AHC: Double the Present Human Population with a POD of CE 1500

Granted, I am NOT a demographics or population expert which is why I set the POD five hundred years from the present day of CE 2016. But I'm still curious on how much the human population can increase, though. What are the factors that drive human population growth and explosion ? And can that growth be duplicated multiple times to increase the human global population to about fourteen billion ? Possibly even more ?
 
The difficulty is that a lot of what's needed to get the extra population (better agriculture, medicine, etc.) was invented by wealthy countries, meaning countries which have already gone through demographic transition. I'm not too convinced anything about nine or ten billion by 2016 is doable from 1500.

That said, to get that, you'll need a much larger population of the Americas, meaning much more immigration to the New World on the part of the European colonisers. That's step one. Step two is to make Africa's population grow much earlier, and then keep Africa from making demographic transition. Probably earlier Green Revolution mixed with earlier invention and proliferation of things like the smallpox vaccine. Some natalism by China and Indian states would also help.
 
The difficulty is that a lot of what's needed to get the extra population (better agriculture, medicine, etc.) was invented by wealthy countries, meaning countries which have already gone through demographic transition. I'm not too convinced anything about nine or ten billion by 2016 is doable from 1500.

That said, to get that, you'll need a much larger population of the Americas, meaning much more immigration to the New World on the part of the European colonisers. That's step one. Step two is to make Africa's population grow much earlier, and then keep Africa from making demographic transition. Probably earlier Green Revolution mixed with earlier invention and proliferation of things like the smallpox vaccine. Some natalism by China and Indian states would also help.
I would rather prevent the transition in Europe than do it in Africa, because technically the second is about what is happening now with apparent slow transition while the 1st is quite hard but can produce some results.

Natalism in India and China would be the big deal though, but I'm not sure of what results that would produce. :oops:

In any case earlier everything would help but I'm not sure if Earth or human agriculture can keep that population well or even poorly feed.
 
I would rather prevent the transition in Europe than do it in Africa, because technically the second is about what is happening now with apparent slow transition while the 1st is quite hard but can produce some results.

Natalism in India and China would be the big deal though, but I'm not sure of what results that would produce. :oops:

In any case earlier everything would help but I'm not sure if Earth or human agriculture can keep that population well or even poorly feed.

Wouldn't preventing demographic transition in Europe be the cause of impoverishment? It doesn't seem like a good idea to cause impoverishment of such a major center of science and medicine, that allowed for agricultural, medicine, etc. advances.

We have enough food to feed billions more, it's all about the logistics in getting food to those people. Which in turn often requires resources which we don't quite have enough of. And also causes plenty of pollution both the production and the logistics, and etc.

India and China could easily have 3 billion plus combined.
 
I'm not sure that a population of 13-14 billion is possible.

The population explosion was a consequence of, among other things, the scientific revolution that found its fullest flower in early modern Europe. It's a fine tightrope to walk, between having the scientific and other components of the population explosion being sufficiently widespread to foster such huge growth while not having this widespread knowledge lead to an earlier demographic transition and a shift to lower rates of births and natural increase.
 
Wouldn't preventing demographic transition in Europe be the cause of impoverishment? It doesn't seem like a good idea to cause impoverishment of such a major center of science and medicine, that allowed for agricultural, medicine, etc. advances.

We have enough food to feed billions more, it's all about the logistics in getting food to those people. Which in turn often requires resources which we don't quite have enough of. And also causes plenty of pollution both the production and the logistics, and etc.

India and China could easily have 3 billion plus combined.
Well I don't think demographic transition is completely influenced by the richness of the country, Israel is an example so I think that if you keep 2-2.5 rates you can maybe have a billion people in Europe(think about Imperial Russia without wwars and cwars).

Well maybe a couple billions more but not 7.5 more.

Technically the Indian subcontinent and China do have more than 3 billion people. I think people mean with India in this case the subcontinent.
 
