Global Population Sustainability

Humans are not predicted to grow infinitely. As areas industrialize, more people have less children. Projections I have read predict we will level off at about 12 billion people by 2100.But the areas of the world now with less population growth (such as the US) also consume much more resources than the areas with higher population growth. So resource consumption is a big problem. But I think it's not helpful to frame it as a "population" problem, as we expect the populat

probably nothing is sustainable at current world population.

The World is seemingly already approaching the upper limit on the number of humans it can support.

There is no exponential growth though, most people don't have 4+ kids. Everything indicates that World population should stabilize this century and then slowly decline, through demographic transition [1]. No resource pressure here.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition

It might be worth considering that society shouldn't keep growing. Eventually we will outstrip the planet's ability to sustain us.

No. The problem is overall resource consumption. Which is a product: people * consumption/person. Since consumption per person has a lower limit, there has to be an upper limit for the sustainable number of people on the planet. Since standard of living should be at least equal to that of your ancestors, resource consumption per person will also be above the bare necessary minimum. And since the normal mode of population growth is exponential, any change in consumption per person is meaning

You need less people, fundamentally. The total fertility rate is declining across the world luckily (except a handful of countries and Africa) [1], but everyone around now is going to have a rough ride until equilibrium is reached (sometime after 2100). Can’t grow your way out of resource exhaustion (renewables excepted).[1] https:

Based on current trajectories, the world's population is not going to double again (or even increase by 50%), it will level off at about 10 billion and at that point perhaps start to shrink. It's possible this level is not sustainable with an acceptable standard of living, but it's not obvious and it certainly isn't inevitable that humanity will reproduce out of control.

It's only a problem if you view it as one. At current resource consumption rich countries would need half or even less of their population to exist sustainably (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ecologica...).That said earth is beginning to self-correct so we may get there more violently than by the relative peacefulness

I'm absolutely certain that the Earth has space for a finite number of humans. I don't want to live in a pod and eat a protein slurry of crushed bugs. Note also that human population was more or less flat for a long time of our existence - explosive growth happened over the last 200 or so years. That has been long enough that we structured our economy around it, but it's coming to an end. The free lunch can't last forever. Quite similar to the end of Moore's law and for