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I very much doubt that "we" have a way to provide the current "western" lifestyle to ten billion humans in a sustainable way. Because that's the "ideal" most humans on this planet are striving for...


The “way” is technology. Malthus famously saw exponential population growth outstripping linear growth in food production. Earth had an estimated carrying capacity of about two billion people as I recall, and it turns out that their estimates were pretty good by and large.

But, they didn’t account for technological takeoff, which allowed us to escape that linear production growth. Nearly half the nitrogen in your body came from the Haber–Bosch process.




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