According to the UN projects our grandchildren will have 9.6 billion playmates to contend with in the year 2050 Quite a change when compared to the 2.5 billion our grandparents had to make do with in the 1950s. Humanity has grown in leaps and bounds over the last two centuries and nothing underlines it more clearly than looking at the population growth over the centuries. The great success of our species At the cusp of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, humanity's ability to multiply was at the end of its rope. After nearly six thousand years of written history, we had developed the skills, technology and social structure to sustain nearly 1 billion individuals! Most of the increase in population can be accredited to the slow accumulation of available workforce, better tools and more advanced farming methods. The more pronounced leaps, around 16th century for example, are thanks to the spread of new food sources to new areas, most notably the humble potato from South America to Europe and beyond. Bleak lives of the individual
The Reverend Thomas Malthus was one of the first to explain the fact that the farmers of the 18th century England and 400 BCE Athens had the same income; precisely because of humanity’s relentless drive to breed. Every productivity increasing invention, new arable locations or new food source was literally eaten away by the ever increasing population; the advances simply weren’t large enough to have time to translate into increased prosperity for the existing individuals. The great irony of Thomas Malthus’s life was to be that, while his theory explained the previous 58 centuries of human history, the following two seemed to prove him wrong. He didn’t see productivity outstripping population growth. The Great Escape As the last two hundred years have shown, the Malthusian Trap is avoidable. With the drastically increased production capacity brought on by the use of fossil fuels, we finally managed to escape the cycle. The Industrial Revolution generated a virtuous cycle in which investment in human capital, education and healthcare generated technological progress, which in turn increased the demand for human capital. In other words: the more people we have, the faster we come up with new technology, tap into new resources and improve our production efficiency. We seem to have managed to sneak around the Malthusian Trap and continue to distance ourselves from it; education, among other factors, has led to declining fertility rates and science seems impervious to the law of diminishing returns, unlike labor intensive farming for example. There’s always a ‘but’. For a while we seemed to forget one important fact: the resources of our planet are finite. The UN estimates that by the year 2025 there will be 1.8 billion people living in conditions of absolute water scarcity. That’s more than 2 out of every ten humans. Oil, natural gas, phosphorus, arable land and many rare earth minerals are at a premium already. While the last 100 years seem to prove that total resource exhaustion is unlikely, the undeniable fact remains that market prices of practically all natural resources are going up. Thankfully we still have options. First of all we can buy time by investing in resource efficiency and environmental technology; we can make what we have last longer and reduce the negative impacts of human activities on our environment. We can buy even more time by continuing and increasing our efforts to lower the fertility rates in the lesser developed parts of the world; Africa chief among them. All of the above would go a long way to postponing the disaster ahead but do nothing to solve it. We are already feeling the first teeth of the Malthusian Trap: the current economic hardships of the west are partly a result of world’s resources being spread more evenly around the globe. Already we have to fight harder for our market share, for our piece of the cake. The choice We have a choice to make: the choice between a slow slide back into the Malthusian Trap, or getting serious and starting to think of our future as a species and as individuals. If we content ourselves with attempting to perpetuate the status quo, we're unavoidably headed towards escalating conflicts over resources, war, famine and the welcoming arms of the Trap. On the other hand, if we face up to the fact that we're headed towards a disaster, we can do a lot of things to mitigate and delay that disaster. We can adopt green-tech solutions, many of which are presented in this very blog. We can ramp up our efforts to support education in Africa; if the current fertility rates persist there for the rest of the century, the UN estimates a population of 17 billion in Africa alone in 2100. These measures can unfortunately only delay the inevitable. The only choice which allows for continued growth and evasion of the Malthusian Trap is to look beyond Earth. The future of the human race is either to go into space or face a long and slow decline into a shadow of our former selves. Want to know more? Click YES, YES, YES and/or OH GOD(S) YES Mikko Hynninen |
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May 2019
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