Wolfgang Korsus Dipl.-Ing. NT, Astrophysicist
Klingenberg 40
25451 Quickborn
Email: wkorsus@gmx.de
iPhone: 01625680456
FN: 04106 69295
Website: Wolfgang.korsus.net
Chapter 333/1
M………….e…………n…………s…………c………..h………e…….n
Please listen, the planet is talking to us:
„I HAVE PEOPLE and I am going into 2025 with 8,300,500,198 people“
(31.12.2024) The world population at the turn of the year 2024/2025 is estimated to be 8,155,500,198 people. That is „81,640,791 more people than exactly one year ago. As the 2024 data report published by the German Foundation for World Population (DSW) in mid-December shows, the natural growth rate is currently 0.9%. That could be twelve years from now, according to the United Nations.
I hear many researchers talking about a „success story“ of the only species of the genus Homo still alive today, more precisely Homo sapiens, they speak with numbers similar to those I have already mentioned in my articles: it began around 200,000 years ago in East Africa. In small groups, humans set out to discover, colonize, conquer and harness the planet‼ (I prefer to say today at this hour: the successor „man“ has turned the planet into a heap of rubble through his actions) ‼
It also goes on diligently, just look at Putin, Trump and the other world politics and rulers swamp…..complicated isn’t it ?
My last bald hairs are bristling as I vomit!
…..Ernst aside, earth history come here…75,000 years ago, humanity was almost „completely“ killed off, because the Toba supervolcano on Sumatra had erupted. This event would have been tantamount to extinction. But it had ☘ : Scientists assume that only between 1,000 and 10,000 people worldwide survived.
„Unfortunately“ …..denn the planet would have been spared billions of times the damage.
It continues…..About 12,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age and the beginning of the „Neolithic“ revolution, five million people were living on Earth. It is an unimaginably long time for us, namely around 60,000 years, that it took for as many people to exist on the entire earth as live today in the metropolis of Singapore alone (5.5 million). ….. I travel to the beginning of our era, 12,000 years later, when the Earth already had 300 million inhabitants, 60 million of whom lived in the Roman Empire alone. Now I find myself 500 years ago, when the world’s population had grown to 500 million, although almost 90 million Native Americans had been killed by the diseases and epidemics introduced by the European explorers and conquerors in the 16th century, not to mention murdered. The 17th century saw a real acceleration in population growth, as for the first time in human history the world’s population doubled within just „100 years“. In 1804, the 1 billion mark was exceeded. It is hard to believe, but in the 20th century the number of people on earth multiplied rapidly despite two world wars.
In my opinion, the main reasons for this are the improvements in healthcare, the Industrial Revolution, technological progress and the Green Revolution in the early 1960s. This is because the large-scale use of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides and the industrialization of food production achieved this.
The table illustrates this:
1804……1 billion
1927……2 billion
1960……3 billion
1974…….4 billion
1987…….5 billion
2011…….7 billion
2025…….8.25 billion
In October 2011, the UN said that the 7 billion mark had been reached. I would have preferred to say „basta“ now, but population growth continued. Today, the earth’s population is growing by 2.5 people every second: while 4.3 people are born, 1.8 die. In one day, the earth’s population increases by 216,000 people, which is equivalent to the population of a medium-sized city in Germany.
On December 31, 2015, there were 78 b more people living on the planet than at the beginning of the year. UN calculations and forecasts for future global population growth rates with an average projection of 2.5 children per woman show that around 8.5 billion people will be living on the planet in 2025. The 9 billion mark will be reached in 2035. By 2060, we are guaranteed to have passed the 10 billion mark, and by the end of the century, over 11 billion people will be sharing planet Earth.
: 2015 2030 2050
Asia 4397 4939 5324
Africa 1271 1685 2473
Amerika 987 1117 1221
Europa 742. 744 728
Ozeanien 40. 48 59
World 7330 8500 9730
The percentage population growth by 2050 will be highest in Africa. More than twice as many people will live there as today. In Europe, the population figures show something completely different; here they will shrink over this period. I always get a certain dizziness in my brain when I am fed with other demographic data, but the figures as I have presented them here – of course they could be calculated even more conservatively, but the result remains the same in principle – make it clear to everyone: it is getting uncomfortably tight on the planet! So the question arises: how many of us can the earth take? We are becoming more. That means people’s demands are increasing. But resources are shrinking. In a complex, interconnected world, the consequences of our actions have far-reaching, diverse effects, which in turn have an impact on the overall system, on the complex, natural processes in the ecosystem. Consisting of the atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, cryosphere and pedosphere. Put simply: more people need more water, more food, more energy, more living space, more mobility. And it goes on, because more food requires more arable land and therefore more fertilizer. Forests are cleared. Oceans are fished dry. Food and goods are produced globally, industrially and transported globally. This increases energy consumption. This results in higher emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Climate change is accelerating, temperatures are rising. The poles and glaciers are melting. The oceans are acidifying, sea levels are rising and deserts are expanding. This destroys additional fish stocks as well as land areas that were previously used as living space and arable land. Before I almost drive myself crazy with the amount of lists, I’ll boil it all down to a very short formula, which looks like this:
More people = more economy = increasing destruction of resources = fewer resources for even more people.
