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Home » Charles C. Mann: How Will We Survive When the Population Hits 10 Billion? (Transcript)

Charles C. Mann: How Will We Survive When the Population Hits 10 Billion? (Transcript)

Charles C. Mann

Charles C. Mann is an American journalist and author, specializing in scientific topics. His book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus won the National Academies Communication Award for best book of the year.

Here is the full text of Charles’ TED Talk titled “How Will We Survive When the Population Hits 10 Billion?”

TRNSCRIPT:

How are we doing? No, no, no, by that, I meant, how are we, homo sapiens “we” doing as a species?

Now the typical way to answer that question is this. You choose some measure of human physical well-being: average longevity, average calories per day, average income, overall population, that sort of thing, and draw a graph of its value over time.

In almost every case, you get the same result. The line skitters along at a low level for millennia, then rockets up exponentially in the 19th and 20th century.

Or choose a measure of consumption: consumption of energy, consumption of fresh water, consumption of the world’s photosynthesis, and draw a graph of its value over time. In the same way, the line skitters along at a low level for millennia, then rockets up exponentially in the 19th and 20th century.

OUTBREAK

Biologists have a word for this: outbreak. An outbreak is when a population or species exceeds the bounds of natural selection. Natural selection ordinarily keeps populations and species within roughly defined limits.

Pests, parasites, lack of resources prevent them from expanding too much. But every now and then, a species escapes its bounds. Crown-of-thorns starfish in the Indian Ocean, zebra mussels in the Great Lakes, spruce budworm here in Canada. Populations explode, a hundredfold, a thousandfold, a millionfold.

So here’s a fundamental lesson from biology: outbreaks in nature don’t end well.

Put a couple of protozoa into a petri dish full of nutrient goo.