Population of the planet today. World population
One of the most important world indicators is the population of the Earth, which, according to statistics, is constantly growing. Moreover, this growth in recent decades has already exceeded the calculated indicators, i.e. actually became uncontrollable.
At the same time, an increasing number of people tend to live in large cities, where there are more opportunities to find a good high-paying job, and the rural population is getting smaller. But will our planet be able to feed the growing human mass by leaps and bounds?
Population of the Earth: only facts
The total population on planet Earth is calculated as the total population of all states in the world. As a rule, the counting of the number of people is carried out by organizations associated with the UN. Based on the data available at the beginning of January 2016, the number of people living on our planet has already exceeded 7.3 billion.
According to experts, the planet was supposed to reach the bar of 7.5 billion people only by 2020. The lead was achieved mainly due to the rapid population growth in Africa and Southeast Asia.
If you look at the growth rates of the number of people in a historical context, it turns out that the population on the planet was equal to:
- 1 billion people - in 1820;
- 2 billion people - in 1927;
- 3 billion people - in 1960;
- 4 billion people - in 1974;
- 5 billion people - in 1987;
- 6 billion people - in 1999;
- 7 billion people - in 2012.
Obviously, population growth is accelerating every year, and very soon all of us will face the problem of overpopulation. According to calculations, reaching the number of 9 billion can be expected by 2050, but if the growth trend continues, this figure will be overcome 5-6 years earlier.
How many people can the planet feed?
It should not be forgotten that the area of our planet is not infinite, and the size of the fertile land on which it is possible to grow food products is even smaller. Already today, about 40% of the entire earth's land is used for agricultural production.
A radical increase in the area of arable land is possible only by reducing the area of pastures, which account for about 30 million square meters. km, while arable land occupies only 11 million square meters. km.
In most countries of the world, almost all plots of land that can be used for agriculture have already been plowed up for a long time. The only exceptions are the developing countries of the tropical and subtropical belt, where no more than a third of the suitable land is occupied by agriculture. However, in many of these countries, lands on which it is theoretically possible to conduct agriculture need either drainage or, conversely, the construction of irrigation facilities, which requires huge financial investments, too heavy for the economy of these states.
In addition, we must not forget about the ecology of the Earth. The green belt of the jungle and the forests of Siberia are not for nothing considered the lungs of our planet. An increase in the amount of carbon dioxide by at least 0.1%, which may follow the deforestation of some forests, will lead to a sharp rise in temperature throughout the planet.
This will cause massive melting of glaciers, which, in turn, will cause the sea level to rise and flood many low-lying land areas, which will be a real disaster for millions of people.
What factors influence the population indicator?
Numerous studies in the field of demography, health and social statistics show that "population explosions" occur in countries that effectively solve two main problems: ensuring public access to food and quality health care.
On the contrary, large-scale military actions, a sharp reduction in food production, or epidemics leading to mass deaths can reduce the level of the population or reduce its growth.
Attempts to artificially regulate the birth rate through the proliferation of contraceptive drugs and technologies have so far failed to show the expected effect in those countries that are most in need of birth control - in the poorest countries of Africa and Latin America.
At the same time, the population of the most prosperous continent of the planet - Europe - today shows an increase mainly due to migration, and the number of indigenous people there is steadily declining. The regulation of population growth is a problem that all of humanity will have to solve in the next two or three decades.
The population of the globe is the total number of people living on Earth and continuously renewing their numbers through the reproduction process. Today the planet is inhabited by more than seven billion people.
According to the calculations of a statistician from the Netherlands (Center for Informatics and Mathematics), Peter Grunwald, over the course of the entire history of human development, equal to more than 162 thousand years, more than one hundred and seven and a half billion people were born on Earth. Based on his calculations, it can be assumed that approximately 6% of all people living on the planet until our time are equal to 6.7 billion people living today (2008 data). Grunwald also admits that in 107.5 billion people born in all time on Earth, one cannot be completely sure, as practically nothing is known about the population size and the percentage of fertility in antiquity. At the same time, the researcher considers it incorrect that some scientists assert that more people live on Earth at the present time than during the entire period of the formation of human history.
Based on estimates of the earth's agro-natural potential, the planet is able to feed more than 80 billion people, and within the framework of history, the population could not exceed 100 million people. Before the Neolithic Revolution took place, the Earth could not feed more than 3 million people. The UN has set an approximate population limit equal to 8 billion, at the moment of reaching which, the population of each country will begin to promote the maximum possible birth control, as well as fertility equal to two births per one healthy woman.
Demographic projections
The most accurate forecast regarding the number of population was made by D. Huxley, a biologist from England. Based on his calculations, in 1964 he made a conclusion, which says that the population of the planet by the year 2000 reached the figure of 6 billion. The UN Foundation announced that by 1999 the number of people living on Earth had reached 6 billion, and in 2011 - seven billion. The UN predicts a significant decline in population from 2015 to 2050 for such countries: Russia, Germany, China, Poland, Romania, Thailand, Ukraine, Serbia, Japan, as well as for the countries of Western, Southeast and East Asia.
General growth trend
In the works of many scientists (H. Foerster, A.V. Korotaev, S.P. Kapitsa, M. Kremer) it is said that the increase in the earth's population over the past six thousand years followed the law of hyperbole, that is, the entire increase in human numbers was equal to proportional to its square. But, judging by the historical chronicle, the population of the planet throughout its history not only increased sharply, but also became smaller, which was facilitated by destructive wars, long-term conflicts, the latest developments in technology and their development. For example, the population of the Middle East has grown at a slow rate over the past 4,000 years (ten times slower than on the planet in general).
By the beginning of the 60s, the main rate of increase in the human population began to gradually slow down, and instead, another type of population increase, logistic, appeared. Pace natural growth the number of people inhabiting the world, since 1989, began to decline, which is a consequence of a sharp jump in demography.
The dynamics of the growth of the population of the entire globe in billions of people from 1000 to 2000 AD
At the beginning of our era, 300 million people already lived on the planet, by the end of the first millennium - 400 million, 500 million - 1500, one billion - 1820, 1.6 billion - 1900, three billion - 1960, 5.65 billion - 1993 ... At the end of October 1999, the number of people inhabiting the globe reached 6 billion people, 6.3 - in 2003, 6.5 - in 2006, 6.8 - in 2010, at the beginning of November 2011 - 7 billion. In 2015, the world's population should be over 7 billion people.
