How many people can the Earth carry?

If it ends the destruction of nature, people can be at ease that the earth mother can still bear humanity.

The British philosopher famous for Thomas Malthus ' nickname 'population , in the 18th century had a terrible prediction of the earth's perspective: ' When the power of the population clearly dominates the ability to create The birth of motherland, death will come in some form '.

For years, experts still disagree when determining the earth's critical level before the population explosion. Many scientists believe that the earth can feed up to 9 or 10 billion people. One of them is Harvard University's famous Edward O.Wilson social biologist, which is based on calculations of current resources on Earth. Like Dr. Wilson pointed out in The Future of Life , published in 2002: 'The tightening brackets around the biosphere have been fixed'. Besides limited freshwater resources, there are other pressures from the amount of food that the earth can produce, just like the expert Malthus predicted more than 200 years ago.

Even in the case of achieving maximum efficiency, which means that all food grown for human life (eliminating the use of food for energy), the earth only 'braces' 10 billion people. but these people have to voluntarily give up meat to become vegetarian. However, currently 1.4 billion hectares of agricultural land produce 2 billion tons of food annually, but still have to share for livestock, so the number of people living on earth must be lower than 10 billion.

According to Columbia University population scientist Joel Cohen, other environmental factors that can control the population on earth are the nitrogen cycle, phosphorus, air carbon content. Of course, these are objective factors, not to exclude the case of mutations that occur and destroy all calculations of the scientific world. In other words, no one can predict the Earth's critical level, according to expert Cohen.

The United Nations Population Commission (UN) estimates that Earth's population will reach 7 billion by 31.10 this year, and if it is calculated correctly, we are on the way to reaching the 9 billion threshold by 2050 and 10 billion. in 2100. However, there are signs that families tend to be less and less members. Data from 1950 in 230 countries showed that the majority of countries had reduced birth rates, according to Gerhard Heilig, head of the UN Population Prediction Committee. On the global level, fertility rates are declining compared to 'replacement rates' , ie 2.1 children / women (only the number of children replacing their parents as well as compensating for the young deaths). If the global fertility rate keeps going this way, the population of the earth can be stable at between 9 and 10 billion people, and the prospect of extinction will be temporarily pushed back, until people also control the actions of destroying nature.