So, now I’m standing on a borderline and I know:
If we carry on like this, one earth is definitely not enough! It is with a very playful feeling that I venture into what I think is a self-produced thought experiment:
– EARTH WITHOUT PEOPLE -.
Come on, I’ll start: „What if the earth was actually without people from one day to the next?“ ….es is a thought experiment that not only shows how extremely humans have changed the planet in the last 10,000 years, but also how resilient nature is, which humans obviously no longer see themselves as part of, because otherwise they would treat nature differently, wouldn’t they?
I realize that there is no environmental catastrophe, no nuclear apocalypse, no meteorite impact, no, quite simply…..8.3 billion people leave their planet behind from one day to the next. Back. That’s too weak a word, I prefer to say: they leave the planet alone!
Please, dear reader, the how and why should not be of interest here.
…I continue….The sun rises, so it’s a Monday, the first day of Earth „without humans“. But the atmosphere is still enriched with billions of tons of CO ₂ and nitrogen oxides, many, many forests have been cleared and open-cast mining has torn huge gashes in the earth’s surface, whole „plastic islands“ the size of continents are floating in the oceans, but the earth’s metropolises are „deserted“ and therefore silent. No noise from cars and airplanes, no voices.
Office towers, houses, stores, supermarkets, cars, subways, streets and airplanes are deserted and abandoned. I was concerned with everything that touched and captured people…. let’s look at the animal world ⇛ ⇛ ⇛
Here, too, the situation is dramatic: masterless dogs, half a billion worldwide and about the same number of cats roaming the streets, forests and finally fields in search of food. In the next few hours, rows and rows of them, i.e. where they were being operated, also go out. As a result, there is no more electricity and the last lights go out. I count on…… traffic lights, pumps, sewage treatment plants and waterworks give up the ghost. This is how the complex machinery that has sustained our civilization comes to a standstill. The animals in the world’s zoos are left to fend for themselves, just like the 1.5 billion cows, 1 billion pigs and 20 billion chickens in the world’s industrialized meat factories. Most of them will therefore starve to death or be eaten by wolves, coyotes, bears and other predators. Lastly, I look at other animals that were „very“ dependent on humans, rats and cockroaches, they will soon suffer from a drastic lack of food, But dear readers, don’t laugh, the head lice will „die out“ completely.
Who thinks of the groundwater ???, it will no longer be pumped out, so the streets in many cities around the world will be flooded with masses of water, as will the subway tunnels. Countless other streets will be „reclaimed“ by grasses, shrubs and later trees. However, many cities will burn down, yes, before they are overgrown by nature’s greenery, because if a fire is started by a simple lightning strike, „no$ fire department will be able to put it out. ….. and wooden buildings that do not fall victim to fire will be destroyed by „termites and other insects“. After 100 years, they will all be gone.
Let’s take a look at the other transience, because they are doing the same.
Iron and steel structures from the pan on the stove to the car to bridges, high-voltage pylons, lanterns, high-rise buildings, wind turbines and even the Eiffel Tower will not be spared. Without long-term protective agents such as new coats of paint and rust inhibitors, they are exposed to the aggressive oxygen in the atmosphere. They oxidize and then collapse.
In the meantime, the animal and plant world has begun to recapture human spaces. Even the fact that core meltdowns and radioactive fallout have occurred in some nuclear reactors due to power failures and the resulting lack of cooling has not been able to stop them, as the exclusion zones around the Chernobyl reactor already show today.
Nature is moving inexorably towards its natural state. Roads, railroad lines, cities, spoil heaps and the eco-deserts from plantation farming and agriculture are all being reclaimed by plants, forests and animals. The oceans and the atmosphere will take the longest to completely renaturalize from man-made dirt. After 10,000 years, roughly, most traces of human existence will have been erased. To mention a non-occurring event: If alien space travellers were to visit the earth 100,000 years after the exit of Homo sapiens, they might hardly find any evidence of former civilizations, with the exception of the pyramids. However, if the „aliens“ were to examine the sediment layers more closely, they would discover that 100,000 years ago there was a mass extinction of animal and plant species on this planet. And that a species must have lived here for a few millennia, burying its dead and obviously using plastics as a preferred cultural asset; and crawling up the backside of a self-generated fantasy „called God“.