According to the UN forecast, the population of the planet by 2025 will be equal to 8.1 billion people, by 2050 - 9 billion, by 2100 - 10 billion.
Until the seventies, the number of people inhabiting the Earth grew, according to the law of hyperbole, today the growth rate has noticeably decreased. According to demographic studies, the population is still growing rapidly, despite the fact that its growth has already become half as much in comparison with the data of 1963 (at this time the peak value of the increase was reached).
Over the past 11 years (from 1994 to 2015), the number of elderly people has doubled, and there are significantly more of them all over the world than children under the age of 5 (according to the latest data provided by the UN).
For the first time, during the formation of all human history, the number of people living within the city, equaled the number living in villages and villages, which amounted to 3.4 billion. It is also predicted that the largest part of the population living on the globe will be urban dwellers, which is confirmed by the latest data.
By 2050, a larger number of the world's population will live in Asia, ¼ in Africa, 8.2% in Latin America, 7.4% in Europe, 4.7% in North America.
The largest state in terms of population is China, but, guided by UN forecasts, India will also reach overpopulation by 2025. Until the beginning of 1991, the USSR was in third place in terms of population, after it disintegrated, this place was taken by the United States (at the end of 2006, the population was equal to 300 million people), the fourth place was taken by Indonesia, the fifth by Brazil, and the sixth by Pakistan, seventh - Bangladesh, eighth - Nigeria, ninth - Russia.
According to CIA estimates, in mid-summer 2013, the number of people inhabiting the planet was 7,095,217,980.
Population of planet Earth in 2015
At the beginning of 2014, the UN commission made a statement, which spoke about the achievement of the earth's population of 7.2 billion people, and in 2015, the world's population is planned to be about 7.3 - 7.4 billion people.
Population of the countries of the world and Russia in 2015
№ | Country | Number | % of the total population |
1 | PRC | 1 369 723 215 | 19,013% |
2 | India | 1 263 419 215 | 17,537% |
3 | USA | 319 078 215 | 4,429% |
4 | Indonesia | 253 276 460 | 3,516% |
5 | Brazil | 203 724 463 | 2,828% |
6 | Pakistan | 188 546 242 | 2,617% |
7 | Nigeria | 178 981 119 | 2,484% |
8 | Bangladesh | 157 967 552 | 2,193% |
9 | Russia | 146 497 215 | 2,033% |
10 | Japan | 127 304 215 | 1,767% |
11 | Mexico | 119 977 418 | 1,665% |
12 | Philippines | 100 481 263 | 1,395% |
13 | Vietnam | 89 973 115 | 1,249% |
14 | Ethiopia | 88 217 206 | 1,225% |
15 | Egypt | 87 528 932 | 1,215% |
16 | Germany | 81 044 215 | 1,125% |
17 | Iran | 77 813 220 | 1,080% |
18 | Turkey | 76 932 079 | 1,068% |
19 | DR Congo | 69 624 333 | 0,966% |
20 | Thailand | 65 135 215 | 0,904% |
21 | Great Britain | 64 572 476 | 0,896% |
22 | France | 64 192 823 | 0,891% |
23 | Italy | 61 046 883 | 0,847% |
24 | South Africa | 54 266 215 | 0,753% |
25 | Myanmar | 53 983 173 | 0,749% |
26 | The Republic of Korea | 50 268 656 | 0,698% |
27 | Colombia | 48 104 215 | 0,668% |
28 | Tanzania | 47 686 001 | 0,662% |
29 | Spain | 46 771 975 | 0,649% |
30 | Kenya | 45 810 195 | 0,636% |
31 | Ukraine | 43 068 274 | 0,598% |
32 | Argentina | 42 933 715 | 0,596% |
33 | Algeria | 40 193 162 | 0,558% |
34 | Uganda | 39 108 839 | 0,543% |
35 | Sudan | 39 028 305 | 0,542% |
36 | Poland | 38 759 874 | 0,538% |
37 | Iraq | 35 032 976 | 0,486% |
38 | Canada | 34 525 215 | 0,479% |
39 | Morocco | 33 674 215 | 0,467% |
40 | Afghanistan | 31 544 733 | 0,438% |
41 | Uzbekistan | 30 752 815 | 0,427% |
42 | Peru | 30 739 359 | 0,427% |
43 | Venezuela | 30 591 215 | 0,425% |
44 | Malaysia | 29 841 390 | 0,414% |
45 | Saudi Arabia | 29 633 643 | 0,411% |
46 | Nepal | 28 384 955 | 0,394% |
47 | Mozambique | 26 737 192 | 0,371% |
48 | Ghana | 26 706 393 | 0,371% |
49 | DPRK | 25 290 803 | 0,351% |
50 | Yemen | 25 232 723 | 0,350% |
51 | Australia | 24 525 215 | 0,340% |
52 | Madagascar | 23 836 177 | 0,331% |
53 | Republic of China | 23 674 495 | 0,329% |
54 | Cameroon | 22 982 847 | 0,319% |
55 | Angola | 22 301 476 | 0,310% |
56 | Syria | 22 150 830 | 0,307% |
57 | Sri Lanka | 21 609 990 | 0,300% |
58 | Ivory Coast | 20 968 989 | 0,291% |
59 | Romania | 20 106 857 | 0,279% |
60 | Niger | 18 699 017 | 0,260% |
61 | Chile | 17 987 215 | 0,250% |
62 | Burkina Faso | 17 583 830 | 0,244% |
63 | Kazakhstan | 17 494 709 | 0,243% |
64 | Netherlands | 17 076 890 | 0,237% |
65 | Malawi | 16 993 359 | 0,236% |
66 | Guatemala | 16 023 929 | 0,222% |
67 | Mali | 15 932 442 | 0,221% |
68 | Cambodia | 15 572 485 | 0,216% |
69 | Ecuador | 15 245 215 | 0,212% |
70 | Zambia | 15 185 217 | 0,211% |
71 | Zimbabwe | 14 763 540 | 0,205% |
72 | Senegal | 14 712 386 | 0,2042% |
73 | Chad | 13 375 361 | 0,1857% |
