Fact Checking
Well-Known Member
OT,
BTW., while that might be true assuming our current non-sustainable mix of technologies, the real population limit of this planet, using high living standards for everyone and only assuming available technologies, is more like 100 billion people living comfortably (!):
Once that practice is superceded (by properly pricing of long term costs/damage) the road to more population growth is wide open, without compromising on living standards.
I think its quite possible that even with Tesla succeeding, Earth can't sustain 7B people in 2050 AD.
BTW., while that might be true assuming our current non-sustainable mix of technologies, the real population limit of this planet, using high living standards for everyone and only assuming available technologies, is more like 100 billion people living comfortably (!):
- Earth receives stupendous amounts of energy from the sun, and energy is the main physical limit,
- ~80% of the population lives on like ~1% of the planetary surface, and that doesn't even include the 75% oceanic surface,
- we are wasting a lot of premium surface living space and are sacrificing a lot of our quality of life on ICE based transportation infrastructure: EVs and tunnels alone will be a giant step forward.
- Earth also still has stupendous amounts of mineral resources, there's literally no lack of anything: for example Earth's oceans contain somewhere between 50,000 and 1,500,000 metric tons of gold dissolved - up to 7x all the gold mined in history? And gold is a very rare and comparatively unimportant mineral resource - more abundant metals like lithium are probably already economically feasible to extract from ocean water.
Once that practice is superceded (by properly pricing of long term costs/damage) the road to more population growth is wide open, without compromising on living standards.
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