What awaits the Earth in the next 500 years? How many people can the globe support? Scientists are sounding the alarm.
Not so long ago, British scientist Stephen Hawking published sensational studies: in 500 years it will be impossible to live on our planet - countless numbers of people and not a single free meter of land. The released industrial energy will turn the Earth into a red-hot fireball. Many Russian scientists do not paint the future of our planet in rainbow colors either.
“If energy production grows by only 2% per year, then in 500-600 years the temperature will rise so that the oceans will boil. Let's hope that humanity will not be so unreasonable and will moderate its appetite,”said Alexander Tutukov, head of the department of physics and evolution of stars at the Institute of Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Just two centuries ago, there were six times less people on Earth than now. Every minute 250 new inhabitants are born on the planet. The question of how many people the Earth can withstand has been worrying scientists for a long time. Back in the middle of the last century, one British physicist suggested that the Earth will be suitable for life as long as the heat that it receives from people and the Sun is equal to the heat that it gives to space. And the globe can hold a maximum of 60 billion people. But this is a hypothesis. For at least the next 200 years, you can live in peace: overpopulation and depletion of resources do not threaten the Earth, some Russian experts say.
“For now, nature is self-organizing and strong enough to withstand human influences. The most important task is to live intelligently on the planet, to join this process of self-regulation, when nature is able to react to influences, to recover from a violation,”said Arkady Tishkov, Deputy Director of the Institute of Geography of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Today, the main dangers for humanity are the anger of nature itself, which we cannot resist, and our own stupidity. Any war will solve all overpopulation issues. But this philosophy is fraught with the fact that humanity may simply not have a future. None. But any earthly catastrophe can be avoided if a spare planet is found in our Galaxy in time.