The real population of the earth. See what "Population of the Earth" is in other dictionaries. How to determine the average population density

Many experts believe that at present there is a threat of overpopulation of the Earth, which will lead to mass starvation. It will be aggravated by a global ecological catastrophe. Therefore, urgent measures are needed, thanks to which it would be possible to regulate the number of people. But before you do anything, you need to ask yourself: how many people can live on Earth?

For all living organisms inhabiting our planet, the same ecological law works. It consists of the following phases, following each other - explosion, a crisis, collapse, stabilization. Any living species, once in a favorable environment, dramatically increase their numbers. This is the explosion. But a huge number of individuals begin to destroy the habitat. Therefore, a crisis occurs, followed by a collapse. It is expressed in a catastrophic decline in the population to a lower level than it was originally. During the collapse Environment is restored, and the population increases to a reasonable level. This is followed by stabilization. Humanity is currently in a phase of crisis.

It should be noted that there are 3 periods of increase in the number of people. The first period refers to the end of the Pleistocene (2.6 million years - 11.7 thousand years ago). It was characterized by the resettlement of tribes engaged in hunting throughout the globe. The second period was observed 9 thousand years ago, when mankind mastered agriculture. The population of the Earth then increased 20 times. And the third period is associated with the industrial revolution. This process these days it has not died out, but is only gaining momentum. At the same time, the population of the Earth increased by 30 times. The area of ​​cultivated land has increased by 3 times, and the yield by 7 times.

10 million people lived on our planet 10 thousand years ago. By the beginning of our era, there were already 200 million people. By the middle of the 17th century, when the industrial revolution began, the planet was inhabited by 500 million people. At the beginning of the 19th century, there were already 1 billion, and at the beginning of the 20th century, 2 billion. At the beginning of 2016, 7.3 billion people lived on Earth. The population is growing by 2% every year. It took 200,000 years for humanity to reach the first billion. The second billion was achieved in 100 years, and the third in just 40. The fourth billion in 15 years, and the fifth in 10.

Humanity is now doubling every 35 years. And the amount of food doubles every 30 years. This is the main indicator of our existence. But it does not increase by itself, but due to the development of new lands. And every year it becomes more and more difficult to ensure the growth of the crop. We should also not forget about electricity and water, which are needed more and more. As a result, resources are being depleted and the natural environment is being destroyed. Stocks of coal, oil, gas, mineral raw materials are used to the limit. But these stocks are not renewed in any way.

Therefore, the current unlimited well-being is finite in time. It will end as habitats are destroyed, food production drops, and then the population is reduced to a level that the remaining resources can provide.

Ecologists answer this question quite definitely, since the biosphere exists according to a simple law. He relates the size of organic food-consuming species to their abundance. The main role in the flows of energy and substances is assigned to small organisms. But the big ones play only a supporting role. Therefore, the main consumers in the biosphere are arthropods, molluscs, and worms. Wild vertebrates, which include amphibians, reptiles, mammals, birds, consume only 1% of the biosphere's production.

A person with pets must be part of the group of wild vertebrates, that is, consume less than 1%. But modern humanity consumes 7% of the production of the biosphere. That is much more than it should be. As a result, all biospheric patterns are violated. And how many people can live on Earth?

Here we must understand that the biosphere is a self-regulating system. Therefore, it seeks to return the population to normal levels. It is 25 times lower than modern, that is, it is about 300 million people. And this is for the entire planet. A maximum of 500 million people can live on Earth, but not 7, 8 or 10 billion. That is why the productivity of valuable ecosystems is falling, dying people need animals, and necessary plants disappear. All this is connected with the self-regulation of the biosphere, which seeks to limit the number of mankind.

The population of the Earth in million people

What will the collapse be like?

A decrease in the population of the Earth will certainly occur, since the biosphere will not allow its destruction. But this can happen in different scenarios. First scenario which is still working in some countries is hunger. Today, only 500 million people on the planet are well-nourished, and 2 billion are regularly undernourished. Every year, 20 million people die of hunger, and the human population during the same time increases by an order of magnitude.

If there are 200 million people dying of hunger a year, then population growth will stop. And if the number of dying increases even more, then the population will begin to decline. But this is a terrible and inhuman process. He will bring so much grief that it is even scary to think.

Second scenario purely political. It is connected with a nuclear catastrophe. There will be a world conflict over non-renewable resources, and a nuclear war will break out. It is capable of destroying all of humanity altogether, leaving only a few intelligent beings on Earth. And then civilization will begin to revive in a new way. And this can take thousands of years.

Third scenario designed for human consciousness. The governments of the states will impose restrictions on the birth rate, which will lead to a decrease in the population. However, this development of events raises serious doubts, since so far birth control in some countries has not led to the desired results.

Fourth scenario connected directly with our planet. To save herself, she can weaken the Earth's magnetic field. In this case, we will be defenseless against the solar plasma. It will burn everything, but nature will quickly recover, but humanity will be almost completely destroyed. This scenario is similar to nuclear war, only the Earth itself is the initiator here.

There are also fifth scenario. In this case, the biosphere will begin to give people signals at a subconscious level. They will act on the mechanisms responsible for fertility, and humanity will begin to respond to them. This will be expressed in a natural decrease in population growth, as occurs in many species of animals. But here it should be understood that a person has long been cut off from nature, and therefore may not perceive the corresponding signals entering the subconscious. Who knows, maybe they are already on the way, but only a few react to them.

In a word, the situation is not very rosy. We learned how many people can live on Earth, and also realized that the current population has long overcome all norms. It remains to wait further development events, as this situation cannot last forever. Let's hope that humanity will painlessly get out of such a sensitive and critical situation..

