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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI1AaZ9OkH8

An interesting video on the topic of potential overpopulation of Earth. The doomers say that the growth is unsustainable and will result in a catastrophe, the boomers like Elon Musk are saying that we actually need more people and that society will crumble if population will keep declining, like it does in many countries.

The conclusion of this video is that most scientist think that the global population will grow at little bit more and then will shrink a little bit and stabilize around the sustainable level.

What do you think?

For years we've heard faint rumblings of hive collapse in bee colonies. Disappearing monarch butterflies. Plastic littering the oceans. There is a legitimate concern for global species collapse. We depend on insects and nature for food. If that relationship were threatened with major collapse. There would be no alternatives. Nature has a monopoly over our food, water and air.

There are many hollywood films claiming aliens or a zombie apocalypse are the biggest threats to civilization. A case could be made for mismanagement of land, ocean and resources being the biggest threat to our future.

We're lucky that survival on the planet has become easier in ways. We have many opportunities and advantages over those who lived in previous eras. We tend to forget that those of past times recognized the need for balance in ecosystems. Like the train in snowpiercer, they would allow hunting during some times. And ban it during others. Depending on animal populations. Waging warfare was often done on a basis of wiping out the land and nature of the opposition. Where they would salt the earth to prevent them from growing crops. And kill their livestock to prevent them from having food to eat.

People have become disconnected from their survival being reliant upon nature. And it has not been a good thing.

Overpopulation is simply a situation where the earth cannot produce what is needed to sustain its inhabitants at a given period of time. The doomers  and the boomers view of population are both correct. Due to greed and excessive quest for power and influence the world would keep experiencing wars and conflicts. Although the earth has enough resources to sustain its inhabitants, wars and conflict tend to destabilize the worlds population and make it seem like overpopulation is a problem. Hence,the doomers should know that overpopulation is not the reason why illegal immigrants are risking their lives to migrate to seek perceived greener pastures but the inability of world leaders to curb conflict and greed.

The boomers are correct because birth rate in Europe, America and some part of Asia is dropping drastically. These underpopulated nations would need to depend on the so called overpopulated nations to balance their economic activities.

I think the current growth of population in most underdeveloped nation would reduce drastically in future. As nations begin to embrace flexible stance towards abortion, with the spread of female education and freedom from some archaic cultural beliefs the population of the world would reduce to a large extent.      

In terms of population, nature has its way. The growth may seem unsustainable but, so far, it has yet to reach a breaking point. If that catastrophic level is finally reached then food and water and other basic necessities would grow very scarce. There would be famine. Crimes would be widespread. There will be diseases. There will be wars. In other words, death and destruction will be all over. So the population would naturally go down as a result. With a smaller population, things would begin to recover. Abundance would ensue. And so the cycle continues.

The issue IMO is not overpopulation or underpopulation. All around the world, people with high IQ are being replaced with people with lower IQ. Population growth is taking place in regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle-East, where the people are illiterate and unskilled. On the other hand, maximum population decline is being noted in regions such as East Asia (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea.etc), where there is 100% literacy. In the long term, this brings down the levels of human innovation. 

I think the decrease or increase in human population both have advantages and disadvantages for life, for example in Japan, where the population decline due to the declining birth rate will affect their production in the future, the advantage if the population increases it can increase production even though it will make it higher pollution level due to energy consumption will increase too.

But I believe with this, because the earth and humans need balance, population growth if it is not followed by an increase in food production will only increase poverty and difficulty living

You can't trust anything coming out of Elon's pie hole. He is a permanent troll and because of this, his words has no meaning. Even if this was his honest opinion, then you cannot really know it and that makes his thoughts worthless.

My opinion is same with the doomers. Especially the Middle East and the Asia needs some population adjustments. Look at India and China. They multiply like... whatever.

Bill Gates failed us  :-\

I saw those tweets when Elon made them and it just made me think about the countless things this guy says on topics he really had no expertise in. I think it’s extremely easy to see this world of over populated, otherwise we’d have a fraction of the issues we face today. There will always be enough of us idiots as long as we aren’t wiped out by ourselves or natural forces.

Not just hollywood films, apparently AWS lawyers had already gone bonkers a while back (https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/amazon-zombie-clause-lumberyard) and truly think a zombie apocolypse is possible. Whose responsible for making these type of decisions? But at least they don't have to worry about inflation, overpopulation or any of that stuff.

