Earth's Population Will Be 7 Trillion By 2411

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Since earth's population doubles every 40 years I have cqalculated that there will be a thousand fold increase in the population 10 forty year generations from now.
So should we start lighting up the nukes so we can propel entire cities into interstellar space to get rid of our excess population ?

Most social scientists actually expect the world's population to hit 9 billion by the middle of this century and then as the cost of living increases for everyone the population will start to fall.

Or, since the increases in human population come from difficult environnements, we could just wait for a natural disaster to strike. =/

But in order to maintain our present standard of living and to avoid misery space colonization will be essential.

Liner projections of population are almost always wrong. The actual rate of increase is increasing itself. That said the population is expected to hit a ceiling within the next 100 years.

Population won't grow as much as you think. The fertility rate of the entire world is like 2.45 and replacement rate is 2.10 in developed countries and higher in non-developed countries. As countries in the poorer parts of the world become more developed their fertility rates will fall drastically. The fertility rate is expected to drop below replacement level with in the next 50 years. Earth's population will probably peak in the next century and by 2410 we'll likely have fewer people alive than we do now baring some unforeseeable uptick in fertility.

Population doubling every 40 years is not a linear increase in the population but it is in fact exponential.
2011 seven billion people
2050 fourteen billion
2090, 28 billion
2130, 56 billion
2170 112 billion
2210 224 billion
2250 448 billion
2290 896 billion
2330 1.8 trillion
2370 3.6 trillion
2410 7 trillion.

With space collonization the human population will never hit a ceiling because by the year 2410 we could colonize a thousand planets with the help of nuclear power.

How will this affect the speed of earth, or will it affect it at all?

With space colonization the speed of light is the biggest problem.

for the population of earth to double, the fertility of rate would have to be north of like 4.66. It's 2.45 right now and falling.

The Earth's population will peak at about ten billion humans, and without anyone figuring out how to violate the Second Law, will then soon plummet to less than 250 million, and then after maximum recovery, it will continue to fluctuate around 250 million.

Tadzio

Isn't it amazing that the people against a nuclear space program have no problem letting billions of people die in order to control the population.

You missed my point. I did not say it you were not making an exponential projection just that you were leaving the multiplier unaffected.

It won't the earth does not get heavier in that sense. Our existence only rearranges matter that already exists. We gain energy from space so we get a little bit of weight from that and from asteroids. Unless new matter arrives we don't add anything to the Earth's weight.

And as 91 said a growing human population just means that more terrestrial matter gets repackaged as humans, not that more matter is being added to the earths surface. Even if babies fell from heaven they would still need to breath and eat terrestrial matter to grow up and stay alive.

And anyway: the wieght of the whole human race even if you muliplied it by thousands would still be neglible compared to that of the planet.

All of those rockets blasting off taking all of those millions of space colonists away would actually have a bigger (though still hardly noticealbe) effect on the earth's motions than the wieght of people livng on the earth.

I hope it's more like a logistic curve..