Every moment on Earth someone dies or is born. Therefore, it is impossible to say for sure that he lives right now, at this moment. Although the approximate number is established. They even created a script - a special robot for calculating the number of people on Earth at the moment. When asked how many people live on planet Earth as of January 2014, he answers - 7.189 billion. This is confirmed by the calculations of modern statistics.

As soon as a person learned to think, calculate and write, he wanted to count the population and find out how many people there are on Earth. Even in the era of the development of civilization, the first calculations were carried out. The powers that be did this to control the payment of taxes. The population was counted in the city, county, country. The census developed slowly and difficultly. Demographers say there were a billion people on earth as early as the 19th century. Again, the number is approximate. All population figures are based on mathematical calculations and assumptions. Over the past two centuries, the increase has amounted to 600%, that is, more than 6 billion. However, these figures relate to civilized countries, where the birth rate is taken into account. How many people on Earth are real, it's hard to say.

The first more or less accurate data were obtained in the 1960s, after being carried out by most countries. Today this figure has exceeded 7 billion. How is it received? By adding the population different countries. However, does each state take full responsibility for the census? For example, a country like Ukraine, which seems to be European and civilized, has already postponed the census three times due to lack of funds. Statisticians believe that only a small percentage falls on the unrecorded population. For want of a better one, we have to agree.

The question of how many people were born on Earth in the entire history of mankind was named the most interesting of all proposed by the popular Quest magazine in 2008. Many scientists worked on it, and the numbers were very different. Peter Grunwald, a specialist at the Center for Mathematics and Computer Science in the Netherlands, counted 107 billion, and demographer Karl Haub from the Population Reference Bureau (PRB - Population Reference Bureau) gives a figure of 108 billion people. The run is not very big. If we accept these data, then the inhabitants of the planet now make up only 6% of those who lived before. The calculation was carried out from 50,000 BC. e., the moment of the appearance of homo sapiens. By the 1st year. e. There are already 300 million people around the world. In 1650, the population reached half a billion, and in the 19th century, a billion.

How many people on Earth now, we already know. Therefore, in the entire history of existence, the total population of the Earth is 108 billion people. It turns out that the elegant saying of the ancient Romans about those who have gone to another world is still true: "He went to the majority."

Scientists suggest that in 2025 there will already be more than 8 billion people on Earth, and in 2050 - 9.7 billion. has not exhausted its resources. According to S.P. Kapitsa, our planet is capable of feeding both 15 and 25 billion people. When the demographic transition is over, it will be able to balance well below the critical level.

Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences S. KAPITSA (Institute for Physical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences).

Of all the global problems that concern mankind, the issue of world population growth seems to be one of the main ones. The population size expresses the total result of all the economic, social and cultural activities of a person that make up his history. Demography is capable of providing only quantitative data, without describing the patterns of human development. Sergei Petrovich Kapitsa tried to fill this gap by creating a mathematical model of the world demographic process. The model shows that the rate of population growth does not depend on external conditions, explains the causes of the current sharp surge in the birth rate ("demographic transition"), and predicts that in the near future the population of the Earth will stop growing, stopping at about 14 billion people. On February 14, Sergei Petrovich turned 70 years old. The editors of the journal congratulate their author on his jubilee and wish him many years of fruitful work.

This is how the world population grew according to demographic data (1) and the theoretical model (2), starting from 1600 BC (R. Kh.).

World population growth from 1750 to 2150, averaged over decades: 1 - developing countries, 2 - developed countries.

Different scenarios of human development predict the nature of population growth in different ways.

The growth of the world's population from the origin of man to the foreseeable future, according to demographers.

Demographers predict that after the year 2000 the age composition of the world's population will begin to undergo dramatic changes. The number of people under the age of 14 will fall (1), and those over 65 will grow (2), and by the end of the next century, our planet will "age" a lot.

Human development on a logarithmic time scale.

History has always described the past as a chain of events and processes in which we were primarily interested in what exactly happened, the qualitative side of the matter, and quantitative characteristics were of secondary importance. It was so, first of all, because the accumulation of facts and concepts must precede their quantitative characteristics. However, sooner or later they must penetrate history, and not as an illustration of this or that event, but as a way of a deeper understanding of the historical process. To do this, it is necessary to begin to consider history as a process of system development.

In recent decades, this so-called systemic approach has become widespread. It was developed first in physics to describe the behavior of systems of many particles, then it came to chemistry and biology, and later it began to be used to study social and economic phenomena. However, it was believed that it was not suitable for describing the development of mankind, because only by understanding the mechanism of demographic processes well, it is possible to explain them, measure their characteristics and move from the particular to the general.

But it was for humanity as a whole that such an approach turned out to be unproductive. It was not clear what was to be measured, and there were no clear quantitative data. Already in the economy, fundamental difficulties arose in the quantitative comparison of heterogeneous concepts, such as labor and goods, raw materials and information, and in history only the passage of time in the past is clearly traced.

However, there is one parameter that is as universal as time and applies to all eras - population. In life, we refer to it very often. Arriving in another city, we are interested in how many inhabitants there are, and having gathered in an unfamiliar country, we will certainly find out what its population is. In the 1930s, there were two billion people on the planet, but now there are almost six billion of us. But we rarely remember the population in the historical past. So, in 1700, there were ten times fewer people on Earth than today, and how many of them lived then in Russia, hardly anyone will immediately answer, although almost everyone knows the years of the reign of Peter I.

But just the size of the population is closely connected with all the economic, social and cultural activities of mankind, which make up its history. Thus, quantitative demographic data provide a universal key to understanding the past. They make it possible to find an answer, albeit a limited one, to a clearly posed question about the mechanism of human development as a whole.