74 | Guinea | 12 208 113 | 0,1695% |
75 | South Sudan | 11 902 933 | 0,1652% |
76 | Cuba | 11 422 812 | 0,1586% |
77 | Belgium | 11 368 207 | 0,1578% |
78 | Greece | 11 156 804 | 0,1549% |
79 | Tunisia | 11 050 715 | 0,1534% |
80 | Bolivia | 11 011 879 | 0,1529% |
81 | Somalia | 10 969 866 | 0,1523% |
82 | Benin | 10 763 725 | 0,1494% |
83 | Rwanda | 10 701 437 | 0,1485% |
84 | Dominican Republic | 10 693 169 | 0,1484% |
85 | Czech Republic | 10 676 634 | 0,1482% |
86 | Burundi | 10 586 967 | 0,1470% |
87 | Haiti | 10 565 624 | 0,1467% |
88 | Portugal | 10 531 516 | 0,1462% |
89 | Hungary | 9 983 215 | 0,1386% |
90 | Sweden | 9 749 079 | 0,1353% |
91 | Azerbaijan | 9 581 315 | 0,1330% |
92 | Belarus | 9 579 315 | 0,1330% |
93 | Serbia | 9 572 593 | 0,1329% |
94 | Austria | 8 612 001 | 0,1195% |
95 | Tajikistan | 8 309 615 | 0,1153% |
96 | Switzerland | 8 240 904 | 0,1144% |
97 | Israel | 8 236 215 | 0,1143% |
98 | Papua New Guinea | 7 580 323 | 0,1052% |
99 | Honduras | 7 522 215 | 0,1044% |
100 | Bulgaria | 7 301 892 | 0,1014% |
101 | Hong Kong (PRC) | 7 192 515 | 0,0998% |
102 | Paraguay | 6 728 846 | 0,0934% |
103 | Jordan | 6 699 315 | 0,0930% |
104 | Eritrea | 6 592 391 | 0,0915% |
105 | Salvador | 6 439 967 | 0,0894% |
106 | Laos | 6 405 015 | 0,0889% |
107 | Libya | 6 309 667 | 0,0876% |
108 | Sierra leone | 6 261 597 | 0,0869% |
109 | Togo | 6 247 370 | 0,0867% |
110 | Nicaragua | 6 127 260 | 0,0850% |
111 | Kyrgyzstan | 5 919 315 | 0,0822% |
112 | Denmark | 5 683 450 | 0,0789% |
113 | Finland | 5 528 715 | 0,0767% |
114 | Slovakia | 5 468 223 | 0,0759% |
115 | Singapore | 5 368 615 | 0,0745% |
116 | Turkmenistan | 5 363 386 | 0,0744% |
117 | Norway | 5 222 115 | 0,0725% |
118 | Lebanon | 5 022 129 | 0,0697% |
119 | UAE | 4 856 465 | 0,0674% |
120 | CAR | 4 765 418 | 0,0661% |
121 | Ireland | 4 660 244 | 0,0647% |
122 | Republic of the Congo | 4 581 809 | 0,0636% |
123 | New Zealand | 4 562 615 | 0,0633% |
124 | Georgia | 4 513 715 | 0,0627% |
125 | State of Palestine | 4 443 764 | 0,0617% |
126 | Costa Rica | 4 324 927 | 0,0600% |
127 | Croatia | 4 269 915 | 0,0593% |
128 | Liberia | 4 213 215 | 0,0585% |
129 | Mauritania | 3 913 215 | 0,0543% |
130 | Bosnia and Herzegovina | 3 859 592 | 0,0536% |
131 | Puerto Rico (USA) | 3 749 004 | 0,0520% |
132 | Moldavia | 3 580 815 | 0,0497% |
133 | Kuwait | 3 502 586 | 0,0486% |
134 | Panama | 3 429 028 | 0,0476% |
135 | Uruguay | 3 227 007 | 0,0448% |
136 | Armenia | 3 128 764 | 0,0434% |
137 | Lithuania | 2 954 075 | 0,0410% |
138 | Albania | 2 854 956 | 0,0396% |
139 | Oman | 2 796 694 | 0,0388% |
140 | Mongolia | 2 760 015 | 0,0383% |
141 | Jamaica | 2 729 015 | 0,0379% |
142 | Namibia | 2 371 203 | 0,0329% |
143 | Lesotho | 2 120 726 | 0,0294% |
144 | Slovenia | 2 098 085 | 0,0291% |
145 | Macedonia | 2 088 984 | 0,0290% |
146 | Botswana | 2 061 802 | 0,0286% |
147 | Latvia | 2 013 515 | 0,0279% |
148 | Gambia | 1 932 169 | 0,0268% |
149 | Guinea-Bissau | 1 769 013 | 0,0246% |
150 | Gabon | 1 720 509 | 0,0239% |
151 | Qatar | 1 708 650 | 0,0237% |
152 | Trinidad and Tobago | 1 326 929 | 0,01842% |
153 | Estonia | 1 318 034 | 0,01830% |
154 | Mauritius | 1 298 004 | 0,01802% |
155 | Swaziland | 1 269 919 | 0,01763% |
156 | Bahrain | 1 236 786 | 0,01717% |
157 | East Timor | 1 068 624 | 0,01483% |
158 | Fiji | 889 242 | 0,01234% |
159 | Djibouti | 888 528 | 0,01233% |
160 | Cyprus | 860 215 | 0,01194% |
161 | Reunion (France) | 830 796 | 0,01153% |
162 | Equatorial Guinea | 780 276 | 0,01083% |
163 | Butane | 767 767 | 0,01066% |
164 | Comoros | 753 653 | 0,01046% |
165 | Guyana | 736 769 | 0,01023% |
166 | Montenegro | 625 550 | 0,008683% |
167 | Macau (PRC) | 608 715 | 0,008449% |
168 | SADR | 586 861 | 0,008146% |
169 | Solomon islands | 574 080 | 0,007969% |
170 | Luxembourg | 550 895 | 0,007647% |
171 | Suriname | 545 140 | 0,007567% |
172 | Cape Verde | 504 852 | 0,007008% |
173 | Malta | 426 599 | 0,005921% |
174 | Brunei | 424 420 | 0,005891% |
175 | Guadeloupe (France) | 405 850 | 0,005633% |
176 | Martinique (France) | 393 506 | 0,005462% |
177 | Bahamas | 383 786 | 0,005327% |
178 | Maldives | 352 787 | 0,004897% |
179 | Iceland | 326 886 | 0,004537% |
180 | Belize | 323 668 | 0,004493% |
181 | Barbados | 287 281 | 0,003988% |
182 | French Polynesia (France) | 281 050 | 0,003901% |
183 | New Caledonia (France) | 261 039 | 0,003623% |
184 | Vanuatu | 259 516 | 0,003602% |
185 | Guiana (France) | 238 764 | 0,003314% |
186 | Mayotte (France) | 229 285 | 0,003183% |
187 | Sao Tome and Principe | 199 097 | 0,002764% |
188 | Samoa | 193 046 | 0,002680% |
189 | Saint Lucia | 184 813 | 0,002565% |
190 | Guam (USA) | 168 761 | 0,002343% |
191 | Curacao (Nid.) | 150 894 | 0,002094% |
192 | Saint Vincent and the Grenadines | 110 586 | 0,001535% |
193 | Virgin Islands (US) | 108 007 | 0,001499% |
194 | Grenada | 107 518 | 0,001492% |
195 | Tonga | 106 997 | 0,001485% |
196 | Kiribati | 104 657 | 0,001453% |
197 | Micronesia | 104 618 | 0,001452% |
