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The two great economic revolutions that marked human history up to 1900—the agricultural and industrial revolutions—greatly increased the Earth's human carrying capacity, allowing human population to grow from 5 to 10 million people in 10,000 BCE to 1.5 billion in 1900. [44]
The 1972 book The Limits to Growth discussed the limits to growth of society as a whole. This book included a computer-based model which predicted that the Earth would reach a carrying capacity of ten to fourteen billion people after some two hundred years, after which the human population would collapse. [7]
The belief that global population levels will become too large to sustain is a point of contentious debate. Those who believe global human overpopulation to be a valid concern, argue that increased levels of resource consumption and pollution exceed the environment's carrying capacity, leading to population overshoot. [18]
Once the population has reached its carrying capacity, it will stabilize and the exponential curve will level off towards the carrying capacity, which is usually when a population has depleted most its natural resources. [25] In the world human population, growth may be said to have been following a linear trend throughout the last few decades. [8]
By war, with or without weapons of mass destruction, starvation, disease, rape, murder, ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, and other horrors beyond the imagination, when humanity has exceeded the carrying capacity of the Earth. By the voluntary action of all of humanity prior to the human population exceeding the carrying capacity of the Earth.
A cultural heritage can outlast the conditions that produced it. That carrying capacity surplus is gone now, eroded both by population increase and immense technological enlargement of per capita resource appetites and environmental impacts. Human life is now being lived in an era of deepening carrying capacity deficit.
According to the Global Footprint Network's calculations, currently people use Earth's resources at approximately 171% of capacity. [27] This implies that humanity is well over Earth's human carrying capacity at current levels of affluence. According to the GFN: In 2023, Earth Overshoot Day fell on August 2nd. Earth Overshoot Day marks the date ...
An expanding population can be considered as an increase of available human capacity for increasing food production. [37] The static aspect of the Malthusian hypothesis, which is based on the rule of decreasing returns, [ 38 ] limits its applicability.