In a world where 21 people are born and 18 die every second, the world's population is increasing by 250,000 people every day, almost all of this increase in developing countries. The growth rate is so high - approaching ninety million a year - that it has come to be seen as a population explosion that could shake the planet. It is the continuous increase in the world's population that requires ever-increasing production of food and energy, the consumption of mineral resources and leads to ever-increasing pressure on the planet's biosphere. The image of rampant population growth, if naively extrapolated into the future, leads to disturbing predictions and even apocalyptic scenarios for the global future of mankind. However, it is clear that development in the foreseeable future - and this is precisely what is of greatest interest - can only be determined by correctly describing the past of mankind.

Humanity is currently undergoing a so-called demographic transition. This phenomenon consists in a sharp increase in the rate of population growth, then its equally rapid decrease and in the stabilization of the population. The demographic transition is accompanied by the growth of productive forces, the movement of significant masses of the population from villages to cities, and a sharp change in the age composition of the population. In today's interconnected and interdependent world, it will end in less than a hundred years and will pass much faster than in Europe, where a similar process began at the end of the 18th century. Now the transition covers most of the world's population, it has already ended in the so-called developed countries and now it is only in developing countries.

WORLD POPULATION AS A SYSTEM

To consider the population of the world as a system, as a single closed object, which is sufficient to characterize the number of people at a given moment, was considered impossible for a long time. Many demographers saw in humanity only the sum of the population of all countries, which does not have the meaning of an objective dynamic characteristic.

The key concept for a system is interaction. But it is the modern world, with its migration flows, transport, information and trade links that unite everyone into one whole, that can be considered as an interacting system. This approach is also true in relation to the past: even when there were much fewer people and the world was largely divided, individual regions still slowly but surely interacted, remaining a system.

Applying the concept of a system, it is necessary to determine what processes and at what speed occur in it. Thus, the emergence of ethnic groups and the separation of dialects and languages ​​occur in their own time scale. The division of mankind into races took longer, and the formation of a global demographic system takes even longer. Finally, the processes of biological evolution, determined by the genetic nature of man, are the slowest. There are reasons to assert that over a million years man has changed little biologically, and the main development and self-organization of mankind took place in the social and technological sphere.

Almost all parts of the Earth that are convenient for this are the habitat of mankind. In terms of numbers, we are five orders of magnitude ahead of all animals comparable to us in terms of size and nutrition (except, perhaps, only domestic animals, the number of which is artificially maintained). Mankind long ago created its own environment and separated from the rest of the biosphere. But now, when human activity has acquired a global scale, the question of its impact on nature has become very acute. That is why it is very important to understand what factors determine the growth in the number of people on the planet.

MATHEMATICAL MODEL OF POPULATION GROWTH

The creation of a model does not consist in fitting formulas to certain numerical data, but in the search for mathematical images that express the behavior of the system and correspond to the task. This process of consistent model building is best developed in theoretical physics, which describes reality as a solution to systems of certain equations (see "Science and Life" Nos. 2, 3, 1997).

The very possibility of using the methods of theoretical physics to build a demographic model that can grow to the status of a theory seems far from obvious, rather even incredible. Nevertheless, for the population of the Earth, when many different factors and circumstances interact, such an approach is quite feasible precisely because of the complexity of the system. Random deviations in space and time will be averaged, and the main patterns will become visible, on which the dynamics of world population growth objectively depends.

We will characterize the population of the world at time T by the number of people N. We will consider the growth process over a significant time interval - a very large number of generations, so as not to take into account either the life expectancy of a person or the distribution of people by age and sex. Under such conditions, it can be assumed that population growth is self-similar (or, as they say, self-similar), that is, according to the same law at different time scales and the number of people. And this means that the relative growth rate of the number of people on the planet is constant and can be described not by the exponent that underlies so many models, but only by a power law.

The extent to which exponential growth is inapplicable can be seen from the following example. Let's assume that humanity doubled in the past in the same 40 years as it does today. Let us estimate when such a process could begin. To do this, we express the world population as a power of two: 5.7. 10 9 ~10 32 . Then 32 generations, or 40x32 = 1280 years ago, in the 7th century, two hundred years before the baptism of Russia, we all could have descended from Adam and Eve! Even if the doubling time is increased tenfold, this point will be pushed back to the beginning of the Neolithic, when in reality there lived about 10 million people.

There is, however, a formula that describes with surprising accuracy the growth of the Earth's population over hundreds and even many thousands of years and has the necessary - power - form:

This expression was obtained by processing data over many centuries by a number of researchers (Mackendrick, Forster, Horner), who saw in it only an empirical dependence, deep meaning not having. The same formula was obtained independently by the author of this article, but he considered it as a physically and mathematically meaningful description of the process of self-similar development. It occurs according to the hyperbolic law of evolution, called the blow-up regime. Such phenomena are typical for "explosive" behavior of systems and have been studied in detail in modern research on nonlinear dynamics.

Nevertheless, such formulas are fundamentally limited by the area of ​​applicability. First, the formula implies that the world's population will tend to infinity as we approach 2025, leading some to regard it as a doomsday date, an apocalyptic consequence of a population explosion. Secondly, an equally absurd result is obtained for the distant past, since at the creation of the Universe 20 billion years ago, ten people should have been present, undoubtedly discussing all the greatness of what is happening. Thus, this decision is limited both in the future and in the past, and it is fair to raise the question of the limits of its applicability.

The factor that was not taken into account is the time that characterizes a person's life - his reproductive ability and life expectancy. This factor manifests itself when passing through a demographic transition - a process characteristic of all populations, clearly visible both in the examples of individual countries and the whole world.

If we introduce the time τ characteristic of human life into the model, the features of population growth both in the past and in the present are excluded. The growth process begins at T 0 = 4.4 million years ago and continues beyond the critical date T 1 into the foreseeable future. It is expressed by the formula

describing the era before the demographic transition and the transition itself. The value of the new constants is obtained by comparing modern demographic data with the calculation:

This formula goes into the original expression (1) in the past, and all solutions describe the growth of mankind over three epochs. In the first - epoch A, lasting 2.8 million years - there is a linear growth, then passing into the hyperbolic growth of epoch B, which ends after 1965 with a demographic transition. After the demographic transition, the growth in numbers over the life of a generation becomes comparable to the world's population itself. And the population will begin to strive towards the asymptotically stabilized regime of epoch C, that is, steadily approaching the limit of 14 billion. This is 2.5 times more than at present.

