The Bottom Line: Malthus was correct. His timing was not.
Modern Human Population
“...democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive overpopulation. Convenience and decency cannot survive overpopulation. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life declines, it disappears. It doesn’t matter if someone dies, the more people there are, the less one individual matters.” - Issac Asimov Summary: When we started putting together this Reality thesis years ago, all the materials noted the human population was around 7.2 billion, and you may still find some instances of that we’ve missed adjusting. Now the population is approaching 8 billion. And “frequent text revision” is not the only ramification by a long shot. It took from the origin of our species roughly 300k years ago up until year 1800 to reach 1 billion humans on earth. 145 Three hundred thousand years . We are now adding an extra billion humans to the planet about every decade , or roughly 30,000 times as fast as the average population growth of what was already one of the planet’s most successful species. The graph below starts in 1950. Relative to 1950, today is in many ways a vastly different world - characterized by a huge number of humans alive at one time, mostly networked via commerce and communication in a planet-spanning superorganism. What an amazing time to be alive.
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