among them there are those who believe that humanity will save wars from overpopulation, epidemics of various diseases, they can take millions of human lives in a few minutes. Of course, humanity does not want wars, it will not allow an epidemic of disease in our time. Material from this site http://wikiwhat.ru
Modern scientists around the world scientifically prove that the death of overgrown people is not endangered in the world, so that the earth can feed billions of people.
But in fact, at present, humanity processes only about 10% of the surface.
Population growth: from 10,000 years before our count. up to 2100
But even if this 10% is now growing this area, if the increase in food supply has already been achieved in many developed countries, you can get food for 9 billion. Human, but if you change food and feed all the vegetation, the annual yield of these crops can be stored for more than 50 billion people.
Even using modern technologies we can double the amount of land suitable for cultivation, and in the future, with the development of science and technology, there is practically no country on our planet suitable for use in agriculture.
People leave the swamp, irrigate the deserts, bring frost-resistant and fast-growing varieties of agricultural crops.
On this site you can find the following topics:
Population of the planet in 1300
World population 2016 is always the answer
Resettlement summary
Number of country reports
World population
Questions for this article:
How to determine the average population density?
Will our country be able to provide food for such a rapidly growing population?
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It is important to respect your mentor.
Only when you truly respect mentors can you turn to them with 100% confidence for advice and guidance, learn from them, and copy their successful business model.
In addition, only on the basis of this can you attract new people to your team, who, seeing your respect for the mentors, will be convinced of the team cohesion and the prospects of the OGRANO GOLD business as a whole.
The principle of our work is that we must strive for simplicity with all our might.
Training consists in acquiring the skills of performing a connected and sequential chain of simple actions.
Modern society is permeated with competition, we are constantly faced with crises and challenges of the era. To resist them, you need to find the appropriate opportunities. If you can open up, learn and by personal example demonstrate the strength and power of the company you represent, you will achieve success. As in any business, a successful leader gains financial independence and a comfortable lifestyle in accordance with his life values.
Conclusion
Copying is the most important business development tool.
It is capable of bringing unlimited wealth. In the process of practical work, you should constantly improve the content and criteria for copying, make the complex simple, simple to perform, use the methods and techniques of copying to expand the market for your business.
The most optimal and effective method succeeding is copying.
By helping others to realize their dreams, you are laying a solid foundation for realizing your own dreams.
STEP 5
RULES OF ETIQUETTE
Etiquette is a form, demeanor, rules of courtesy and politeness, adopted in a particular society. The practical value of etiquette is that it enables people to effortlessly use ready-made forms of generally accepted politeness to communicate with various groups people and at different levels.
The basics of etiquette are pretty simple.
Of great importance for the communication of people is their appearance, clothing, the ability to behave correctly in public places, in various situations.
A good impression is made by a well-dressed, polite person who knows how to behave in all circumstances and always behaves accordingly.
The manner of speaking, the ability to maintain a conversation are also of no small importance when people deal with each other. In order to be a good conversationalist, you need to know what you are talking about and be able to express your thoughts in such a way that they would be interesting to others.
The ability to manage your negative emotions indicates good manners and good manners.
According to etiquette, best remedy to overcome irritation and discontent in oneself and in others is a smile.
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More than 107 billion people were born on Earth in the history of mankind, which began 162 thousand years ago, calculated Peter Grunwald, a statistician at the Dutch Center for Mathematics and Informatics.
According to his calculations, commissioned by the monthly magazine "Quest", 6.7 billion people living on our planet make up 6% of all people who have ever lived on it.
Population of the earth
Grunwald admits that this figure (107.5 billion people) cannot be absolutely certain, because too little or nothing is known about the population and birth rate in ancient periods of history. At the same time, the researcher believes that the statement of some scientists that there are more people living on Earth now than in the entire history of mankind is incorrect.
The question "How many people were born on Earth in the entire history of mankind?" was recognized as the most interesting question of 2008 out of 101 questions proposed by the magazine "Quest".
This opinion was reached by a jury formed by the magazine, which included, in particular, the Dutch cosmonaut Andre Kuipers, who flew to the International Space Station on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, RIA Novosti reports.
Helpful information
Many experts believe that at present there is a threat of overpopulation of the Earth, which will entail massive famine. It will be aggravated by a global ecological catastrophe. And therefore urgent measures are needed, thanks to which it would be possible to regulate the number of people.
But before you do anything, you need to ask yourself: how many people can live on Earth?
For all living organisms that inhabit our planet, the same ecological law works. It consists of the following phases following each other - explosion, crisis, collapse, stabilization. Any living species, once in a favorable environment, sharply increase its numbers. This is the explosion. But a huge number of individuals begin to destroy the habitat.
Therefore, a crisis ensues, followed by a collapse. It is expressed in a catastrophic decrease in the population to more low levelthan it was originally. During the period of collapse, the environment is restored, and the population grows to a reasonable size.
This is followed by stabilization. Humanity is currently in a phase of crisis.