Due to the introduction of the characteristic time, the critical year of the break T 1 is shifted from 2025 to 2007. The very value of τ= 42 years well reflects some average characteristic of a person's life, although it is obtained from the processing of demographic data, and not taken from life.

The main and only dynamic characteristic of the system that determines its development is the dimensionless constant K = 67,000. It serves as an internal scale for the size of a group of people and determines the collective nature of the interaction that describes growth. Numbers of this order determine optimal size city ​​or urban area and the abundance of a sustainable natural species.

The growth rate for time t in epoch B turns out to be equal to N 2 /K 2 , where the meaning of the parameter K is clearly visible: it determines the growth rate per generation as a result of pairwise interaction of groups of K people. This simplest non-linear expression describes collective relationships, summing up all the processes and elementary interactions that take place in society. It only applies to all of humanity. As is well known from algebra, the square of a sum is always greater than the sum of squares; that is why it is impossible to sum up growth factors for individual regions or countries.

The meaning of the law is that development is self-accelerating, and each next step uses all the experience previously accumulated by mankind, which plays the main role in this process. The long childhood of a person, mastery of speech, training, education and upbringing to a large extent determine the only way of development and self-organization that is specific to people. It can be thought that it is not the rate of reproduction, but namely the cumulative experience, interaction, dissemination and transmission from generation to generation of knowledge, customs and culture that qualitatively distinguish the evolution of mankind and determine the rate of population growth. This interaction should be seen as intrinsic property dynamic system. Therefore, the time has come to abandon once and for all the representation of social phenomena in the form of a simple sum of elementary cause-and-effect relationships, which, in principle, is not capable of describing the behavior of complex systems over long periods of time and over a large space.

Based on the concepts of theory, it is easy to determine the limit to which the human population is striving for the foreseeable future: 14 billion people, and the time of the beginning of growth in epoch A: 4.4 million years ago. You can also evaluate total number people who have ever lived on Earth: P=2K 2 lnK=100 billion people.

In this estimate, the average life expectancy of a person is considered equal to τ/2 = 21 years, as is customary among demographers and anthropologists, who obtained values ​​for P from 80 to 150 billion people. Significantly, the entire growth pattern is best described on a double logarithmic scale. It's not just a matter of convenience when it comes to representing the behavior of quantities that change by ten orders of magnitude, there is a much deeper meaning here. On a double logarithmic scale, all power laws - the laws of self-similar development - look like straight lines, showing that the relative growth rate remains constant at all times. This allows us to take a fresh look at the pace of development and periodization of the entire history of mankind.

COMPARISON WITH ANTHROPOLOGY AND DEMOGRAPHY

Comparison of the model with the data of paleoanthropology and paleodemography will make it possible to describe the development of mankind over a gigantic period of time. The initial epoch of linear growth A begins 4.4 million years ago and lasts Kτ = 2.8 million years. Thus, the model in general terms describes the initial stage of human growth, which can be identified with the era of separation of hominids from hominoids, which began 4.5 million years ago. By the end of epoch A, Homo habilis ("handy man") appeared, and its number increased to 100 thousand people.

To check the calculations, it was necessary to compare the calculated values ​​​​with those already known. The famous French archaeologist and anthropologist Yves Coppens could have had such information. I came to him in the old building of the Collège de France on the Rue d'Ecole in the Latin Quarter of Paris and asked:

Professor, how many people lived on Earth 1.6 million years ago?

One hundred thousand, - the answer immediately followed, which completely amazed me, making me think that the researcher had calculated this figure. However, Coppens immediately dismissed this suggestion, saying that he was not a theorist, but a field researcher. And his assessment is based on the fact that at that time in Africa there were about a thousand sites in which large families lived - about a hundred people each. This figure fixed a significant moment in the history of mankind, when a "handy man" appeared in the Lower Paleolithic.

Epoch B of hyperbolic growth spans the Paleolithic, Neolithic, and historical period. During this most important period of time lasting 1.6 million years, the number of people has once again increased by K times. By the time of the demographic transition, which can be attributed to 1965, the estimated population of the Earth was already 3.5 billion.

During the Stone Age, mankind spread throughout the globe. At the time of the Pleistocene, the climate changed dramatically, up to five glaciations passed, and the level of the World Ocean changed by a hundred meters. The geography of the Earth was redrawn, the continents and islands were connected and again diverged, man occupied more and more new territories. Its numbers grew slowly at first, but then with increasing speed.

From the concept of the model it follows that when the links between individual groups of the population and the bulk of humanity were interrupted for a long time, development slowed down in them. Anthropology is well aware that the isolation of small groups leads to a slowdown in their evolution: even today you can find communities that are at the Neolithic and even Paleolithic stage of development. But in the Eurasian space, through which tribes roamed and peoples migrated, ethnic groups and languages ​​were formed, there was a systematic and unchanging growth. At a certain stage, the interaction went along the Steppe Road, and later the Great Silk Road, connecting China, Europe and India, acquired the greatest importance. Since antiquity, intensive intercontinental ties have been going along it, world religions and new technologies have spread.

Data on the world's population over the entire range of times fit the proposed model quite well, but as we move into the past, the accuracy of the estimate decreases. So, already for the time of the Nativity of Christ, paleodemographers give figures for the world population from 100 to 250 million people, and from the calculation, about 100 million should be expected.