198 | Aruba (Nid.) | 104 146 | 0,001446% |
199 | Jersey (UK) | 98 572 | 0,001368% |
200 | Seychelles | 94 021 | 0,001305% |
201 | Antigua and Barbuda | 91 618 | 0,001272% |
202 | Isle of Man (UK) | 87 190 | 0,001210% |
203 | Andorra | 76 813 | 0,001066% |
204 | Dominica | 73 056 | 0,001014% |
205 | Bermuda (UK) | 66 176 | 0,000919% |
206 | Guernsey (UK) | 63 800 | 0,000886% |
207 | Cayman Islands (UK) | 59 941 | 0,000832% |
208 | Greenland (Denmark) | 57 679 | 0,000801% |
209 | American Samoa (USA) | 55 835 | 0,000775% |
210 | Saint Kitts and Nevis | 55 304 | 0,000768% |
211 | Northern Mariana Islands (USA) | 55 046 | 0,000764% |
212 | Marshall Islands | 53 287 | 0,000740% |
213 | Faroe Islands (Denmark) | 48 674 | 0,000676% |
214 | Monaco | 38 581 | 0,000536% |
215 | Sint Maarten (Nid.) | 37 944 | 0,000527% |
216 | Liechtenstein | 37 644 | 0,000523% |
217 | Saint Martin (France) | 36 801 | 0,000511% |
218 | Turks and Caicos (UK) | 34 251 | 0,000475% |
219 | San marino | 32 152 | 0,000446% |
220 | Gibraltar (UK) | 30 516 | 0,000424% |
221 | Virgin Islands (UK) | 29 077 | 0,000404% |
222 | Aland Islands (Finland) | 28 717 | 0,000399% |
223 | Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba (Nid.) | 23 511 | 0,000326% |
224 | Palau | 21 312 | 0,000296% |
225 | Cook Islands (New Zel.) | 20 947 | 0,000291% |
226 | Anguilla (British) | 14 675 | 0,000204% |
227 | Wallis and Futuna (France) | 13 421 | 0,000186% |
228 | Nauru | 10 296 | 0,000143% |
229 | Tuvalu | 9 989 | 0,000139% |
230 | Saint Barthélemy (France) | 9 130 | 0,000127% |
231 | Saint Pierre and Miquelon (France) | 6 175 | 0,0000857% |
232 | Montserrat (UK) | 5 230 | 0,0000726% |
233 | Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha | 4 155 | 0,0000577% |
234 | Falkland Islands (UK) | 3 087 | 0,0000428% |
235 | Spitsbergen (Norway) | 2 690 | 0,0000373% |
236 | Norfolk Island (Australia) | 2 337 | 0,0000324% |
237 | Christmas Island (Australia) | 2 087 | 0,0000290% |
238 | Tokelau (New Zel.) | 1 426 | 0,0000198% |
239 | Niue (New Zel.) | 1 317 | 0,0000183% |
240 | Vatican | 803 | 0,0000111% |
241 | Cocos Islands (Australia) | 560 | 0,0000078% |
242 | Pitcairn Islands (UK) | 60 | 0,00000083% |
How many people have lived on earth or were born at all is an intriguing question that can be based, at least in part, on a scientific basis.
In order to evaluate and for this to be true, it is necessary to understand that childbirth, the survival rate of babies both at the beginning of the 20th century and now in the 21st century are not the same as they were in the past.
It is known that there are now a large number of elderly people born in the middle of the last century.
However, the number of prehistoric people, or how many people in total lived on earth, can be determined with a high degree of probability.
How many people have ever lived on earth?
Population on Earth | Births per 1000 people | Tentative births | |
50,000 BC | 2000 | – | – |
8000 BC | 5 000 000 | 80 | 1137 789769 |
A.D. 1 | 300 000 000 | 80 | 46025332354 |
1200 | 450 000 000 | 60 | 26591343000 |
1650 | 500 000 000 | 60 | 12782002453 |
1750 | 795 000 000 | 50 | 3171931513 |
1850 | 1 265 000 000 | 40 | 4046240009 |
1900 | 1 656 000 000 | 40 | 2900237856 |
1950 | 2 516 000 000 | 31-38 | 3390198215 |
1995 | 5 760 000 000 | 31 | 5427305000 |
2011 | 7 000 000 000 | 20 | 2143327599 |
How many people were there | 107 615 707,768 | ||
October 31, 2011 UN announced: Earth's population | |||
Percentage of those who were ever born who are living in 2019. | 6,5 % |
Any estimate of the total number of people who have ever been born will mainly depend on two factors: the length of time humans have lived on Earth and the average size of the human population at different times.
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 a brain measuring 900 cm 3. Of course, great apes walked the earth several million years ago.
Growth rate of the world's population
According to the United Nations, determinants for the impact of demographic trends in contemporary 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 dawn Agriculture around 8000 BC, the world population was somewhere on the order of 5 million. Slow population growth over the period from about 5 million to 300 million per year. For 8000 years there was a very low growth rate - only 0.0512 percent per year. In different regions, the number was different and was rejected 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 life expectancy has been around 10 years for most of human history... The estimate of the average life expectancy in France during the Iron Age was, for example, according to scientists, only 10-12 years. In these conditions, the birth rate is determined to be about 80 per 1000 people just to survive. Today, a high birth rate of about 45-50 per 1000 population is observed only in a few African countries and in a few countries in the Middle East with a young population.
