Abstract
Estimates of the maximum number of people the earth can support have been developed and put forth routinely in environmental debates in UN reports and in papers by scholars or academic politicians trained in ecology economics sociology geography soil science or agronomy and other disciplines. However professional demographers tend to focus upon the composition and growth of populations restricting their predictions to the near term and framing them in conditional terms. How many people the earth can support depends upon nature as well as humankinds social economic cultural and political choices. There is not and will not be one single number of people the earth an support. Earths ultimate human carrying capacity hinges upon future constraints and possibilities which cannot yet be known since they remain in the future. The world still has room to accommodate additional population. However any major population growth is pointless. The population density needed for mankind to obtain all of the advantages of cooperation and social intercourse has in most populous countries already been attained.
Highlights
Two thousand years ago, the Earth probably had [100-300] million people
The population would double in 59 years if it continued to grow at its present rate of increase of nearly 1.2 percent per year, but a constant growth rate seems very unlikely
It is much more likely that the average number of children per woman and the population growth rate will continue to fall as they have over the past half century
Summary
The Earth probably had [100-300] million people. The human population reached one billion in 1800-1830, and seven and a half billion in 2017.
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