this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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Damn, that's interesting!
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The visualization is strange for this because the hour glass implies that the is a finite number of humans that can live but at the same time it is refilled from the top continously.
What happens in a billion years will it overflow?
Am I the only one with this problem?
Well. Human societies have an upper limit on the amount of population they can sustain, determined by their access to natural resources, technology, and social organization.
Malthus got a lot of shit because he came up with his theories exactly when civilization was entering into a period where the advancements in technology were drastically expanding those limits, and because his ideas were instrumentalized by a lot of unsavory types, but he did find a (very incomplete) segment of truth.
Right now, the biggest danger of it all becoming relevant again is the possibility that sustained ecological disaster might dramatically lower our population upper limit without us having the capacity to react fast enough.