The fertility assumption significantly affects the estimate of the number of people how many people have lived on earth. Infant mortality in human history in the early days is thought to have been very high - perhaps 500 deaths per 1000 births or even higher. Children were probably a burden among hunter-gatherer societies and the fact that this most likely led to the practice of infanticide. In these circumstances, a disproportionate number of births will be required to support the growth of the world's population, and this will raise the estimated number of "how many people have lived on earth."
Until the 1st century BC, the world may have consisted of 300 million people. One estimate of the population of the Roman Empire from Spain to Asia Minor is 45 million.
In 1650, the world's population rose to about 500 million, a slight increase from the 1st century BC. The average annual growth rate of the world's population in the Middle Ages was actually lower than BC. One of the reasons for this abnormal 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 slowly spread 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 size greatly add to 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 grow since then to the current number according to the UN on October 31, 2011 - 7 billion.
How many people have lived on earth requires choosing a time interval from antiquity to the present and applying the birth rate for each period.
What determines the growth rate of the number of people on Earth
One of the complicating factors of 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 prepared a number of theories. To support this hypothesis, it was assumed that constant increment applies to every period prior to modern times. Fertility rates were set at 80 people per 1000 per year BC. and 60 per 1000 in the Middle Ages. The birth rate then fell in the middle of the last century below 40 per 1000 people and even lower in the modern period. The truth is growing at the present time.
This semi-scientific approach estimates about 108 billion births at the dawn of the human race.
Apparently the period is 8000 BC. BC. is the key to the scope of the definition, but unfortunately little is known about that era. Some aspects, or perhaps almost all aspects, are assumptions and one approach to this issue is not achievable. Conditions constant growth the earth's population at an earlier period may underestimate the amount at that time. And, of course, determining the time of the evolutionary consequences of mankind on the planet about 50,000 years ago is also probabilistic.
Thus, an 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.
Based on data from UN projections for the world's population
Around 8000 BC, the world's population was approximately 5 million. Over the 8000-year period up to 1 A.D. it has grown to 200 million people (according to some estimates, 300 million or even 600 million), with a growth rate of 0.05% per year. A huge change in population size happened with the arrival of the industrial revolution:
- In 1800, the world's population reached one billion.
- The second billion in population was reached in just 130 years in 1930.
- The third billion was reached in less than 30 years in 1959.
- Over the next 15 years, in 1974 it will reach the fourth billion.
- In just 13 years, in 1987 - the fifth billion.
During the 20th century alone, the world's population grew from 1.65 to 6 billion.
In 1970, the population was half what it is today. Due to the slowdown in population growth, it will take more than 200 years to double the population from today's data.
Table with data on population by years and dynamics of population growth in the world by years until 2017
Pop% | Population in the world | Increase in% over the previous year | Absolute annual growth in the number of people | Average age of the population | Population density: number of people per 1 sq. Km. | Urbanization (urban population) in% of the total | Urban population |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
2017 | 7 515 284 153 | 1,11% | 82 620 878 | 29,9 | 58 | 54,7% | 4 110 778 369 |
2016 | 7 432 663 275 | 1,13% | 83 191 176 | 29,9 | 57 | 54,3% | 4 034 193 153 |
2015 | 7 349 472 099 | 1,18% | 83 949 411 | 30 | 57 | 53,8% | 3 957 285 013 |
2010 | 6 929 725 043 | 1,23% | 82 017 839 | 29 | 53 | 51,5% | 3 571 272 167 |
2005 | 6 519 635 850 | 1,25% | 78 602 746 | 27 | 50 | 49,1% | 3 199 013 076 |
2000 | 6 126 622 121 | 1,33% | 78 299 807 | 26 | 47 | 46,6% | 2 856 131 072 |
1995 | 5 735 123 084 | 1,55% | 85 091 077 | 25 | 44 | 44,8% | 2 568 062 984 |
1990 | 5 309 667 699 | 1,82% | 91 425 426 | 24 | 41 | 43% | 2 285 030 904 |
1985 | 4 852 540 569 | 1,79% | 82 581 621 | 23 | 37 | 41,3% | 2 003 049 795 |
1980 | 4 439 632 465 | 1,8% | 75 646 647 | 23 | 34 | 39,4% | 1 749 539 272 |
1975 | 4 061 399 228 | 1,98% | 75 782 307 | 22 | 31 | 37,8% | 1 534 721 238 |
1970 | 3 682 487 691 | 2,08% | 71 998 514 | 22 | 28 | 36,7% | 1 350 280 789 |
1965 | 3 322 495 121 | 1,94% | 60 830 259 | 23 | 21 | There is no data | There is no data |
1960 | 3 018 343 828 | 1,82% | 52 005 861 | 23 | 23 | 33,8% | 1 019 494 911 |
1955 | 2 758 314 525 | 1,78% | 46 633 043 | 23 | 21 | There is no data | There is no data |
The world's population is currently (2017) growing at a rate of about 1.11% per year (up from 1.13% in 2016).
Currently, the average annual population growth is estimated at about 80 million. The annual growth rate peaked in the late 1960s, when it was 2% or more. The population growth rate peaked at 2.19 percent per year in 1963.
Annual growth rates are currently declining and are projected to continue to decline in the coming years. Population growth is projected to be less than 1% per annum by 2020 and less than 0.5% per annum by 2050. This means that the global population will continue to grow in the 21st century, but at a slower pace than in the recent past.
The world population doubled (100% increase) in the 40 years from 1959 (3 billion) to 1999 (6 billion). The world's population is now projected to increase by another 50% in 39 years, to 9 billion by 2038.
Forecast of the population of the Earth (all countries of the world) and demographic data for the period up to 2050:
date | Population size | Growth in the number of a% in 1 year | Absolute growth in 1 year in the number of people | Average age of the world's population | Population density: number of people per 1 sq. km. | Percentage of urbanization | Total urban population |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
2020 | 7 758 156 792 | 1,09% | 81 736 939 | 31 | 60 | 55,9% | 4 338 014 924 |
2025 | 8 141 661 007 | 0,97% | 76 700 843 | 32 | 63 | 57,8% | 4 705 773 576 |
2030 | 8 500 766 052 | 0,87% | 71 821 009 | 33 | 65 | 59,5% | 5 058 158 460 |
2035 | 8 838 907 877 | 0,78% | 67 628 365 | 34 | 68 | 61% | 5 394 234 712 |
2040 | 9 157 233 976 | 0,71% | 63 665 220 | 35 | 70 | 62,4% | 5 715 413 029 |
2045 | 9 453 891 780 | 0,64% | 59 331 561 | 35 | 73 | 63,8% | 6 030 924 065 |
2050 | 9 725 147 994 | 0,57% | 54 251 243 | 36 | 75 | 65,2% | 6 338 611 492 |
The main stages of the growth of the world's population
10 billion (2056)
The United Nations projects a world population of 10 billion by 2056.
