Member-only story

The Earth Can Carry 100 Billion Humans

Tomas Pueyo
9 min readNov 20, 2024

Some people fear there are too many humans on Earth.
They’re wrong.
We could 12x our population, from 8 billion (8B) today to 100B if we wanted to, while maintaining quality of life on Earth.

Where would we all fit?
Could we feed everybody?
Wouldn’t pollution explode and ecosystems collapse?

This is what we’ll answer today.

Our Current Path

Today’s world population is ~8B, and according to the UN, it will peak close to 10B around 2080:

This is probably an overestimate: It’s not the first time the UN has revised the estimate downwards, and it has incentives to not reflect the true decline in population forecasts.

UN projections of births are consistently too rosy. It always hopes that the crash will slow down. But the truth is it doesn’t: Birth drops have no end in sight.

So we’re on a trajectory to only reach about 10B people at most, and one of the reasons is that many people aren’t having kids because they fear overpopulation and the destruction of the environment.

I was a college student when I read Mr. Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb.” I took it to heart and now have no grandchildren, but 50 years later…

Create an account to read the full story.

The author made this story available to Medium members only.
If you’re new to Medium, create a new account to read this story on us.

Or, continue in mobile web

Already have an account? Sign in

Tomas Pueyo
Tomas Pueyo

Written by Tomas Pueyo

2 MSc in Engineering. Stanford MBA. Ex-Consultant. Creator of applications with >20M users. Currently leading a billion-dollar business @ Course Hero

Responses (54)

Write a response

Increase population density in the Netherlands a bit and extrapolate it to the rest of the world, and you get 100B.

Sorry for waking you out of your utopian dream... I live in Amsterdam and will explain the Netherlands (NL) footprint...
Its wealth was built on the externalised colonial exploitation (the vastnesses of Indonesia, Suriname, etc) and slave trade…

Wow... what a wildly inane set of statistics woven into a pretty - and totally false - narrative.

It's been decades since we had clear unambiguous warning from climate scientists about what continued fossil fuel use and expansive C02 emissions would do.
Now it's happening. The warnings were ignored. The decisions were made by politicians who are…