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That's 30 billion people, with 99% of people living in poverty. Realistically there's no way that the earth can comfortably support that many people. We can't even comfortably support 6.5 billion people without having most of them living like peasants. The average estimate for 'comfortable' standards of living seems to be between 2 and 5 billion people (source).fatiain said:
Population growth is by its nature exponential. What might be considered important is the 'doubling time' which is the time it takes for the population to double (surprisingly). The current rate of growth is between 1 and 1.5 percent per year, which gives a doubling time of approximately 50 to 70 years. So by 2075 we might expect to have 13 billion people on the planet, if growth rates remain approximately constant.
At some stage though, there is going to come a point where we physically can't support everybody on the earth, at any standard of living whatsoever. We'll be so grossly overpopulated that we wouldn't be able to feed everyone if we tried (at the moment we have enough food for 10 billion people, we're just extremely bad at distributing it). Let's say that stage is your figure of 30 billion people. When we reach that, we'll enter a period of massive population crash known as 'die-off', where famine and pestilence will be at unheard of levels, and we'll very quickly decrease to a more manageable population. There's an example in the page I linked to where 19 reindeer were introduced to an area. Their population increased to over 6,000 at which stage the area could no longer support them, and they died in droves over a very short period, until there were less than 50 remaining.
What's shocking, though, is that we'll have almost no warning of this until it happens. Even twenty years beforehand it will look like we have enough resources to go around. Consider bacteria living in a petri dish, which has enough space to support a million bacteria. Let's say they double every minute (unrealistic, but it helps for the example) and that they'll reach maximum population in 60 minutes. At 59 minutes they'll only fill up a mere half of the dish and they won't see any problem at all. It's only at about 59 1/2 minutes that they'll start to think that it's getting a bit crowded. So that's 59 1/2 minutes of perfectly happy growth, and then 30 seconds warning before they all start dieing. Scary, huh?
Although your post did (to me) imply that you agreed with it I thought.
I promise it will make you think. You may never think the same way about 'economic growth' again.