8 billion (2023)
The world's population is expected to reach 8 billion in 2023 according to the United Nations (and in 2026 according to the US Census Bureau).
7.5 billion (2017)
The current population of the Earth is 7.5 billion as of January 2017, according to United Nations estimates.
7 billion (2011)
According to the United Nations, the world's population reached 7 billion on October 31, 2011. The US Census Bureau made a lower estimate - 7 billion was reached on March 12, 2012.
6 billion (1999)
According to the United Nations, on October 12, 1999, the population of the entire world was 6 billion. According to the US Census Bureau, this value was reached on July 22, 1999, at approximately 3:49 am GMT.
Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences S. KAPITSA (Institute for Physical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences).
Of all global problems, worrying mankind, the question of the growth of the world's population 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 makes up his history. Demography is able to provide only quantitative data, without describing the laws of human development. Sergey 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 reasons for the current surge in the birth rate ("demographic transition") and predicts that in the near future the Earth's population will stop growing, stopping at about 14 billion people. On the fourteenth of February, Sergei Petrovich turned 70 years old. The editorial board of the magazine congratulates its author on the anniversary and wishes him many years of fruitful work.
This is how the world population grew according to demographic data (1) and a 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 for the development of mankind predict the nature of population growth in different ways.
The growth of the world's population from the emergence of man to the foreseeable future, according to demographers.
Demographers predict that after 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 begin to fall (1), and over 65 years old - to grow (2), and by the end of the next century, our planet will greatly "age".
Development of mankind 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. This was primarily because the accumulation of facts and concepts must precede them. quantitative characteristics... However, sooner or later they must penetrate into history, and not as an illustration of this or that event, but as a way of a deeper understanding of the historical process. For 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 he was not suitable for describing the development of mankind, for only having well understood the mechanism demographic processes, you can explain them, measure the characteristics and move from the particular to the general.
But it was for humanity as a whole that this approach turned out to be unproductive. It was not clear what was to be measured, there were no clear quantitative data. Already in economics, fundamental difficulties arose in the quantitative comparison of dissimilar concepts, such as, for example, labor and goods, raw materials and information, and in history only the course of time in the past is well traced.
However, there is one parameter that is as universal as time and applies to all eras - population. In life, we turn to him 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 size in the historical past. So, in 1700 there were ten times less people on Earth than today, and how many of them lived then in Russia, hardly anyone will answer right away, although almost everyone knows the years of the reign of Peter I.
But it is precisely the size of the population that is closely related to the entire economic, social and cultural activity of mankind, which constitutes 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 every second and 18 people die every second, the world's population is increasing by two hundred and fifty thousand people every day, and this increase is almost entirely in developing countries. The growth rate is so high - it is approaching ninety million a year - that it has come to be seen as population explosion capable of shaking the planet. It is the continuous increase in the world's population that requires an ever-increasing production of food and energy, the consumption of mineral resources and leads to an ever-increasing pressure on the biosphere of the planet. The image of unrestrained population growth, if naively extrapolated into the future, leads to alarming predictions and even apocalyptic scenarios for the global future of humanity. However, it is clear that it is possible to determine development in the foreseeable future - and this is precisely what is of the greatest interest - only by correctly describing the past of mankind.
Currently, humanity is going through the so-called demographic transition. This phenomenon consists in a sharp increase in the rate of population growth, then an equally rapid decrease and in the stabilization of the population. The demographic transition is accompanied by an increase in productive forces, the displacement 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 be completed in less than a hundred years and will be much faster than in Europe, where a similar process began in late XVIII century. Now the transition covers most of the world's population, it has already ended in the so-called developed countries ah and now it goes only in developing countries.
WORLD POPULATION AS A SYSTEM
For a long time it was considered impossible to consider the world's population as a system, as a single closed object, which is sufficient to characterize the number of people at a given moment. Many demographers saw in humanity only the sum of the population of all countries, which does not make sense of an objective dynamic characteristic.
The key concept for the 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 valid 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. So, the emergence of ethnic groups and the division of dialects and languages occurs in its own time scale. The division of humanity into races took more time, 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 is reason to assert that over a million years, man has biologically little changed, and the main development and self-organization of mankind took place in the social and technological sphere.
Almost all convenient parts of the Earth serve as the habitat of mankind. In terms of our numbers, we have outstripped all animals comparable to us in size and nutrition by five orders of magnitude (except, perhaps, only domestic animals, the number of which is artificially supported). Humanity has 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 influence on nature has arisen with all the urgency. 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 GROWTH IN THE EARTH'S POPULATION
The creation of a model does not consist in fitting formulas to certain numerical data, but in finding mathematical images that express the behavior of the system and correspond to the task at hand. This process of sequential model building is best developed in theoretical physics, which describes reality in the form of solving 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 capable of growing 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 regularities will become visible, on which the dynamics of world population growth objectively depends.
We will characterize the world population 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 human life span or the distribution of people by age and sex. Under such conditions, it can be assumed that population growth occurs self-similarly (or, as they say, self-similar), that is, according to the same law for different time scales and the number of people. This means that the relative growth rate of the number of people on the planet is constant and it can be described not by the exponent underlying so many models, but only by the power law.
How exponential growth is inapplicable can be seen in the following example. Suppose humanity in the past doubled 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 could all descend from Adam and Eve! Even if the doubling time is increased tenfold, this moment will move back to the beginning of the Neolithic, when in fact there were 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, which has no deep meaning. The author of this article also received the same formula independently of them, but he regarded 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 peaking regime. Such phenomena are characteristic precisely of the "explosive" behavior of systems and have been studied in detail in modern research on nonlinear dynamics.