Considering how close these estimates are, they should be considered quite satisfactory even up to the very beginning of the appearance of mankind. This is all the more surprising since the calculation implies the constancy of growth constants, which are determined on the basis of modern data, but nevertheless apply to the distant past. This means that the model correctly captures the main features of world population growth.

It will be instructive to compare model calculations with demographic forecasts for the near future. The mathematical model indicates an asymptotic transition to the limit of 14 billion, with 90% of the limit - 12.5 billion - to be expected by 2135. And according to the optimal scenario of the UN, the population of the Earth by this time will reach a constant limit of 11,600 million. Note that over the past decades, demographic forecasts have been repeatedly revised upwards. In the latest study, the calculated human population until 2100 and the estimates made converged and, in fact, overlapped.

DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION

Let us turn to the phenomenon of the demographic transition as a very special period that requires separate consideration. The duration of the transition is only 2τ = 84 years, but during this time, which is 1/50,000 of the entire history, there will be a fundamental change in the nature of human development. This time will outlive 1/10 of all people who have ever lived on Earth. The sharpness of the transition is largely due to the synchronization of development processes, to the strong interaction that is observed today in the world demographic system.

It is the "shock", aggravated nature of the transition, with time less than the average life expectancy of 70 years, that leads to a violation of the value and ethical ideas developed over the millennia of our history. Today, this is seen as the reason for the collapse of society, the growing disorder of life and the reasons for the stress so characteristic of our time.

With the demographic transition, the ratio between the younger and older generations changes radically. From the point of view of a systematic approach and statistical physics, the transition resembles a phase transformation, which should be associated with a change in the age distribution of the population.

TRANSFORMATION OF DEVELOPMENT RATES OVER TIME

One more important conclusion can be drawn from the developed ideas: the scale of historical time changes with the growth of mankind. Yes, history ancient egypt covers three millennia and ended 2700 years ago. The decline of the Roman Empire lasted 1.5 thousand years, while the current empires were created over centuries and disintegrated over decades. This change in the scale of time by hundreds and thousands of times clearly shows the scale invariance of the historical process, its self-similarity. On a logarithmic scale, each next cycle is shorter than the previous one by e = 2.72 times and leads to an increase in the number by the same factor. In each of lnK = 11 periods of epoch B, 2K 2 = 9 billion people lived, while the duration of the cycles varied from 1 million to 42 years.

N. D. Kondratiev first drew attention to such a periodicity of major socio-technological cycles in the history of modern times in 1928, and since then such cycles have been associated with his name. However, this periodicity is clearly realized only in the logarithmic representation of development and already covers the entire history of mankind. The stretching of time is clearly visible as we move away from the critical date - 2007. So, a hundred years ago, in 1900, the population growth rate ∆N/N = 1% per year, 100 thousand years ago it was 0.001%. And at the beginning of the Paleolithic, 1.6 million years ago, a noticeable increase - by 150 thousand people (today so much is added in half a day) - could occur only in a million years.

It was in the Paleolithic that self-accelerated development began, which has continued unchanged for a million years since then. By the beginning of the Neolithic, 10-12 thousand years ago, the growth rate was already 10 thousand times greater than at the beginning of the Stone Age, and the world population was 10-15 million. There is no Neolithic revolution as a leap within the framework of the model, since it describes only an average picture of development, which, on average for mankind, proceeded quite smoothly. Let us pay attention to the fact that by this time half of all people who have ever lived managed to live, and on a logarithmic scale, half of the time from T 0 to T 1 has passed. Thus, in a sense, the past of mankind is much closer than we think. After 2007, the population stabilizes, and in the future the historical course of time may again become more and more extended.

It is interesting to note that recently the Russian historian I.M. Dyakonov in his review "The Ways of History. ancient man to the present day "clearly pointed out the exponential reduction in the duration of historical periods as we approach our time. The historian's thoughts fully correspond to our model, where these same conclusions are simply clothed in a different - mathematical - form. This example shows how closely they touch, even intersect , the vision of the traditional humanist and images belonging to the exact sciences.

IMPACT OF RESOURCES AND THE ENVIRONMENT ON POPULATION GROWTH

The Human Development Model predicts that the population growth limit is not affected by external factors- Environment and availability of resources. It is determined only by internal factors that have been invariably operating for a million years. Indeed, mankind as a whole has always had sufficient resources, which man mastered by settling on the Earth and increasing the efficiency of production. When contacts ceased, there were no resources and free space left, local development ended, but the overall growth was steady. Today, in developed countries, 3-4 percent of the population can feed the entire country. According to experts international organization food, there are currently and in the foreseeable future there will be enough reserves on the planet to feed 20-25 billion people. This will allow humanity to safely pass the demographic transition, in which the population will increase by only 2.5 times. Thus, the limit of population growth should be sought not in the global lack of resources, but in the laws of human development, which can be formulated as the principle of the demographic imperative, as a consequence of the law of population growth inherent in humanity itself. This conclusion requires a deep comprehensive discussion and is very significant, since the long-term strategy of mankind is connected with it.

Resources, however, are extremely unevenly distributed across the planet. In overpopulated cities and countries, they are already exhausted or close to exhaustion. Argentina, for example, has an area of ​​only 30% less than India - the country of the most ancient civilization, the population of which is 30 times larger, and it lives very poorly. But Argentina, whose modern development began 200 years ago, could, according to experts, feed the whole world.

But within the framework of the approach under consideration, there is no difference between developed and developing countries. They all equally belong to one system of humanity and are simply in different stages demographic transition. Moreover, now, primarily due to the exchange of information, the development of the so-called third world countries is twice as fast as it was in the developed countries, just as younger brothers often develop faster than their elders, borrowing his experience.

