The Earth Can Carry 100 Billion Humans

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…