Nevertheless, such formulas are fundamentally limited by their range of applicability. First, the formula implies that the world's population will tend to infinity as we approach 2025, forcing some to consider it as the date of Doomsday, an apocalyptic consequence of the 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 the greatness of what is happening. Thus, this solution 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 the demographic transition - a process characteristic of all populations, clearly visible both in individual countries and throughout the world.
If we introduce into the model the time τ characteristic of a person's life, 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 becomes the original expression (1) in the past, and all solutions describe the growth of humanity over three eras. In the first - epoch A, with a duration of 2.8 million years - a linear growth occurs, which then turns into a hyperbolic growth of epoch B, which ends after 1965 with a demographic transition. After the demographic transition, the growth in the population over the course of a generation becomes comparable to the population of the world itself. And the number will begin to strive for the asymptotically stabilized regime of the C epoch, that is, it 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 same value τ = 42 years reflects quite well some average characteristic of a person's life, although it was 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 the internal scale of the size of a group of people and determines the collective nature of the interaction that describes growth. The numbers of this order determine the optimal size of a city or urban area and the number of a stably existing natural species.
The growth rate for time t in the 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 the sum is always greater than the sum of the squares; that is why it is not possible to summarize 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 a major role in this process. A person's long childhood, mastery of speech, training, education and upbringing to a large extent determine the only, specific for people, way of development and self-organization. One might think that it is not the rate of reproduction, but 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 viewed as an intrinsic property of a dynamic system. Therefore, the time has come to abandon once and for all the presentation of social phenomena in the form of a simple sum of elementary cause-and-effect relationships, which, in principle, is not able to describe the behavior of complex systems over long periods of time and over a large space.
Based on the ideas of the theory, it is easy to determine the limit to which the number of humanity tends in 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 estimate the total number of people who have ever lived on Earth: P = 2K 2 lnK = 100 billion people.
In this estimate, the average life span of a person is considered equal to τ / 2 = 21 years, as is customary among demographers and anthropologists, who have received values for P from 80 to 150 billion people. Significantly, the whole picture of growth is best described on a double logarithmic scale. This is not only a matter of convenience, when it is necessary to imagine the behavior of quantities changing 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 you to take a fresh look at the pace of development and periodization of the entire history of mankind.
COMPARISON WITH ANTHROPOLOGY AND DEMOGRAPHY DATA
Comparison of the model with the data of paleoanthropology and paleodemography will make it possible to describe the development of mankind over a giant period of time. The initial epoch of linear growth of A begins 4.4 million years ago and continues with Kτ = 2.8 million years. So the model describes in general terms 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 Age A, Homo habilis ("skillful man") appeared, and its population increased to 100 thousand people.
To check the calculations, it was required to compare the calculated values with those already known. Such information could have been possessed by the famous French archaeologist and anthropologist Yves Coppens. I went to see him in the old building of the College 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 rejected this assumption, saying that he was not a theoretician, but a field researcher. And his assessment is based on the fact that then in Africa there were about a thousand camps, in which large families - about a hundred people each - lived. This figure consolidated an essential moment in the history of mankind, when the “skillful man” appeared in the Lower Paleolithic.
Age B of hyperbolic growth spans the Paleolithic, Neolithic and historical periods. 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 onset 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 across the globe. At that time, the Pleistocene climate was changing dramatically, up to five glaciations passed, and the level of the World Ocean changed by a hundred meters. The geography of the Earth was reshaped, continents and islands were connected and diverged again, man occupied more and more new territories. Its number grew slowly at first, but then with an increasing rate.
From the concept of the model, it follows that when connections 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, communities can be found that are at the Neolithic and even Paleolithic stages 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 constant growth. At a certain stage, the interaction proceeded along the Steppe Road, and later the Great Silk Road, connecting China, Europe and India, acquired the greatest importance. Since antiquity, there have been intensive intercontinental ties along it, world religions and new technologies have spread.
Data on the world's population over the entire time range fit fairly well into the proposed model, 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's population from 100 to 250 million people, and from the calculation one should expect about 100 million.
Given the closeness of these estimates, they should be considered quite satisfactory up to the very beginning of the emergence 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 are applicable to the distant past. This means that the model correctly captures the main features of the growth of the world's population.
It will be instructive to compare model calculations with demographic forecasts for the near future. The mathematical model points to an asymptotic transition to the 14 billion limit, with 90% of the population limit - 12.5 billion - expected by 2135. And according to the optimal scenario of the UN, the population of the Earth will reach the permanent limit of 11 600 million by this time. Note that over the past decades, demographic forecasts have been repeatedly revised upward. In the latest study, the estimated human population up to 2100 and the estimates made converge and essentially overlap.
DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION
Let us turn to the phenomenon of 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, a radical change in the nature of the development of mankind will take place. This time will outlive 1/10 of all people who have ever lived on Earth. The severity 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 concepts developed over the millennia of our history. Today, this is seen as the cause of the disintegration 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 the systems 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 RATES OF DEVELOPMENT IN TIME
One more significant conclusion can be drawn from the developed concepts: the scale of historical time changes with the growth of humanity. Thus, the history of Ancient Egypt spans three millennia and ended 2700 years ago. The decline of the Roman Empire lasted 1,500 years, while the current empires were created over the centuries and disintegrated over the decades. In this change in the time scale by hundreds and thousands of times, the scale invariance of the historical process, its self-similarity, is perfectly visible. On a logarithmic scale, each subsequent cycle is shorter than the previous one by e = 2.72 times and leads to an increase in the number by the same time. In each of the 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.
ND Kondratyev first drew attention to such periodicity of large 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 covers the entire history of mankind. The stretching of time is clearly visible as the distance from the critical date - 2007, increases. 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 this amount is added in half a day) - could have occurred in only a million years.
It was in the Paleolithic that that self-accelerated development began, which has since continued unchanged for a million years. By the beginning of the Neolithic, 10-12 thousand years ago, the growth rate was already 10 thousand times higher 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's 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 has passed from T 0 to T 1. Thus, in a sense, the past of mankind is much closer than it seems to us. After 2007, the population will stabilize, and in the future, the historical passage of time may again become more and more stretched.
It is interesting to note that recently the Russian historian I. M. Dyakonov in his review "The Paths of History. From the Most 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 the same conclusions are simply clothed in another - mathematical - form. This example shows how closely the vision of the traditional humanities and the images belonging to the exact sciences touch, even intersect.
