The Population Explosion - Was Thanos Right? | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by Skillshare a happy earth overshoot day okay I'm a little bit behind but earth overshoot day is the day every year when the consumption of natural resources by humans on earth overshoots the amount of natural resources the earth produces it's basically the day each year that we max out our credit card and this year it happened on August 1st and it's been inexorably creeping up every year we do live on a finite planet with a finite amount of natural resources and the population on this planet continues to grow up not just grow but also become more developed if everybody on the planet consumed at the same rate as the average American we would need five planets to sustain us this is a problem because all the other places that we can move to nearby are not great and this was actually addressed in the biggest blockbuster movie of the year this year Avengers infinity war and without getting too spoilery the big bad guy in this movie is a guy named Thanos a Purple People beater who believes that the only way to save all life in the universe because of overpopulation and overconsumption is to get rid of half of it now this was clearly evil but was he right now let's just set aside for the purposes of this video the fact that the Infinity stones the gate Thanos the ability to wipe out half of all life in the universe also could have created more resources or created another universe for people to move into or just made half of all life in the universe infertile any of those would have solved the problem without murdering a bunch of people there were options Thanos but didn't need to do anything at all was his reasoning sound at least well let's look at the facts for tens of thousands of years the human population remained pretty much unchanged totally stable and then around the time of the Industrial Revolution an explosion occurred that's continuing to this day it took tens of thousands of years for the population to hit 1 billion in 1804 and then another 123 years to get to 2 billion in 1927 only 33 years to reach 3 billion in 1960 and then another billion by 1970 for another billion by 1987 and another billion by 1999 as of this recording the population is seven point six billion it grows by 83 million every year 200,000 everyday 318 from the time you started watching this video if this train continues we'll hit 10 billion by 2050 by the end of the century 15 billion hearing any alarm bells yet the first person to sound the alarm on overpopulation was the English cleric Thomas Malthus who wrote the book in essay on the principle of population in 1798 in the book he wrote that as food production increases people use this prosperity not to improve their quality of life but to reproduce this leads to overpopulation and overconsumption and eventually to starvation and suffering especially amongst people in the lower classes this became known as a Malthusian trap in extreme examples this can lead to war and famine and caused unimaginable suffering known as the Malthusian catastrophe but luckily for the world according to Malthus anyway we have war and famine and pestilence and disease these things that help prevent an even worse disaster further down the line these are all good things as far as he's concerned I bet he is a real hit at parties cheery though he might have been his ideas were very influential and popular and stuck around long enough to the 1960s for Paul Ehrlich to come along he's a biologist from Stanford University and wrote the book the Population Bomb which became a best-seller at this point the population explosion was in full-on exploding mode and there was a lot of anxiety out there especially amongst economists and sociologists about how the human race was gonna cope with such an overpopulation problem and he suggested that the 70s and 80s were gonna be periods of huge suffering and famines pretty alarmist tone and his prediction about the 70s in the 80s were fairly off the mark but he was one of the first people that tied the well-being of the planet to the number of people on it a problem that's gonna continue to grow over time and all that makes sense but is it true I mean let's look at the numbers poverty rates have actually gone down as the population has grown prosperity is increased global food production has gone up education rates have risen even IQs have increased over time due to better nutrition and more education in fact here we are we got more people on the planet far more than ever and before in the world history and not only a starvation not a problem but obesity is becoming a worldwide epidemic and getting worse every single year today more people die from obesity than starvation clearly the assumption though people know problems is not quite true yes we've been using more arable land for farmland to feed everybody that before and often this comes at the expense of forests which do take co2 out of the atmosphere this is a problem but advancements in farm technology including GMOs as controversial as they are has multiplied the output of the farmland that we're using thanks to technology and human ingenuity the world's resources seem to be able to support a lot more people than we thought it could in fact there's something of a paradox here in that more people there are out there especially more educated people the more Minds there are working on solutions to maximize our resources and making more available to all with the onset of technology resources and especially economies cease to be a zero-sum game this at least was the opinion of economist Julian Simon who challenged him appalled erlik's assumptions in the population bomb which resulted in a very famous bet he challenged pol Ehrlich to pick five commodities any five that he wanted over any period of time longer than a year and he bets that over that time the value of those commodities would actually go down and set it up Ehrlich took him up on the challenge and he and his team picked copper nickel chromium 10 and tungsten and chose a period of 10 years the wager began in 1980 and 10 years later in 1990 the results ran and every single one of the commodities that he picked had gone down in price even though the population had gone up by 800 million people the largest jump in any decade in human history now this is all interesting but 10 years is a very short amount of time eventually if the population continues to rise exponentially they we're gonna reach a breaking point which is why luckily we aren't gonna grow exponentially those projections I mentioned earlier I kind of just made him up I didn't totally pull him out of my butt I projected those based off of the current rate of growth but the current rate of growth is falling here's a deal pre-industrial revolution it was actually quite common to have a whole litter of kids because you can expect at least one of them to be you know eaten by bears or fall off a horse or get smallpox or get swept away by a river or just get a cut and die a random infection