Population Explosion?

Natural populations tend to grow along an S-curve, with numbers increasing exponentially until a limiting factor like disease or resource scarcity causes them to level off. Earth’s human population remained below one million for most of the species’ history. Since the dawn of capitalism in about 1750, our numbers have exploded, reaching six billion on October 12, 1999.

Neo-Malthusian Paul Ehrlich argued in The Population Bomb (1968) that humanity had overstretched the planet’s carrying capacity and that a catastrophic collapse was around the corner. Instead, we’ve seen the beginnings of a slowdown. Most statisticians now predict that the human population with stabilize at around 8-10 billion sometime in the next century.