In a way both sides have good points however I think those that argue against overpopulation have a better case, the resources we have are limited, it is true the planet is incredibly rich but regardless of it there are still limits, those which argue for more people instead are doing so in the basis that we need to maintain the current economic system which is based on the idea of the economy growing forever, which is impossible,  so we need to wonder how can we reach a balance with the resources we have available? This is something very difficult to do as it would mean restricting heavily on the freedom people have today of having as many kids as they want, and as we have seen at China it is not as if those policies have been good for the country either.

The debate is very old. As early as the end of the 18th century, Malthus stated that while the human population grows according to a geometric progression, the capacity to exploit the planet's resources grows at the rate of an arithmetic progression, much more slowly, and we were heading for disaster.

Time has shown that he was wrong, since the capacity to produce food has made humanity go from a billion people in the past to eight thousand people living today, most of whom are overweight, instead of starving, which was more normal in the past.

What happens is that resources are not infinite, and a planet with eight billion humans and growing does not seem very sustainable.

Although I think that as all societies develop, this will reach a peak and will start to decrease, because in developed countries people have fewer children. Hopefully at some point this will happen worldwide and humans will put less pressure on the planet's resources.

These are the signs of the catastrophic levels that the society will degenerate to but don't we see it as we are already in this level seeing all that is happening in our modern day lives. There are scarcity already and smaller countries and less developed are feeling it. There is increase insecurity around the world at large, wars and political tension are charactirizing the general public causing fear. Coming into the economy the level of inflation is alarming and some homes are malnourished.

The economy doesn't need more people. The economy needs better educated and qualified people.
Capitalism is heading towards mass automation, digitalization and Artificial Intelligence. The companies won't be needing more workers in the factories in the near future. The service-based industries will have to fire many people and replace them with robots. This will create mass unemployment. Combining mass unemployment with overpopulation and mass migration is a recipe for disaster.
Thomas Malthus was right about the dangers of overpopulation. The global population will have to decrease due to wars, pandemics and starvation. Elon Musk isn't some kind of expert in demographics and economics. He's an entitled egomaniac.

I agree with this point of view, in my country for instance, people formerly used marry many wife's and have many children for the purpose of Labour which was important for survival then as more children meant more efficiency in the farmland, fetching water and firewood faster as well than a small family, that old thinking often has caused many people to have too many kids than they can take care of...but currently due to more development entering those rural communities, no need to keep a big family for labour and development has replaced fetching firewood with electricity and fetching water with boreholes... Development has also introduced complexities and affected the economic situation and made it more difficult for raising many children, as a result of this you advice yourself to give birth to a number of children that they can properly take care of. 


As more places become developed it will affect the mindset of people as regards giving birth to many children, it will also make some places that were formerly uninhabitable to be inhabitable through technology and more persons will migrate to such areas thus balancing the population all round.

I know that the overpopulation isn't really a risk, and yes, I've heard that it's going to stabilize. We have much bigger issues than the number of people and whether over population spike is a problem. For example, apparently, it's still unclear to some countries that conquering land and waging a war for it is not okay. It's also unclear to many that if there's a giant long-term problem we know for certain is going to be a big deal, we can't just ignore it, remain skeptical and focus on things that happen over one's time in office (I'm talking about climate change). It's also, unfortunately, not obvious that profits can't be more important than reducing the human suffering, fighting war crimes, not allowing concentration camps and stuff like that.
I also think it's unfair to say that the number of resources grow slower than the population (like the lady in the video) because the problem is NOT that there isn't enough resources to provide basic housing, food and medicine for everyone on the planet, it's just that the resources are distributed in an incredibly unfair way, when some have more than they can ever use in their lifetime, while others are dying from hunger.
Similarly, stopping the anti-migration stuff and opening up borders more to encourage redistribution of the populations could help some countries solve their underpopulation, and others overpopulation issues.

overpopulation has been my concern for a long time, this issue is often discussed in various media including the world of cinema, the global population has quadrupled in the last two centuries.

I imagine if this catastrophic explosion occurs in the future, there will be mass migration, overcrowded slums and cities. Big cities cover entire continents, disease and pollution, chaos and violence fight over sources of energy, water and food, and the human species only focuses on defending itself. 

and fortunately the global population is not an end-time prophecy. The United Nations estimates that the world population is projected to reach 8.5 billion in 2030, and increase further to 9.7 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion in 2100 as reported by the world population project, meaning the world's growth rate slowing down, in that year ( 2100 )

I didn't watch the link, but I have read a lot of journals like this from time to time.