In the foreseeable future, after the demographic transition, the question of the criteria for the development of mankind will arise. If in the past the basis was quantitative growth, then after the stabilization of the number it will have to be the quality of the population. A change in the age structure will lead to a deep restructuring of the hierarchy of values, a greater burden on health care, social protection and education systems. These fundamental changes in the value orientations of society will undoubtedly constitute the main problem in the near future, at a new stage in the evolution of mankind.

DEVELOPMENT SUSTAINABILITY

The sustainability of human development in the process of growth and especially during the transition period is of exceptional importance from a historical and social point of view. However, at the first stage of the demographic transition, as calculation shows, stability is minimal, and at this moment there is a historically sudden emergence of a young and active generation. This was the case in Europe in the 19th century, where the demographic prerequisites for rapid economic growth and powerful waves of emigration arose, which led to the settlement of the New World, Siberia and Australia. But they failed to sufficiently stabilize the process of world development and prevent the crisis that led to world wars.

On the eve of the First World War, Europe was developing at an unprecedented and unsurpassed pace. The economies of Germany and Russia grew by more than 10% per year. The flourishing of science and the arts of that time predetermined the entire intellectual life of the twentieth century. But the "Belle Epoque", this wonderful time of the heyday of Europe, was cut short by a fatal shot in Sarajevo.

The world wars resulted in the death of about 100 million people - 5% of the world's population. From the "black death" - a terrible plague epidemic - in the XIV century, entire countries died out. But even then, humanity always made up for losses very quickly and, remarkably, returned to its former stable growth trajectory.

For the time being, however, possible sustainability of growth may be lost as the demographic transition of emerging countries goes twice as fast as in Europe and reach ten times more people. Comparing the dynamics of population growth in Europe and Asia, one can see that Europe will forever become a small outskirts, and the center of development will move to the Asia-Pacific region in the very near future. Only considering the speed of its development, one can understand in what kind of world our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will live. The uneven population of territories on the borders of states and their economic inequality can also threaten global security. The expanses of Siberia, for example, are now losing population, while the northern provinces of China are rapidly populating. There is constant northward migration across the US-Mexico border, and a similar process could take place for Indonesia's 200 million people north of vast Australia, where only 18 million live.

Rapidly growing uneven development can cause a complete loss of growth stability and, as a result, lead to armed conflicts. It is impossible in principle to predict the course of events, but it is not only possible, but necessary, to indicate their probability. Today, the world community faces an important task: to preserve peace in an era of drastic changes and prevent local conflicts from flaring up into a global military conflagration similar to those that broke out in Europe in the early and middle of the 20th century. Without global sustainability it is impossible to solve any other problems, no matter how significant they may seem. Therefore, their discussion, along with issues of military, economic and environmental security, should include, and not in the last place, the demographic factor, taking into account its quantitative, qualitative and ethnic aspects.

DEMOGRAPHIC SITUATION IN RUSSIA

As already mentioned, the fate of a single country cannot be considered by methods developed to describe the whole of mankind. However, developed ideas allow us to consider each individual country as part of the whole. This was even more true for Soviet Union and it is true now for Russia (see "Science and Life" No. ).

Due to the size and multinational composition, the diversity of geographical conditions, historical development paths and a closed economy, the regional processes that took place in the Union largely reflected and modeled global phenomena. At present, the demographic transition is being completed in Russia; population growth stops, its number stabilizes. However, this age-old process is superimposed by the events of the last ten years, and in the first place - the economic crisis. It has led to profound upheavals and has resulted in a reduction in life expectancy, especially for men, which has fallen below 60 years.

With the birth rate, according to demographers, nothing so catastrophic is happening. Its systematic decline is quite natural and typical for all modern developed countries. Therefore, Russia will continue to live in conditions of low birth rates, in which population migration has begun to play an important role. If before 1970 there was mainly emigration from Russia, now up to 800 thousand people annually arrive in the country. Migration directly affects the demographic situation in the country and contributes to some compensation for losses.

Reducing the number of young citizens will require a transition to a professional army and an end to compulsory conscription, a very wasteful use of human resources. Russia will face this situation by the beginning of the next century, by which time the reform of the army should lead to new principles for the formation of the armed forces. Reducing the share of unskilled labor will increase the requirements for the quality of education, for the early choice of professional orientation, and will create incentives for creative growth.

In some regions of Russia, and especially in the adjacent countries of Central Asia, population growth continues, due to the first stage of the demographic transition. It is accompanied by characteristic phenomena: an influx of population into cities, a growing mass of restless youth, an imbalance in the development of the country and, as a result, an increasing instability of society. It is very important for Russia to understand that these processes are of a fundamental nature and will drag on for a very long time. On the one hand, they are connected not only with global, but also with internal, specific to our history, circumstances. If we can and must cope with the latter, then global processes are beyond our influence: it needs a global political will, which is not yet available. On the other hand, it is in the destinies of our country that one can see the complex nature of the demographic revolution taking place in the world - a rapid transition, unique in its dynamics, which ends a million years of the unremitting quantitative growth of mankind.

CONCLUSION AND CONCLUSIONS

The proposed model makes it possible to cover a huge range of time and a range of phenomena, which, in essence, includes the entire history of mankind. It is not applicable to individual regions and countries, but it shows that the course of world development affects each country, each demographic subsystem, as part of the whole. The model gives only a general, macroscopic description of the phenomena and cannot claim to explain the mechanisms that lead to population growth. The validity of the modeling principles should be seen not only and not so much in how closely the calculation matches the observed data, but in the validity of the underlying assumptions and in the successful application of the methods of nonlinear mechanics to the analysis of population growth.

The theory has established a boundary from which time should be counted, and a time scale that stretches as one moves away into the past, responding to the intuitive ideas of anthropologists and historians about the periodization of development and giving them a quantitative meaning.

An analysis of the theoretical equation shows that population growth has always followed a quadratic law, and now humanity is undergoing an unprecedented change in the paradigm of development. The end of an extremely vast era is coming, and the time of the transition, of which we have become witnesses and participants, is very compressed.