Most experts in this field are saying that somewhere around 11 bn is the best we can conceivably achieve. That takes into account technologies that don't really exist yet, including growing plants in solution rather than dirt. With that, 11bn is guessed for sometime in the mid 22nd century.

So can science be accelerated by a century and a half? I'm doubtful about this. If we pushed the POD back to a time before there was rapid science advancement (so pre 1300), and said "in this ATL there is now rapid science advancement rather than everyone being more devoted to God than logic" (referring to stuff like murdering cats and using leaches to get rid of 'bad blood') then maybe.

Post 1500 you had pretty good technological advancement as it was. I don't think this can be pushed quite as far as we would like.

- BNC
 

SRBO

Banned
Wew lad

WEW LAD

Unless edible dirt then no

If Earth was maximum efficient and populated (basically the entire planet is one city with farms stacked on eachother making farm-skyskrapers) but doing that requires an absolutely khmer rouge brutal tier world-spanning state to do
 
Wew lad

WEW LAD

Unless edible dirt then no

If Earth was maximum efficient and populated (basically the entire planet is one city with farms stacked on eachother making farm-skyskrapers) but doing that requires an absolutely khmer rouge brutal tier world-spanning state to do

Really ? Humans have already created in vitro synthetic meat which can placate the use of livestock and feeding those animals. We already can produce food for possible billions more. it's just the matter of distribution and livestock feeding.
 

SRBO

Banned
Really ? Humans have already created in vitro synthetic meat which can placate the use of livestock and feeding those animals. We already can produce food for possible billions more. it's just the matter of distribution and livestock feeding.
Yeah but having to make such a massive distribution network it will be more vulnerable.

These things seem to be subject to some sort of a law similar to the square-cube law: The larger and more complex a society is, the higher the chance it will get absolutely destroyed. With about 15 billion people you're guaranteed to get some sort of happening to send everyone back to the stone age.

But i realize OP said human population without stating which planet, it could be more plausible to somehow boost human technology and annex various planets (i used annex extremely deliberately)
 
Yeah but having to make such a massive distribution network it will be more vulnerable.

These things seem to be subject to some sort of a law similar to the square-cube law: The larger and more complex a society is, the higher the chance it will get absolutely destroyed. With about 15 billion people you're guaranteed to get some sort of happening to send everyone back to the stone age.

But i realize OP said human population without stating which planet, it could be more plausible to somehow boost human technology and annex various planets (i used annex extremely deliberately)

That's a start, though the POD is at 1500. How can we boost human technology by then ?
 
Yeah but having to make such a massive distribution network it will be more vulnerable.

These things seem to be subject to some sort of a law similar to the square-cube law: The larger and more complex a society is, the higher the chance it will get absolutely destroyed. With about 15 billion people you're guaranteed to get some sort of happening to send everyone back to the stone age.

But i realize OP said human population without stating which planet, it could be more plausible to somehow boost human technology and annex various planets (i used annex extremely deliberately)

Oh yeah that law seems pretty legit, after all look how many times the USA has been destroyed or the current world (considering it's the most populous and most complex it has ever been) has been destroyed. Wait, no, that is not a law and is just nonsense with no statistical or historical basis. There's never been an event in human history that sent people back to the stone age, keep that to the realms of science fiction.
 

missouribob

Banned
The only think I could think of is that birth control and abortions are globally prohibited. With different cultural standards I could see something like that. But even with that I'd have to look at the data to see if that would get us to 15 billion. My gut says yes though.
 
Well I don't think demographic transition is completely influenced by the richness of the country, Israel is an example so I think that if you keep 2-2.5 rates you can maybe have a billion people in Europe(think about Imperial Russia without wwars and cwars).

Well maybe a couple billions more but not 7.5 more.

Technically the Indian subcontinent and China do have more than 3 billion people. I think people mean with India in this case the subcontinent.