Overpopulation is a real thing, but we are nowhere near overpopulation as there are still many places untouched by humans, unexplored, uninhabited. Also, the method of reducing the population by cutting the newborn babies is wrong. That way, a small percentage of young people must carry a big percentage of old, prone to sick, useless, unproductive people which will destroy the civilization.

If you experience this fear of overpopulation, just get out of the big city, and start living in beautiful 3rd world countries.

When I heard about the 'human ingenuity will always save the day' in the video (7:05), I was reminded of the US Dust Bowl in the 1930s. How's the recovery going? CMIIW but it's been decades since the incident and I'm yet to read that our current tech could replenish all the top soils that were blown away. The population also ballooned since then replacing old smart heads. Are these genius boomers still depending on the earth's healing process?

Some countries are overpopulated but as for me, the earth hasn't reached its breaking point yet and it's still able to sustain the needs of people. Overpopulation is something that we normal people can't control but there are still alternative solutions to reduce it a bit just like using contraceptives. As the population increases each day, there are also natural ways that decrease it so I think it isn't the main problem the human race should face right now.

The population is not a problem if we have a proper management system. In most centuries earth's population decreases because of diseases and war. This will continue until the end of the human race. Elon says something like that because he wants to send earth people to mars.

Overpopulation can be doomsters and boosters if we failed to manage our society in a proper way.

I've also watched this debate about over-population in a video on YouTube...

I agree with the opinion of one party who says that;

"actually we are not over-populated (now or in the future), it's just that the distribution of humans is uneven (accumulating in big cities only), this is what causes the earth to look like over-population even though not at all"

regeneration is important and humans need new people to keep the human population alive.

Over population is a doomster if you ask me, though it varies from country to country, there are countries that even with low population, the economy is so bad that citizens can hardly feed well, live well, or have good jobs to do, then imagine a situation where such a country becomes over populated, it will be a disaster for the human race in such a country.
I think the simple term "too much of everything is bad" also applies to world population, if it becomes too much, it is bad, forget what Elon musk is saying, he's a joker.

India is set to overthrown China as the most populated country and this could be a bigger problem for a small country if they experienced the same problem on the growing population. Some countries though have their own problem with the population, just like in Japan where most of their workers are set to retire and there’s no enough younger generation to continue the legacy, I guess the problem here are also about the cost of living especially on a bigger country.

Overpopulation is a huge threat to the balance in ecosystem and also in nature. As more and more humans populate the world, more and more resources would be needed to feed these mouths and where would these resources be taken? From nature. People will continuously rape our natural resources to get food on the plate until such time that they will get nothing.

Elon Musk is a visionary, I get that, but his remarks regarding population is half-baked. True that we need people to run our industries and this world, but how could you do populate more people in a sustainable way if even nations can't agree on things to make this planet more habitable for the next 50 years?


And even if we distributed humans in every land mass evenly, we will still have problems for food security. That is the single, most critical thing that pro-population fail to acknowledge. Resource limitations will eventually slam at us at high speed and soon we'll struggle to have our mouths fed for a day.

Elon Musk is smart, but that doesn't mean he always brings up the right issues in masculinity in life. We only see the negative issues surrounding it and blame them as the cause, but in fact there are many other problems involved. I very much hope that the population increases and people still love each other more and get along better in many fields so they can go up together, not win or lose or compete in every small thing. Perhaps as far as I know, the population is only a small part that determines the quality of life. Instead, try to change the perception of all and equality, not one-sidedly in the direction of control to suppress or increase.

Unfortunately suppressing each other is what is going on in every way since the time one country successfully invade and conquered countries. We despise leaders who do this but in the books, we call them the GREAT like Alexander the GREAT!  We made them heroes when they conquered lands that were occupied before them and we hail them, Discoverers!

Doomster or Boomster, we all have to think of ways and some had already found it since they were eating insects that can grow in weeks. We don't have to fight over gas and oil and bomb lands if we were just friendly to each other, not seeing ourselves like we are more exceptional than other races because we are in this earth together.

Population around the world will not shrink unless a deadly disease with no cure evolves and probably it should have enough potential to wipe the complete humans to make that happen but the pandemic like COVID-19 or Ebola or previous century pandemic like HIV and all others are still exists but it doesn't reduce the population growth rate so the population will increase not stabilize at any point until the nature decides it.

As awful as it may sound, you're right. Western countries are facing underpopulation, due to the financial crisis and the deteriorating situation, the west isn't having children. Third world developing countries, however, in Asia (see Indonesia, India) or Africa, are extremely overpopulated, often living in terrible living conditions, with poor hygiene and housing, lacking access to water and food.