The model paradoxically indicates that throughout history, the development of mankind has depended not on external parameters, but on the internal properties of the system. This circumstance made it possible to reasonably refute the principle of Malthus, who argued that it is resources that determine the rate and limit of population growth. Therefore, it should be considered expedient to develop interdisciplinary complex studies of demographic and related problems, in which mathematical modeling should participate together with other methods.

Mathematical models are not only a means for a quantitative description of phenomena. They should be seen as a source of images and analogies capable of expanding the range of ideas to which the strict concepts of the exact sciences cannot be applied. First of all, this applies to demography, since the number of people as a characteristic of a community has a clear and universal meaning. Thus, the demographic problem should be seen as a new object for the theoretical studies of physicists and mathematicians.

If the ideas developed above help to offer a certain development perspective common to mankind, a picture suitable for anthropology and demography, sociology and history, and allows doctors and politicians to see the prerequisites for the current transition period as a source of stress for an individual and a critical state for the entire world community, the author will consider the experience of his interdisciplinary research justified.

Literature

Kapitsa S.P. Phenomenological theory of the growth of the Earth's population. "Successes in Physical Sciences", vol. 166, no. 1, 1996.

Kapitsa S. P., Kurdyumov S. P., Malinetsky G. G. The world of the future. Moscow: Nauka, 1997.

King A. and Schneider A. The First Global Revolution. Moscow: Progress, 1992.

How many people live on Earth? Probably, every person sometimes asked a similar question. Population growth on our planet has always occurred: climate change, drought, famine, predators, the struggle between tribes only slowed down the demographic process.

6.7 billion people - this is the figure indicating how many people live on Earth today, which is 6% of the total population (107 billion) that has ever walked on its surface. Of course, this number is approximate, since it is difficult to imagine what happened in ancient times, and even more so to calculate.

How many people can "fit" on Earth

If we imagine how many people live on Earth, then we can understand that with the growth of the population, the needs of the population grow, and the uncontrollability of the demographic process can lead to an environmental catastrophe: epidemics, hunger, an increase in crime, poverty.

Many people often ask the question: how many people can the Earth withstand? More than lives today. But the planet is not dimensionless, nor is its patience and endurance. The German Foundation for the Population of the Earth has calculated that every minute its number increases by 155 people. In the total annual amount, this can be represented as the appearance of another Germany. How many people on Earth can "fit" depends on their consumption strategic reserves planets, in which, of course, the Americans are leading. If all inhabitants consumed the resources of the Earth with the same appetite, then the limit of ecological endurance would remain in the distant past. With the thrifty lifestyle of the Brazilian Indians, the planet could feed 30 billion people.

Scientists theoretically tried to weigh how many people on Earth in weight units, and found out that obesity, which affects half of humanity, harms not only a particular person who consumes a large amount of food, but also the planet as a whole, increasing its burden.

Examples of population density

Surprisingly, 70% of the population is crowded into 7% of the entire territory of the Earth. In Moscow alone, there are about 13,000 people per square kilometer, while Canada, the whole country, is empty. Conventionally, it can even be called deserted, because in certain areas there are about 100 square meters for every Canadian. kilometers. Thus, the uneven distribution of people on the planet is an extremely important issue that interests the minds of many ordinary people.

The most populous country is China, whose government has already begun to take measures to slow down the process of overpopulation of the country. In second place are India and the United States, which are inactive in the demographic issue. It is India, according to UN forecasts, that in the near future will become the leader in population growth, the number of which in 50 years will reach 1.5 billion people on Earth.

How long does such a rapid demographic progress last, which, in addition to the detrimental impact on the ecosystem, breaks the fate of people, forcing them to leave their inhabited lands due to climate change, lack of water and food? Migration occurs due to the disturbance of the natural habitat. In 1996, the UN made an attempt to calculate how many people lived on Earth and how many people tried to leave the habitable lands. The results were shocking: the number of environmental migrants was 26 million; 137 million are going to leave their country.

Reasons for growing demographic growth

A number of studies have shown that the main population growth occurs in countries with a low standard of living.

To answer the question: how many people are on Earth now, you need to understand the reasons for the increased birth rate, especially in countries with a low standard of living:

• the biological law of the struggle for survival, implemented on a subconscious level and consisting in the opinion: the less chance of offspring, the higher the birth rate;
• continuation of the family, supported by economic considerations: the number of children in the family guarantees the number of planned working hands, on which the maintenance of the old age of disabled parents depends;
• socio-psychological features: customs, traditions, religious dogmas that have developed over the centuries, taking into account the economic and social characteristics of life at different stages of the development of society.

In poor countries, which are characterized by high infant mortality and short life expectancy, the birth rate is very high, so almost all families there have many children. The aid given annually to the poor to improve their standard of living, however paradoxical it may sound, only worsens it. That is, there is an impact not on the cause, but on the effect. In addition, poor countries that exist on subsidies from richer countries get used to them and stop any attempts to correct the situation by reducing the birth rate.

High standard of living - low birth rate

While uncontrolled reproduction is taking place in poor countries, developed countries are trying to cope with the problem of extinction, even using incentive and bonus systems. For example, in France, each child born is valued at $10,000. Russia pays parents $11,000, but under certain conditions. The leader in rewards for each child born ($13,000) is Italy, or rather its small town of Laviano, with a population of 2,000 inhabitants.

With a high degree of material well-being, the need for fertility decreases, the mortality rate falls, and the average life expectancy increases. As an example, we can consider Thailand, where in 25 years (from 1965 to 1990) the standard of living increased by almost 12 times, and the birth rate dropped sharply. Such dynamics is observed in most countries that have embarked on the path of industrialization.

