âThe world is overpopulated.â
Nope.
âWell, thatâs just carbon emissions. What about places for all those people to live?â
If the worldâs population all lived in one city that was as densely populated as Manhattan, that city would be the size of Ecuador. The space taken up by ourselves and our toys is actually rather insignificant next to that taken up by our farmland.
âAh-hah! Farmland! Weâre not producing enough food for all those people!â
The problem here is we are insanely wasteful with our food.
Firstly, half of all food grown in the US goes straight into the dumpster.
Secondly, we grow it very inefficiently. We could very easily increase the food yield of a given area of land by building a greenhouse on it (which also reduces water loss) and using poly-cultures instead of mono-cultures; the reason our preferred method is open-air mono-culture farms, which are susceptible to erosion and blight and requires a god-awful amount of water to stay hydrated, is that labor is expensive and land is cheap.
In fact, if we took it even furtherâgrowing our food in carbon dioxide-rich environments lit with artificial lighting 24 hours a day (or at least at night)âyou only need 1-2000 square feet of farmland per person. Admittedly, you pretty much have to have fusion power for this to be an environmentally and economically viable option, but still; the point is, we could easily condense our environmental footprint by a shit-ton (and even more options will be available in the future) without decreasing our population one iota.
âThere is still a maximum carrying capacity the planet has.â
Indeed there is. And do you know what that carrying capacity is? Itâs ten trillion. And the cut off isnât space or resourcesâitâs waste heat. The things weâd have to do to get there arenât exactly the sort of things we could do overnightâhell, we donât actually know how to fusion yetâbut theyâre all well within the realm of the physically possible.
