468
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
468 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43741 readers
1103 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Man, I hope you're wrong about that, because Earth isn't growing any bigger. We did live in rough balance with things for about a million years, so I have hope.
Earth isn’t growing any bigger, but we have surpassed “limits” described by scientists without the collapse they predicted.
The actual capacity of Earth isn’t a fixed value.
Which limits are you thinking of? We're past the carrying capacity on certain fronts, but that was never a "will collapse" thing as much as a "we're going into debt" thing, and I think they were first calculated after we had passed them.
There's some ways in which we can stretch the Earth, but there's some that are set in stone. Energy budget comes to mind; we only get so much sunlight, and even if we start doing fusion to sidestep the sun we only have so much ability to radiate waste heat. Energy use on Earth will have to plateau within the next few centuries.
Here’s one:
quoted from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-didnt-first-earth-days-predictions-come-true-its-complicated-180958820/
World population in 1970 was 3.7 billion, and is 8.0 billion now. Ehrlich predicted that the carrying capacity of the planet had been met, and yet the population has more than doubled without the mass starvation his model predicted.
Yeah, they also thought birth rate would stay steady. It's dropped like a rock instead.
It is true that agriculture got better in that time. It probably will again. There's no hard limit being suggested here, though.