What's the optimum human population of the Earth?

[Eli]

Actually it depends on the definition of maximum. But to get a workable definition we must agree on the minimal living conditions.

And with 300 million citizens the US is far from being overcrowded. It can easily support a billion and still have lots of room left. You'll have to get rid of suburbia though.

[Eli]

And that's with today's technology.

[Adalbertus]

Originally posted by Will9
2. A concentration located in central and southern France, northern Italy, and central Germany.

....

The centers are placed where they are to avoid natural disastors.

You have got quite nice ideas, but at least for that region I can say that it is not completely free of natural disasters, though they are not as severe as elsewhere. Southern and western Germany, as well as northern Italy, are regions which are likely to have earthquakes - the African plate crashes against the Eurasian, forming the Alps, and in as short time as some hundred thousand years all problems between Germany and France will be solved when there is a small trench of sea where now is the Rhine.
Of course, you can have storms (not as severe as a hurrican, though - there is a certain chance that a hurricans whose Depression survives up to Canada two weeks later show up as a storm depression in Europe) and floods from rivers which are the most common natural disaster in Germany.

Apart of that, our nature is as robust against desertification as we could wish which makes it generally a pleasant place to live.

[Geronimo]

Lancer, would you agree that your idea of optimum population would depend on the technology level of civlization for any given point in time?

[hexagonian]

me, plus the rest of the world, minus everyone here at 'poly...

[Sandman]

Originally posted by Geronimo
You get around this by removing the need of the plant to devote energy to reproduction and instead produce the seed elsewhere in more favorable conditions. You can also make the plant more worthwhile by assuring that more of it is edible at the probable cost of making it less appetizing even if as nutritious as ever. Less appetizing food would suck to eat but it would prevent starvation and malnutrition so long as it is nutritious.

The conditions following a collpase of the ecosystem are unlikely to be profoundly harsh in any case. Rather the crops will have to grow without the assistance of other species they were formerly dependant on. These other species had been devoting energy to these roles using the energy locally available. I don't see it as unreasonable to suppose the plant could find the energy for these tasks as well if it is engineered to have the molecular tools required to do so.

Plants with more edible parts would be more vulnerable to disease and pests.

I do not believe that a 'Jack of all trades' crop is realistic. GM crops have been around for more than ten years; has there been any development in this area whatsoever?

[Zkribbler]

Originally posted by hexagonian
me, plus the rest of the world, minus everyone here at 'poly...

That kinda hurts my feelings.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Sandman


Plants with more edible parts would be more vulnerable to disease and pests.

I do not believe that a 'Jack of all trades' crop is realistic. GM crops have been around for more than ten years; has there been any development in this area whatsoever?

it aint cheap to develop.

Certainly it would be prudent to develop multiple crops to help offset the hyper-monoculture effect and that would only make the effort even more expensive.

tinkering to create crops that fullfill some of the requirements certainly has been done however with significant success despite relative shoestring budgets but there hasn't been a great deal of interest for a variety of reasons such as hostility to gm crops and the fact that some of the crops (ie crops designed to be entirely edible and nutritious, from root to tip) simply wouldn't taste exactly like anything consumers expect to find and as such didn't attract much interest by those who would actually grow them.

As I said in the post you first responded to, this sort of effort would only be attractive following a collapse of the existing ecosystem which would threaten existing crops. So long as that collapse has not yet occured why would you expect such crops to be grown now?

[lord of the mark]

The optimum is impossible to determine apart from tech, and im not just talking about maximum sustainable.

Why do you want MORE population, rather than the 2 or 6 that some have been throwing around, apparently facetiously? For economies of scale, of course. But what pop do you need for economies of scale.

At one time the US supported dozens of auto manufacturers, as did Europe. In a time of smaller populations. Yet today it looks like the globe can only support a few giant integrated auto manufacturers. Clearly we've achieved greater scale economies, and going back to smalller auto companies would mean more expensive cars, etc. OTOH it used to be the United States had 3 major TV networks. Now weve got, I guess, dozens, via cable and sat, and even those are losing share to youtube, etc. Tech has reduced the needed scale for a TV production, station, network.

Today there are some specialized silicon chips, IIUC, that are produced in only a couple of facilities on the globe. So to keep producing them at todays level of efficiency you need todays pop, 6 billion. Except lots of todays pop is so far removed from the modern economy, theyre not really part of the market. So lets say 1 billion, at minimum. But what if it becomes possible to make these chips economically at smaller volumes? Perhaps other more specialized chips take their place at the top of the economy of scale chain?

[Eli]

LOTM:

There's also the cost of developing technology. As it becomes more advanced and more specialized a larger base population is necessary to support a larger number of scientists.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Eli
LOTM:

There's also the cost of developing technology. As it becomes more advanced and more specialized a larger base population is necessary to support a larger number of scientists.

Theres no point in having more scientific innovative ideas than you can afford to implement, in a world where capital is scarce (in the economists sense). Also can we economize on "scientists"? Automate all those lab tech functions?

[Eli]

Ok. How does that contradict what I said?

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Eli
Ok. How does that contradict what I said?

given a non-population based limit (or, more properly increasing costs, not an absolute limit) for capital and other inputs to implementing innovation, there are diminishing marginal returns to additional scientists for innovation (Im assuming thats what scientists are needed for, and "engineers" are needed for "maintenance" of existing techs - quotes as this categorization may not map to academic definitions of whose a scientist) I dont have any of this quantified of course, but Im not as inclined towards "the more scientists the better"

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Eli
Actually it depends on the definition of maximum. But to get a workable definition we must agree on the minimal living conditions.

And with 300 million citizens the US is far from being overcrowded. It can easily support a billion and still have lots of room left. You'll have to get rid of suburbia though.

Not really. Compare the population density of Wyoming say, or even North Carolina, to New Jersey (and before you say thats all acreage in food crops, no it isnt, much of its woodland (much of THAT non-commercial) other "waste" or pasturage. And note a wide variety of densities within US suburbia, from 1 house per acre (or less) sprawl to 10 house per acre "street car suburbs".

If we hit a billion (anytime soon) our constraints would include water, pollution, energy, infrastructure, etc more than space. Infra you can write off as being easily built by the enlarged pop (though its more complex than that) but not the others, esp not pollution and water. (Of course those could be dealt with via MASSIVE infrastructure spending)

[Kuciwalker]

There are some categories in which are aren't such increasing costs. Fields like computer science, where a single innovation can be applied to all of your current capital at zero or small fixed marginal cost.

xpost