Eight Billion Reasons to Celebrate
Why a larger population is a radically good thing.
[Author’s note: as of 15/11/2022, 08:00GMT the global population reached eight billion.]
I just checked: there are currently seven billion, 999 million, 581 thousand, 300-and-11… 12… 14 people in the world right now. No. Make that 20… 23… 34 people!
Feel free to take a look yourself: there are more.
Without a doubt, the population is increasing. The number of births outpaces the number of deaths. The number of people alive right now is larger than it was ten seconds ago. The number of people alive right now is even larger than that. And in the coming days, the number of contiguous, cohabiting homo sapiens will leisurely exceed eight billion globally. That is eight-with-nine-zeros people sharing a planet that housed a whole nine-zeros fewer merely a decade before.
And I just checked: there are more.
Figures like these are concerning. For many, they are nothing short of catastrophic. The overpopulation problem is one characterised by rising anxiety with each and every newborn child. After all: more people require more food. More people require more water. More people require more energy to heat up their homes and more people, with wider footprints, require more land to build them on. More people produce more waste, take up more space, kindle more fires, quarry more rock. More people emit more carbon and more people burn up the sky. More people have more children. More children have more children faster. More and more and more and more until, sometime in the not-so-distant future, more becomes far too many and our overburdened world finally breaks—into famine, hunger, tyranny and warfare. With far more to come.
But I will not say such things. I will not call this, our most recent population milestone, a catastrophe. I will not call it some crisis in need of great sacrifice to avoid. Nor will I cast people as exclusively negative forces weighing on an already tormented world: emitters, polluters, consumers, destroyers (laden with a subtext more befitting the spread of disease or malignant cancer); but never builders, inventors, transformers, creators (imbued with a favour derived from our best understandings). I will, instead, say the opposite: this is a triumph. I will reflect on such developments as the humanist miracles they rightfully are; I will celebrate each and every personal life maintained on a limited planet by limitless ingenuity; and I will lay down the gauntlet for a future whose abundance is measured in more people living at one time than all those who died ages before them.
I will also, to begin, refute some of the arguments opposing reproduction—those promoting a less populous society in the false names of freedom, justice, and a vision of plenty crippled by pessimism. Those which twist genuine concerns towards misanthropic ends.
Sinks, Fires, Springs, Flowers
There are broadly four competing notions about population and growth. In our attempts to understand such wide spanning problems we might ask ourselves: What are people? How do they interact? What is their impact? Are they good?
Individual answers will vary from person to person. But the prevailing narrative splits and reseams itself with a twisted and cynical fabric of man. On the one hand we are viewed with compassion: people are victims of both themselves and each other; we are impotent, pitiable, helpless to the pressures of scarcity and hardship. We are doomed.
While on the other, far more constricted hand, we are feared as uniquely treacherous: humanity has proven time and again its reckless abandon in matters of greed, expansion, and proclivity towards violence in achieving such ends. We are belligerents, marauders, a singular danger spreading unchallenged.
Both theories, while conceptually at odds, can be reduced into seemingly cohesive statements. They are as follows.
People are sinks
The more people there are, the less each person can have.
People are fires
The more people there are, the more damage they inflict.
The first theory argues that people are diluting—that they are, by no fault of their own (but merely by virtue of their physical needs) a detriment to others. A drain on available resources. This is, as many have argued, obvious, the inescapable truth of elementary subtraction. The nutritional content of 100 meals, for example, depends almost entirely on how many people require feeding (10 is a banquet; 50 is a ration; more is nothing but a guarantee for violence). The syphoning concern of overpopulation relies on the simple realities of scarce distribution: the same people cannot eat the same food; they cannot burn the same coal; they cannot occupy the same space and why should they want to? It is in this view that the birth of new children makes victims of their parents. Not because they are intentionally wicked, but because they are unavoidably demanding. Every mouth gained is a mouthful lost.
