• Question: How many people can the Earth support?

    Asked by Izzywizzy to Daniel, Hannah, Maggie, Ry, Scott on 13 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Ry Cutter

      Ry Cutter answered on 13 Nov 2017:

      If we’re talking about about food and sustainability researchers at Harvard think it’s about 10 billion people. After that we will run out of space to live and grow food. We think that we are going to hit that limit in the year 2100.
      If we’re saying how many people will it take before Earth collapses (which is a much better question) we can estimate it by taking the weight of Earth and dividing it by the weight of an ordinary person:
      Weight of Earth / Weight of person = number of people to destroy Earth
      5900000000000000000000000 / 70 = 80000000000000000000000
      Which is 8 sextillion people! (that’s 10 billion * 10 billion * 80)

      Great Question,

      Ryan

    • Photo: Maggie Lieu

      Maggie Lieu answered on 13 Nov 2017:

      Hi Izzywizzy!

      That’s an awesome question and ryan’s already answered it really well. I think 10 billion people is the max too and already there are over 7billion! Check here to see how many people there are on Earth live:
      http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

    • Photo: Hannah Middleton

      Hannah Middleton answered on 13 Nov 2017:

      Yes, I agree – 10 billion is the maximum number of people that is predicted the Earth can sustain. It’s based on the amount of land that is suitable for food production and also would require people to become vegetarian, as producing plant-based food is much more land and energy efficient than producing meat.

    • Photo: Scott Melville

      Scott Melville answered on 14 Nov 2017:

      At any one time – the others have it covered super well 🙂 Probably about 10 billion (or 8 sextillion 😉 ).

      But actually, one of the amazing things is that the Earth could support an almost infinite number of people over a long period of time, as long as they go through regular life cycles – only a few of us are alive at any given time, and as long as we don’t irreversibly harm the environment then our children will take over once we are gone, and so on and so on.

      Unfortunately, we don’t seem to be aiming for this as a society – instead we’ve polluted things really badly, and if global warming keeps up at its current rate then we’ll probably only get another few generations of humans before the Earth becomes uninhabitable ( 🙁 ). This is why lots of people are really worried about climate change and asking the politicians to try to do something about it!

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