Dave Brown

humans are pretty good at...

…hitting carrying capacity and stopping. We hit an alarming 2% boom in population growth, mainly due to people like Fenner (one of the biggest contributers btw), but then quickly settled down to the 1% it has been since prehistoric advent of agriculture as people suddenly realized that most of their babies weren’t about to die before reaching adulthood.

Throughout history data shows that human growth rate tends to take a dive as soon as they hit carrying capacity. Famines are more due to carrying capacity diving rather than humans exceeding it.

In other words, the population will probably peak at 10-15 billion and then steadily decline over hundreds of years to about 2-4 billion assuming no further technological innovations are made and no global catastrophy occurs.

Global warming will reduce carrying capacity, but not catastrophically (2-10 billion between best and worst case scenarios) unless it triggers something else unforseen and more disasterous.

We could actually live sustainably at 10 billion population on this planet with current technology if we deployed all of it today (only deployed at around 5-7% currently).