It should be noted that there are 3 periods of population growth. The first period refers to the end of the Pleistocene (2.6 million BC).
years - 11.7 thousand years ago). It was characterized by the settlement of hunting tribes throughout the world. The second period was observed 9 thousand years ago, when mankind mastered agriculture. The population of the Earth then increased 20 times. And the third period is associated with the industrial revolution. This process has not died out these days, but is only gaining momentum. At the same time, the population of the Earth has increased 30 times.
The area of \u200b\u200bcultivated land has increased by 3 times, and the yield by 7 times.
10 million people lived on our planet 10 thousand years ago. By the beginning of our era, there were already 200 million people.By the middle of the 17th century, when the industrial revolution began, the planet was inhabited by 500 million.
person. IN early XIX century was already 1 billion, and at the beginning of the XX century 2 billion. At the beginning of 2016, 7.3 billion people lived on Earth. The population grows by 2% every year. It took humanity 200,000 years to reach the first billion. The second billion was achieved in 100 years, and the third in just 40. The fourth billion in 15 years, and the fifth in 10.
Now every 35 years, humanity is doubling. And the amount of food doubles every 30 years.
This is the main indicator of our existence. But it does not increase by itself, but due to the development of new lands. And every year it becomes more difficult to ensure the growth of the crop. We should also not forget about electricity and water, which are required more and more.
As a result, resources are depleted and the natural environment is destroyed. The reserves of coal, oil, gas, mineral raw materials are used at the limit of possibilities. But these reserves are not renewed in any way.
Therefore, the current boundless prosperity is of course in time.
It will end, as the habitat will collapse, food production will fall, and after that the population will decline to the level that the remaining resources can provide.
How many people can live on Earth?
Ecologists answer this question quite definitely, since the biosphere exists according to a simple law. He relates the size of organically consuming species to their quantity.
How many people can the planet Earth withstand?
The main role in the flow of energy and substances is assigned to small organisms. But large ones play only an auxiliary role. Therefore, the main consumers in the biosphere are arthropods, mollusks, worms.
Wild vertebrates, which include amphibians, reptiles, mammals, birds, consume only 1% of the biosphere's production.
A person with pets must be part of the group of wild vertebrates, that is, consume less than 1%. But modern mankind consumes 7% of the production of the biosphere. That is, much more than it should be. As a result, all biospheric laws are violated. And how many people can live on Earth?
Here you need to understand that the biosphere is self-regulating system... Therefore, it seeks to bring the number of people back to normal levels. It is 25 times lower than the modern one, that is, it is about 300 million people. And this is for the entire planet. At most 500 million people can live on Earth, but not 7, 8 or 10 billion. That is why the productivity of valuable ecosystems decreases, animals needed by people die out, and necessary plants disappear. All this is associated with self-regulation of the biosphere, which seeks to limit the number of humanity.
Population of the Earth in million people
What will the collapse be like?
A decrease in the population of the Earth will surely occur, since the biosphere will not allow its destruction. But this can happen according to different scenarios. First scenariowhich is still working in some countries is hunger. Today, only 500 million people on the planet are adequately nourished, and 2 billion are regularly undernourished.
Every year 20 million people die of hunger, and the number of humanity during the same time increases by an order of magnitude.
If there are 200 million dying of hunger a year, then population growth will stop. And if the number of dying still increases, then the population will begin to decline.
But this is a terrible and inhuman process. It will bring so much grief that it’s scary to even think about it.
Second scenario purely political. It is associated with a nuclear disaster. A global conflict over non-renewable resources will begin, and a nuclear war will break out. It is capable of completely destroying all of humanity, leaving only units of intelligent beings on Earth. And then civilization will begin to revive in a new way.
And this can take thousands of years.
Third scenario designed for the consciousness of people. State governments will impose restrictions on the birth rate, which will lead to a decrease in the population.
However, this development of events raises serious doubts, since so far the birth control in some countries has not led to the desired results.
Fourth scenario connected directly with our planet. To save herself, she can weaken the Earth's magnetic field. In this case, we will be defenseless against the solar plasma. It will burn everything, but nature will quickly recover, but humanity will be almost completely destroyed. This scenario is similar to a nuclear war, only the Earth itself is the initiator here.
There are fifth scenario... In this case, the biosphere will begin to send signals to people at a subconscious level. They will act on the mechanisms responsible for fertility, and humanity will react to them.
This will be reflected in a natural decline in population growth, as occurs in many animal species. But here it should be understood that a person has long been divorced from nature, and therefore may not perceive the corresponding signals entering the subconscious. Who knows, maybe they are already on the way, but only a few react to them.
In short, the situation is not very rosy. We learned how many people can live on Earth, and also realized that the current population has long since overcome all norms.
It remains to wait for the further development of events, since this situation cannot continue forever. Let's hope that humanity will painlessly get out of such a scrupulous and critical situation.
Vitaly Zvonky