With rising living standards and a well-developed pension system, children are no longer an economic priority for parents, as is the case in a traditional society. The number of families with two or more children is decreasing; Many parents need only one child. Moreover, the decision to have a baby is made deliberately, taking into account all the pros and cons, since individualistic claims to one's own happiness become predominant in modern society. Therefore, many couples remain childless, and this directly affects how many people live on Earth.

Forecasts

According to cautious forecasts, by 2075 the world's population will be about 9 billion people, after which this figure will decline.

The assumption of how many people on Earth will be due to the following reasons:

• The growth of the welfare of the population of developing countries.
• The rapidly growing level of education in developing countries, which dramatically increases the possibility of increasing the well-being of the population. The income of qualified specialists is much higher than that of uneducated people. A high level of education reduces the need for numerous offspring.
• The steady growth of urbanization (the movement of people from rural areas to the city) of all regions of the planet. The higher the percentage of urban residents, the higher the level of education of the population and, accordingly, its income. And this again affects the decrease in the birth rate.
• Growing mortality from epidemics and AIDS, which in 20 years infected more than 60 million people and claimed the lives of more than 22 million. Particularly affected by AIDS are residents of poor countries, who experience a catastrophic lack of a general medical culture, hospitals and medicines.

Natural selection?

The current size of the world's population is certainly large. Apparently, therefore, catastrophes began to occur on it more and more often, the number of which increased by 3 times compared to the last century. How many people lived on Earth? How many more will be born? How many people are on earth today? Perhaps the planet independently regulates the population and tries to restore the natural balance, freeing itself from its overabundance.

How many people have lived on earth or even been born at all is an intriguing question that can be justified, at least in part, on a scientific basis.
In order to evaluate and for it to be true, one must understand that childbirth, the survival of infants both at the beginning of the 20th century and now in the 21st century are not the same as they were in the past.

known to live now big number age people born in the middle of the last century.

However, the number of prehistoric people or how many people lived on earth with a high degree of probability can be determined.

How many people have ever lived on earth?

Any estimate of the total number of people who have ever been born will mainly depend on two factors: the length of time people have lived on Earth and the average size of the human population at different periods.

Fixing the time when humanity actually came into existence is not a simple matter. Various ancestors of Homo sapiens ( Homo sapiens) appear to have appeared at least 700,000 years ago with brains as large as 900 cm 3 . Of course, great apes walked the earth already several million years ago.

Growth rate of world population

According to the United Nations, the determinants for the consequences of demographic trends in modern Homo sapiens appeared around 50,000 BC. This long period of 50,000 years is the key to the question of how many people have lived on earth.

At the dawn of agriculture around 8000 BC, the world's population was somewhere in the order of 5 million. Slow population growth over a period from about 5 million to 300 million per year. 8000 years have been very low growth - only 0.0512 percent per year. In different regions, the number was different and deviated as a reaction to the vagaries of nature, military operations, changes in weather and climatic conditions, hunger.

In any case, people's lives were short and probably average life expectancy has been around 10 years for most of human history. An estimate of the average life expectancy in Iron Age France was, for example, according to scientists, only 10-12 years. Under these conditions, a birth rate of about 80 per 1000 people is determined just to survive. Today, a high birth rate of about 45-50 per 1000 population is observed only in a few countries in Africa and in a few countries in the Middle East with young populations.

The birth rate assumption significantly affects the estimate of the number of people how many people lived in total on earth. Infant mortality in early human history is thought to have been very high - perhaps 500 deaths per 1,000 births or even higher. Children were probably a liability among hunter-gatherer societies and the fact that this most likely led to the practice of infanticide. Under these circumstances, a disproportionate number of births would be required to support the growth of the world's population, and this would raise the estimated number of "how many people lived on earth."

Until the 1st century BC, the world may have consisted of 300 million people. According to one estimate of the population of the Roman Empire from Spain to Asia Minor - 45 million.

In 1650, the world's population had grown to about 500 million, a slight increase since the 1st century BC. The average annual growth rate of the earth's population in the Middle Ages was actually lower than BC. One of the reasons for this abnormally slow growth was the Black Death. This terrible plague was not limited to 14th century Europe. The epidemic began around 542 in Western Asia and spread slowly from there. It is believed that half of the Byzantine Empire was destroyed in the 6th century, with a total of 100 million deaths. Such large fluctuations in population greatly exacerbate the difficulty of estimating the number of people who have ever lived. Diseases did not lead to natural.

By 1800, however, the world's population had passed the 1 billion mark and has continued to rise since then to the current UN number on October 31, 2011 of 7 billion.

How many people lived on earth in total requires choosing a time interval from antiquity to the present and applying the number of births for each period.

What determines the growth rate of the number of people on Earth

One of the complicating factors in the number of people is the growth rate of the world's population. Do they rise from a certain level and then change dramatically in response to hunger and climate change? Or do they grow at a constant rate from one point in time to another? Scientists cannot know the answers to these questions, although paleontologists have produced a number of theories. To support this hypothesis, constant growth was assumed to apply to every period up to the present. Birth rates were set at 80 per 1000 per year BC. and 60 per 1000 in the Middle Ages. The birth rate then declined in the middle of the last century below 40 per 1,000 people and even lower in modern period. The truth is growing.

This semi-scientific approach gives an estimate of about 108 billion births at the dawn of the human race.

Obviously, the period 8000 BC. BC. is the key to the extent of the definition, but unfortunately little is known about that era. Some aspects, or perhaps almost all aspects, are conjectures and one approach to this question is not achievable. The conditions of the constant growth of the earth's population in an earlier period may underestimate the number at that time. And, of course, timing the evolutionary consequences of humanity on the planet about 50,000 years ago is also probabilistic.

Thus, the estimate is determined that about 6.5% of all people ever born are alive today. This is actually quite a large percentage with such an "old" Earth.