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  • Technically, earth's land area is big enough to sustain around 24 billion people. Consider this diagram:

    It shows that we're using around 50% of all habitable land for agriculture. Most of the land that we aren't using is either high up in the mountains (where terrain isn't flat and you can't use heavy machinery) or in the tropical regions on Earth close to the equator (south america, central africa, indonesia), or in areas where it's too cold for agriculture (sibiria, canada). so you can't really use more agricultural land than we're already using without cutting down the rainforest.

    In the diagram it also says that we're using only 23% of agricultural land for crops which produce 83% of all calories. If we used close to 100% of agricultural land for crops, it would produce approximately 320% of calories currently being produced, so yes, we could feed 3x the population this way.

    However, it must be noted that there's significant fluctuation in food production per km², for example due to volcanic eruptions. So it's better to leave a certain buffer to the maximum amount of people you could feed in one year, because food shortages in another year would otherwise lead to bad famines.

  • Most of the 8 billon people are living in the third world and which less resources waste, most recources a wasted by less than 10% of the world population.

  • How detailed is this calculation? Does it take into account where these resources are produced and costs of logistics (nvm difficulty of getting every country on board with this, lets assume we did)?

  • This study is dangerously stupid.

    We are rapidly running out of resources for survival.

    Global fresh water demand will exceed supply by 40% by 2030 and 90% of topsoil is at risk of depletion by 2050.

    We are already over capacity on fresh water demand for the amount of humans alive on this planet.

    Top soil is what food grows in. Without top soil we can't grow food.

    Billions of people will die this century. The planet cannot support any more people. Don't have kids.

    • No, we are not over capacity for survival. We waste a ton of water on stuff we don't need, like having lawns in the desert or choosing to grow almonds during droughts when people have to ration water usage at home. . Top soil is the same, we could, collectively, switch from beef and to a lesser extent pork to focus on much more efficient chicken, thus freeing a lot of land used to feed livestock.

      Stop this Malthusian nonsense, we have enough resources for everyone. They are just severely mismanaged to the point of killing us all. We could live sustainably if we wanted to, we just choose not to.

      • So you agree that as things are, there aren't enough resources for the current population, let alone billions more people.

        This complete overhaul of the structure of society that keeps being mentioned here is an impossible pipe dream fantasy that is flat out just not ever going to ever happen as it fundamentally goes against human nature.

        Human beings aren't capable of altruism. What about the world around you ever gave you the idea that we were?

        Most people won't even go vegetarian (let alone vegan!), and yet you expect the rich and powerful to just roll over and give up all their money and power for this imaginary 'greater good' scenario that will save the world?

        Stop believing in stupid fairytales, they won't save you from the world that is falling apart right in front of you.

236 comments