seriously time travel sounds cool but I refuse to go back beyond the age of antibiotics that just sounds like a nightmare so anyway the birth rate was high but the death rate was high too so the population you know remains stable then around the time of the Industrial Revolution mass production made better things available to more people the jobs got a little bit better in many cases and we started to wrap our heads around you know medicine and figuring out how to treat people childhood mortality went down so now you've got a really high birth rate in a lower death rate so population went up but eventually the birth rate adjusted you know couples realized they didn't have to produce an entire soccer team worth of kids in order to continue their family so the birth rates went down in population stabilized this has happened and developed countries all around the world a big population boom is just part of the transition from third world to first world today there are still some countries going through this transition so the population is continuing to increase but as these countries stabilize so will their birth rates and the population will even out so what we're looking at here isn't so much an exponential explosion as it is an s-curve that's gonna you know level out over the next hundred years or so according to the UN it'll level out somewhere below 12 billion people but that's still a lot of people can the earth support 12 billion people the very short answer is yes but not at our current consumption levels one of the strongest arguments for veganism is the amount of land that's required to feed the livestock that we eventually eat ourselves it's incredibly wasteful humans over the next couple hundred years are gonna have to become a lot more vegan and a lot more efficient in the use of our resources the good news is that more people that are thinking about this kind of thing the more brilliant ideas that are gonna come out that are gonna make this sort of diet a lot more palatable so that people two centuries from now won't just be eating birdseed vegan diet doesn't have to be awful have you ever tried an impossible burger so we find ourselves at something of a paradox the best way to reduce our consumption of resources is to reduce the population and the best way to reduce the population is to spend and best a lot of resources in developing countries by the way the biggest reasons an oasis plan was dumb was because it wouldn't work after a while the universe would just repopulate itself right back to where it was in the first place the bubonic plague in the 1300s is perhaps the only instance in human history where the population actually went down but let's take a look at what happened afterward the rate of growth more than doubled so Thanos's plan would create all that pain and suffering for nothing because we'd wind up right back where we started now this is a weirdly hotly contested issue there's a lot of people out there that think vanos did nothing wrong but what do you think do you agree talk about it in the comments one last thing to be said is that maybe overpopulation isn't the existential threat that we think it is but that's only the case if we do our part like I said the population boom may end but our way of life is still gonna have to change we have to find ways to conserve our resources while maintaining the highest quality of life as possible this is gonna be a long term transition that the entire world is gonna go through and we're gonna require some of the sharpest minds in the world to do it and one way to become one of those sharpest minds isn't Skillshare Skillshare is a new sponsor to this channel but it's a great platform for people like you who like to you know learn stuff Skillshare is an online learning community with over 20,000 classes and no I did not just stutter 20,000 classes and subjects as varied as computer science to cooking you can learn a new skill from professionals in their fields or you can up your game and whatever it is that pays your bills now maybe you can even make more money to pay those bills a premium membership gives you access to all 20,000 classes including Kurt Anderson's computer science 101 course which would make you pretty much smarter than about 90% of people on that subject from there you can learn about deep learning and neural networks from Frank Cain and from there you could just take over the world and because Skillshare knows the viewers of this channel or just a little bit more special than everybody else they're offering two months their premium subscription to you for free just click the link down in the description and start feeding your head brain big thanks to Skillshare for supporting this channel and a huge shout out to my answer files on patreon who keep the lights on around here we got a whole lot of new people I kind of skipped last week so let me get through these as fast as possible I want to thank Dale Kirkwood Lewis on Suarez shantia dykes who actually upped her pledge I appreciate that Bobson kick Dave whiskas big friend of mine thank you sir Chad Winston Johannes M Kastner Franklin agarró of Aaron deSario the indie sports car podcast Kent Egan Andrew Harlin Fr Solberg and Fraser Kane D Fraser Cain thanks dude so much Natives chill of rusty Shackelford Aaron Rosario Pinto me ham sandwich 283 jens crab Lenzi buck Graham Christ even break Marissa's Awad ski altaïr Timothy F Morphet e and B Phil Henry mark brandenburg michael gung gaunt go Andre Smith Samantha K Enriquez peter DeCosta po t Wang nice Tristan centavo Dean Jacobsen Tobias ring cough James Devine norman hunter everywhere L Anderson were still going folks Michael Dodd Roger ranch kin lid Sir John Campbell Allen Boyd shantel mehron Floyd Marcus Oliver Robert Goering and Mark Wilkins thank you guys so much if you would like to join them get access to things that other people don't get to see behind the scenes stuff and whatnot you can join at patreon.com slash answers with you alright please like and share this video if you liked it and that this is your first time here I invite you to check out some of my other videos on similar topics you might like those as well and if you do hit subscribe you'll get to see them every Monday as always shirts are available at the store answers with Joe calm slash shirts thanks again for watching everyone you guys now go out have an eye-opening week and I'll see you next Monday I love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 279,339

Rating: 4.8795357 out of 5

Keywords: paul ehrlich, population growth, human overpopulation (literature subject), population bomb, marvel avengers, marvel studios, julian simon, thanos, thomas malthus, overpopulation, sustainability, malthusian theory of population, malthusian catastrophe, answers with joe, Joe Scott, fertility rates, world fertility rate, avengers infinity war

Id: qH_RE9HbNbA

Length: 12min 8sec (728 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 03 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/rouxpale]

Thanos Wrong !!! That unacceptable !!!!

​