The second conjecture is far more incendiary, stating that people are not merely burdensome but outwardly dangerous. They destroy what meagre resources remain after partitioning. Towns and cities are vandalised. Parks and gardens are littered. Fields and forests and lakes and rivers are defaced or outright removed from the landscape. (Indeed, a large proportion of “destructive” rhetoric is leveraged from an environmental foundation: people seize habitat; people poison oceans; people murder animals. And so on.) This is the primary source of anti-human sentiments in population discourse. Where distributive concerns maintain a humanistic core (“How much suffering must a person endure?”), the damage accusation is defamatory by design. It is also from this perspective that we derive comparisons to viruses, cancers, intruders, explosives—impassioned rebukes of people and their desire to influence the world. And with such condemnation comes a logical dismissal of population growth. They argue instead for degrowth: shrinking the world to save it from us. Sheepishly at best. Forcibly at worst. And for the benefit of a future limited in principle.
Thankfully for everyone, already living and soon to be: the destructive picture is false. The advent of new children is no inherent hardship and our eight billionth birthday is no certain doom. Resources are not finite. Growth has no ceiling. Death is not fated and people are no monsters.
This is true for the inverse reasons outlined above. These are our new statements underpinning a pronatalist optimism.
People are springs
The more people there are, the more each person can have.
People are flowers
The more people there are, the more they transform.
People are springs in the sense that they are abounding: they literally generate new and better stuff using a special form of computation—creativity—to solve both abstract and physical problems. This is why the advent of new people is fundamentally prosperous, not impoverishing, and why living in a world with a larger population can (and has!) resulted in each individual person having more than their parents. More people solve more problems than fewer people and generate more resources to share between them. They are springs, not sinks, and the water is raging.
It should be noted that this is true alongside the realities of distribution, not in place of them. The nutritional scenario outlined above is mistaken not because more people require fewer meals (they really do require more meals), but because it presents foodstocks as a fixed and immutable value from which to divide. In reality we can, say, invent better farming methods and increase the supply. (This is precisely what Norman Borlaug did in the 1950’s when he bioengineered disease resistant crops, kickstarting the Third Agricultural Revolution and saving over a billion people from starvation. It is also what both vertical and cellular farming hope to achieve in the decades to come.)
Opposition to such arguments derive from two central fallacies. The first is the classic Malthusian error of judging future demands by current supplies, future challenges by current solutions (precluding the possibility of progress and begging the question of resource destruction). And the second is a fundamental confusion between the meanings of the words “resources” and “materials” in the context of world economics.
In purely physical terms, we really are bounded; the Earth really does have a finite bulk mass and finite surface area. There really are finite atoms and finite bond energies holding them together. But resources are not some idle thing sitting there motionless and independent of people. They represent instead a very specific relationship between a person’s needs—their knowledge—and the physical world around them. The element uranium, for example, did not become a resource until the advent of very specific theories in fundamental physics. Before that time it was still uranium by all accounts; but it was not a resource until people discovered what it was, what it could do, and how they could use it in a way that benefited them. The same can be said for all the materials listed above. Deep-buried minerals are not considered as geological “reserves” until they can be extracted economically—until, for example, we invent better drills. Those residing on far-distant asteroids will be similarly excluded until we innovate drones capable of reaching them.
Even previously inhospitable land—space itself—is partial to the emanating influence of human creativity. The spatial problem does, at first glance, appear like a truly impregnable barrier facing the budding resource abundant. That is until, once again, we separate the notions of materials and resources. Of square footage and places to live. The former has been largely stable for billions of years on Earth; the latter has expanded with each and every engineering advancement. In 10,000 BCE the number of people capable of living basically anywhere was a simple function of tents and flat pastures. Today, humans have colonised every continent on the planet, weathering extreme climates at great altitudes and beneath vast oceans. We have built towers far outreaching the clouds. And when we don’t build up, we build down, into the Earth, whose volume is two thousand times greater than its surface area. Or into the ocean, whose waters span 71 percent of its landscapes. Or into the skies. Or into space.
