Human population growth has followed the trajectory of a typical invasive species, says a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, and that suggests there may be a looming global population "crash."
"The question is: Have we overshot Earth’s carrying capacity today?" said Elizabeth Hadly, a professor in environmental biology at Stanford University and senior author of the paper, in a press statement.
"Because humans respond as any other invasive species," Hadly continued, "the implication is that we are headed for a crash before we stabilize our global population size."
The study examined 1,147 archaeological sites via radiocarbon dating to understand the patterns of human population growth in South America. As a successfully invasive species, upon arrival "humans spread rapidly throughout the continent," the study authors note.
Once humans reached the continent's carrying capacity—meaning its resources couldn't support further population growth—"consistent with over-exploitation of their resources," the study found that humans' population growth halted and the species "remained at low population sizes for 8,000 years."
Well, this sucks.
Seeing current events as they are is wrecking me emotionally. So I say 'farewell' to this forum. For anyone who wonders.
"Crash" may be too strong a word. "Stall" maybe ("growth halted".) There have certainly been "choke-points" in the past, and we neatly side-stepped one in the last hundred years with advances in agricultural yield (the Nobel-prize-winner later mentioned that he had created greater suffering yet to occur in the future, but I don't know if that's true, and certainly won't stay up late fretting about it.)
I've noticed many of your recent posts have been alarmist ideas, SPF. Chill, buddy! Spend some time away from the Internet and take up a hobby, something community-related, something you can get behind and enjoy. People will surprise you, and you'll be doing some good.
Or I can fuck right off and leave you to it.
Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says.
Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality.
Rule #3: Institutions will not save you.
Rule #4: Be outraged.
Rule #5: Don’t make compromises.
Khaat wrote:I've noticed many of your recent posts have been alarmist ideas, SPF. Chill, buddy! Spend some time away from the Internet and take up a hobby, something community-related, something you can get behind and enjoy. People will surprise you, and you'll be doing some good.
Or I can fuck right off and leave you to it.
Nono, your suggestions are good. I am working on respinning a Linux distribution for fun, but I should be spending more time on that.
Seeing current events as they are is wrecking me emotionally. So I say 'farewell' to this forum. For anyone who wonders.
SPF, one point that is being ignored in the text of this article is that humans modify their environment to a degree much greater than that of any other lifeform on the planet. We overshot the carrying capacity of Stone Age South America (and of any other continent in the Stone Age) a long time ago, because we eat more food than is naturally growing in those environments. But that's irrelevant in terms of talking about our future population, because we grow our food artificially, in environments we created for that purpose.
Indeed. The rest of the article actually says that and at no point says we'll crash before stability, just that the Hunter gatherers expanded to a certain number than stopped. No mention of a proceeding crash. The conclusions drawn from evidence also need controlling for complexity.
For example before colonisation Africa had some huge pastoral civilizations . A devastating cattle fly disease killed something like 95% of the cattle on the continent with mass starvation following. The Africa of the big game Savannah was a post apocalyptic landscape. Nothing to do with carrying capacity. Everything to do power law distributed events. As we get more and more people and more and more connected the biggest size of a possible event is getting larger, and the probability of any single event increases. Fortunately our ability to work together is also increasing as the same function and we, as a species, are putting increasing amounts of thought into resilience.
"Aid, trade, green technology and peace." - Hans Rosling.
"Welcome to SDN, where we can't see the forest because walking into trees repeatedly feels good, bro." - Mr Coffee
