Name: 【TED】Charles C. Mann: How will we survive when the population hits 10 billion? (How will we survive when the population hits 10 billion? | Charles C. Mann)
Uploaded: 2018-11-16T20:01:13.000Z
Duration: 12 min 58 s
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Now the typical way to answer that question is this.

You choose some measure of human physical well-being:

average longevity, average calories per day,

average income, overall population, that sort of thing,

In almost every case, you get the same result.

The line skitters along at a low level for millennia,

then rockets up exponentially in the 19th and 20th century.

consumption of energy, consumption of fresh water,

consumption of the world's photosynthesis,

In the same way, the line skitters along at a low level for millennia,

Biologists have a word for this: outbreak.

An outbreak is when a population or species

Natural selection ordinarily keeps populations and species

Pests, parasites, lack of resources prevent them from expanding too much.

But every now and then, a species escapes its bounds.

Crown-of-thorns starfish in the Indian Ocean,

zebra mussels in the Great Lakes, spruce budworm here in Canada.

Populations explode, a hundredfold, a thousandfold,

So here's a fundamental lesson from biology:

Put a couple of protozoa into a petri dish full of nutrient goo.

In their natural habitat, soil or water, their environment constrains them.

In the petri dish, they have an ocean of breakfast

They eat and reproduce, eat and reproduce,

until bang, they hit the edge of the petri dish,

at which point they either drown in their own waste,

you and I are not fundamentally different than the protozoa in the petri dish.

All the things that we, in our vanity, think make us different --

art, science, technology, and so forth, they don't matter.

we're going to hit the edge of the petri dish, simple as that.

Well, the obvious question: Is this actually true?

Are we in fact doomed to hit the edge of the petri dish?

I'd like to set aside this question for a moment

If we are going to escape biology, how are we going to do it?

there will be almost 10 billion people in the world,

and all of those people will want the things that you and I want:

I mean, think of it: Toblerone for 10 billion people.

How are we going to feed everybody, get water to everybody,

provide power to everybody, avoid the worst impacts of climate change?

and I've been asking these questions to researchers for years,

and in my experience, their answers fall into two broad categories,

believe that science and technology, properly applied,

will let us produce our way out of our dilemmas.

They see the world as governed by fundamental ecological processes

with limits that we transgress to our peril.

Wizards and prophets have been butting their heads together for decades,

but they both believe that technology is key to a successful future.

The trouble is, they envision different types of technology

Wizards envision a world of glittering, hyperefficient megacities

surrounded by vast tracts of untouched nature,

economies that have transitioned from atoms to bits,

that no longer depend on exploiting nature.

Energy, to wizards, comes from compact nuclear plants;

food from low-footprint farms with ultraproductive,

genetically modified crops tended by robots;

water from high-throughput desalination plants,

which means we no longer exploit rivers and aquifers.

packed into ultradense but walkable megacities,

an urbanized world of maximum human aspiration

Now, prophets object to every bit of this.

You can't dematerialize food and water, they point out.

and industrial agriculture has already given us massive soil erosion,

【TED】Charles C. Mann: How will we survive when the population hits 10 billion? (How will we survive when the population hits 10 billion? | Charles C. Mann)

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【TED】Charles C. Mann: How will we survive when the population hits 10 billion? (How will we survive when the population hits 10 billion? | Charles C. Mann)

obvious

massive

scale

average