A lot of Israel's growth is driven by fundamentalist nutjobs. I've seen that as an explanation for why the US has such a high fertility rate as well. I'm not sure how much they correlate. I think that such an environment might still hinder technology thanks to the lack of women in science (even as contributing members to male-led scientific teams), thus ignoring half the human race's potential. Although admittedly not as much as keeping everyone poor might.

Imperial Russia was bound to end in either disaster or intense reform which either way would have slowed the population growth as it did OTL. In any case, development would have naturally slowed population growth thanks to demographic transition.

Most experts in this field are saying that somewhere around 11 bn is the best we can conceivably achieve. That takes into account technologies that don't really exist yet, including growing plants in solution rather than dirt. With that, 11bn is guessed for sometime in the mid 22nd century.

So can science be accelerated by a century and a half? I'm doubtful about this. If we pushed the POD back to a time before there was rapid science advancement (so pre 1300), and said "in this ATL there is now rapid science advancement rather than everyone being more devoted to God than logic" (referring to stuff like murdering cats and using leaches to get rid of 'bad blood') then maybe.

Post 1500 you had pretty good technological advancement as it was. I don't think this can be pushed quite as far as we would like.

- BNC

The 10 billion estimate is based on stagnating fertility rates (including in undeveloped nations) and possible ecological damage (thanks to global warming and other such issues). It's more than doable based on the number of food, and even logistically, it's more than doable, assuming everyone wants to live like a developing world peasant ruled by an elite class. For the OP's sake, this would incidentally stagnate technology.

Besides, more desalination, plus seawater greenhouses mean we can be growing all sorts of vegetables in the Sahara, Australian Outback, etc. With skill marketing/research/agronomy, we can domesticate tons of unusual plants to use as vegetables and sell them to the public (an American bushfood market comparable to the Australian bushfood market might as well be the tip of the iceberg!). This means we can be growing more staple crops using land we currently use to grow vegetables.

Really, everything is based on getting the food (and water) to people instead of any agricultural limitations. So many famines in the past 200 years (and probably beyond) could have been solved with getting the food to the people, since the food was there, just for reasons it couldn't reach who it needed to. For instance, in the 1930s people starved in the US and beyond (the Soviet Union most infamously) while grain was rotting in silos throughout the Great Plains unable to be sold/brought to market for various reasons. The myth of "peak food" needs to die (we live in a world where obesity is now a disease of poverty in many places, that should say it all). There's many reasons why we can't/shouldn't exceed that many people. But we can. And the other essential need, peak water, is solvable through desalination. To construct the desalination, you will need more power...which incidentally we've been able to do since the mid-20th century with more nuclear engineering (not even getting into solar energy and such). All humans need is food (with enough nutrients to not fatally malnourish you) and water. It doesn't matter how bad your life is, until something kills you, you'll persist. That's an utterly horrible way to live, but food and water is all people need in the end.

Yeah but having to make such a massive distribution network it will be more vulnerable.

These things seem to be subject to some sort of a law similar to the square-cube law: The larger and more complex a society is, the higher the chance it will get absolutely destroyed. With about 15 billion people you're guaranteed to get some sort of happening to send everyone back to the stone age.

But i realize OP said human population without stating which planet, it could be more plausible to somehow boost human technology and annex various planets (i used annex extremely deliberately)

No, if everything broke down, you see billions (let's say 14-14.5 billion) starve/kill each other for food, but not Stone Age. I don't even think humanity is capable of sending everyone to the Stone Age, only a supervolcano/asteroid/comet is by virtue of there being only a few thousand people left alive. You'd leave a few hundred million to a billion left alive, and that's comfortably capable of rebuilding society.

Most ideally, more land in space is the way to do this thing. Maybe we build space colonies ("free" land), then with artificial wombs and incentives for "childbearing" (if you want a kid, you get benefits), we're able to raise fertility back to replacement levels minimum. And we do all this in the mid-20th century at latest. So 10 billion on Earth, 4-5 billion in space. With a 1500 POD, that isn't too impossible. But as for Earth, that's more difficult.
 
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