How Many Humans Can The Earth Support

The Human Population is expected to double or even triple or quadruple before it stabilizes. What is the population number that can live happy and satisfied on this third Rock from the Sun.

Let us take food first. Conventional wisdoms says that there is no more cultivatable land left, large parts of Africa already face famine and hunger, food is being grown with increasing dosages of chemicals which are likely to reach lethal levels, global warming is disrupting normal rainfall patterns leading to more draughts and floods and a Malthusian crisis is looming large already.

With new technologies like Hydroponics and Aeroponics with genetically modified crops, the food output can easily go up hundreds of times without increasing the acres under cultivation or any addional need for water for irrigation. Current cropping practices are essentially thousands of years old and are too inefficient in their use of light, air, moisture and fertilizers.

Next if we look at fresh water needs of a growing population, there need be no fears as even the most densely populated cities get enough precipitation and if only they could store all this rain water, they would not have to depend upon external supplies. All the gigantic dams and barrages can actually be mothballed or put in museums for future generations to ogle at and wonder what was wrong with their ancestors' thinking capabilities.

Electricity also would not be a major concern as there is no shortage of generation alternatives and market forces would direct the flow of necessary investments into building more generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure.

Housing again should not be an issue as there is enough limestone and hence cement to build houses to cover the entire globe with several stories of masonary.

Services like education, telecommunication, healthcare, law and order are essentially created and consumed by humans in exchange for other services and a transparently operating market and rules based democracies in a true spirit of "serve and get served" would ensure a healthy balance between demand and supply.

As a matter of fact even with an exploding population humans could easily expand the non-human reserves like forests and so called "wastelands" on the planet by proactively accelerating the transition to a post consumerism society. This would also re-establish the ecological food chains and balance of nature which may contribute to overall meaningfulness in our existence.

The planet may be able to smilingly bear the upkeep of another 50 billion people, but it is not compulsary for us to keep multiplying when we have still not learnt to tolerate and coexist with each other. Historically Humans have been violently competing for the Planet's resources at populations levels which were a small fraction of the current numbers. Enterprizing individuals and communities always found it more attractive to loot and plunder than to painstakingly grow and store.

The difficult issues are not the resources of this Planet but the inability of Humans to live within their means. It is perhaps impossible for man not to attempt to be one up on his neighbour or envy his more fortunate bretheren. It is human nature that causes the rat race and growth of knowldege is but a by-product of this intense competitiveness. Hopefully knowledge will grow to a level where competition will be rendered meaningless and then we can all grow our own food using the techniques of Hydroponics.