At this very moment, there are only seven people living in permanent orbit around the Earth (those scientists working within the International Space Station); the irrationality of pessimism lies in the assumption that we cannot, in principle, increase that number to seven million. Or seven billion for that matter. It would be the same irrationality of our neolithic ancestors, looking upon their luxuriant tents in relative comfort, to deny the possibility of an average block of flats. The tip of the Burj Khalifa is as distant to them as the base of a Mars colony is to us. Probably more so. To assume that we will cease to innovate new solutions to residential problems is the same blind parochialism that has been disproving Malthus for well over two centuries. Like searching for leaks as the pool overflows.
My second statement is perhaps even more controversial. People are flowers, not fires, in the sense that they heal the world, not destroy it; that they make it more hospitable and more beautiful, not more dangerous and more gruesome; that they adorn its landscapes with wonder and meaning, not terror and chaos. And that when they do make mistakes, they can correct for them, using the same creative and rational faculties outlined above. An obvious example is the ongoing climate dilemma, whose associated risk is touted as some fatalist charge against people and their actions, but in reality represents one of our greatest opportunities for societal troubleshooting. Whether that means innovating better low-emission energy technologies to compete with fossil fuels, adapting to warmer temperatures and increasing climate resiliency, experimenting with geoengineering solutions to decreasing temperatures—or a combination of all three: there is nothing fatal about the challenge ahead. Damage is repairable with knowledge and wealth. More people create more wealth. More people repair more damage. This is as true for the natural world as it is for society; the future going forward can be as green or as urban as we want it to be, and as most demographic transitions have shown, populations tend to become more nature-loving as they become more wealthy (when they have the security to appreciate nature instead of being victimised by it). And nature—ocean vistas, mountain pathways, dappled sunbeams under gossamer canopies—really is beautiful. We should maximise the number of people who can enjoy it.
Animals will be safer, too. While the expansion of people across the Earth has been clumsy in its outset, that going forward favours the concentration of people away from nature and towards urban areas. This coupled with Kuznets Curves (linked above) is only good news for non-human lives. And besides, people are the only known animals to care at all about their neighbouring wildlife—to practise conservation and, in the coming years, even de-extinction to maintain a species beyond its natural limits. This also alludes to another, slightly futuristic, solution: sequence the genome of every extant (and extinct for that matter) organism we can find; store the information robustly and with digital backups; wait a century for bioengineering to advance to the point where synthesising an animal is as easy as printing an A4 sheet; start a planet-wide nature reserve somewhere. The alternative is the continuation of a natural order that prizes extinction, not sanctuary, as its defining feature. Whether by mutation or predation or starvation or virulent disease; be it a meteor strike or super volcano or solar flare or rogue black hole they are—all of them—doomed. Unless people save them.
One Hundred Billion More
Eight billion people really is a triumph. But compared with the sum total of all human lives, throughout all of natural history, it is a meagre gathering in the halls of past death. Roughly 109 billion people have fought to survive on Earth and roughly 109 billion people have, in the tragedy of their ignorance, failed in that endeavour. They fell prey to a genetic knowledge unfit to sustain them; they grew hungry and tired and old and decrepit all because they didn’t know, in their rudimentary understandings of the world, how to elevate themselves above their immediate surroundings, how to defend from external pressures and how, in their everyday lives, to exist without pain, fear, and a universalised suffering. We owe it to them to celebrate a world that accommodates more birthdays than it does funerals; and we can set our sights forward for an even bigger accomplishment in the centuries to come.
One hundred billion people. Alive. At one time.
I can think of no greater rebuke—no louder “fuck you!”—towards entropy and destruction than to simultaneously sustain more people at one moment than all those who died in all of known history. That will mark a moment of supreme exaltation, perhaps the first in the cosmos, where order supplants chaos with purpose and stability. Meaning over nonsense. Truth over falsehood. Beauty over foulness. Good over evil. That is what more people can mean. And that, I would maintain, really is worth celebrating.
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