Some Unsettling Thoughts

Short post today, lots of other stuff to do. MonteCedro showed a Netflix documentary yesterday called Seaspiracy. Pretty scary in its own way and brings the climate change crisis into focus in a new way. I thought of a book I read a month or so ago, Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century by John Higgs. In the penultimate chapter, Higgs makes note of what he believes is the least understood of the events of the 20th century. In 1900, the world population stood at 1.6 billion. By the close of the century, it had quadrupled to 6 billion. As I type this, the world population in 2022 stands at over 7.9 billion people. As Higgs points out, our civilization is predicated on increasing consumption. But there is a limit to growth because Earth, the only home our species knows and likely will ever know, is finite. Many years ago in Microbiology 101, we learned what an ever-increasing population of bacteria will do on an agar slant. It looks like this:

We are at least approaching the inflection point of log growth with the stationary phase. The trajectory for resources to provide Earth’s inhabitants with water, food, energy, and all that civilization requires will then be downward. Climate change will only exacerbate this downward phase. I think a major need is to reduce the number of humans on our planet. Maybe the ZPG thinkers had this correct decades ago.