IMPACT OF RESOURCES AND ENVIRONMENT ON POPULATION GROWTH
The human development model predicts that the population growth limit is not influenced by external factors - the environment and the availability of resources. It is determined only by internal factors that invariably operate for a million years. Indeed, humanity as a whole has always had sufficient resources, which man mastered by settling on the Earth and increasing production efficiency. When contacts ceased, resources and free space were 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 from the International Food Organization, there are currently enough reserves on the planet and in the foreseeable future to feed 20-25 billion people. This will allow humanity to safely bypass the demographic transition, in which the population will increase by only 2.5 times. Thus, the limit to 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 deep and comprehensive discussion and is very significant, since the long-term strategy of mankind is associated with it.
Resources, however, are highly unevenly distributed across the planet. In overcrowded cities and countries, they are already depleted or close to being depleted. Argentina, for example, has an area of only 30% less than India - the country of the most ancient civilization, whose population is 30 times larger and lives very poor. But Argentina, whose modern development began 200 years ago, could, according to experts, feed the whole world.
But within the framework of this approach, there is no difference between developed and developing countries. All of them equally belong to the same system of humanity and are simply in different stages of the demographic transition. Moreover, now, primarily due to the exchange of information, the development of the so-called third world countries is going twice as fast as it did in developed countries, just as younger brothers often develop faster than the older ones, 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 quantitative growth was the basis, then after the stabilization of the number, it should 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 attitudes of society will undoubtedly constitute the main problem in the near future, at a new stage in the evolution of mankind.
SUSTAINABILITY OF DEVELOPMENT
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 the calculation shows, stability is minimal, and at this moment there is a historically sudden appearance of a young and active generation. This was the case in Europe in the 19th century, where demographic prerequisites for rapid economic growth and powerful waves of emigration that led to the settlement of the New World, Siberia and Australia emerged. But they were unable 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 developed at an unprecedented and unsurpassed pace. The economies of Germany and Russia were growing at more than 10% per year. The flourishing of science and arts of that time predetermined the entire intellectual life of the twentieth century. But "Belle Epoque" is wonderful time the heyday of Europe, was cut short by a fatal shot in Sarajevo.
World wars have led to the death of about 100 million people - 5% of the world's population. From the "black death" - a terrible plague epidemic - entire countries died out in the XIV century. But even then, humanity always very quickly made up for the losses and, what is remarkable, returned to the previous stable growth trajectory.
Currently, however, the possible sustainability of growth may be lost as the demographic transition developing countries is going twice as fast as in Europe and will reach ten times as many 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 soon move to the Asia-Pacific region. Only taking into account the speed of its development, it is possible to understand in what world our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will live. Uneven settlement of territories on the borders of states and their economic inequality can also threaten global security. The vast expanses of Siberia, for example, are now losing population, while the northern provinces of China are rapidly populating. There is a constant northward migration across the US-Mexican border, and similar processes could occur with Indonesia's 200 million people north of the vast Australia, where only 18 million live.
The rapidly growing unevenness of development can lead to a complete loss of sustainability of growth and, as a result, lead to armed conflicts. It is impossible to predict the course of events in principle, but it is not only possible, but also 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 mid-twentieth 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 the methods developed to describe all of humanity. However, developed ideas allow us to consider each individual country as a part of the whole. This was all the more true for the Soviet Union and is true now for Russia (see Science and Life, No.).
Due to the size and multinational composition, the variety of geographic conditions, historical paths development and a closed economy, the regional processes taking place in the Union largely reflected and modeled global phenomena. At present, the demographic transition is nearing completion in Russia; population growth stops, its numbers stabilize. However, this secular process is superimposed on the events of the last ten years, and first of all - economic crisis... It led to profound shocks and resulted in a decrease in the average life expectancy, especially for men, which was less than 60 years old.
With the birth rate, according to demographers, nothing so catastrophic is happening. Its systematic decline is quite natural and characteristic of all modern developed countries. Therefore, Russia will have to continue to live in conditions of low fertility, in which migration of the population has begun to play an important role. If before 1970 there was mainly emigration from Russia, now up to 800 thousand people arrive in the country every year. Migration directly affects 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 abandonment of universal conscription - a very wasteful form of use of human resources. Russia will face this situation by the beginning of the next century, and by that time the reform of the army should lead to new principles for the formation of the armed forces. A decrease in the share of unskilled labor will increase the requirements for the quality of education, for the early choice of vocational guidance and create incentives for creative growth.
In some regions of Russia and especially in the neighboring 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 consequence, an increasing instability of society. It is very important for Russia to understand that these processes are fundamental and will drag on for a very long time. On the one hand, they are associated not only with world, but also with internal, specific to our history, circumstances. If we can and must cope with the latter, then global processes are outside our influence: it requires a global political will, which is not yet available. On the other hand, it is in the destinies of our country that the complex nature of the demographic revolution taking place in the world is visible - a rapid transition, unique in its dynamics, which ends a million years of relentless quantitative growth of humanity.
CONCLUSION AND CONCLUSIONS
The proposed model allows us to cover a huge range of time and a range of phenomena, which, in fact, 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 every country, every demographic subsystem, as a part of a whole. The model provides only a general, macroscopic description of the phenomena and cannot pretend to explain the mechanisms leading to population growth. The validity of the modeling principles should be seen not only and not so much in how closely the calculation coincides with the observed data, but in the validity of the basic assumptions and in the successful application of nonlinear mechanics methods to the analysis of population growth.
The theory established the line from which time should be counted, and the scale of time, which stretches with distance 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 development paradigm. 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 asserted that it is resources that determine the rate and limit of population growth. Therefore, it should be considered expedient to deploy interdisciplinary complex studies of demographic and related problems, in which mathematical modeling should be involved along with other methods.
Mathematical models are not only a means for quantitatively describing phenomena. They should be seen as a source of images and analogies that can expand 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, in demographic problem one should see a new object for theoretical research in physics and mathematics.
If the ideas developed above help to offer some kind of common development perspective for mankind, a picture suitable for anthropology and demography, sociology and history, and if doctors and politicians will allow them to see the prerequisites of 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 their interdisciplinary research justified.
Literature
Kapitsa S.P. Phenomenological theory of the growth of the Earth's population. "Uspekhi fizicheskikh nauk", vol. 166, no. 1, 1996.
Kapitsa S.P., Kurdyumov S.P., Malinetskiy G.G. The world of the future. Moscow: Nauka, 1997.
King A. and Schneider A. The first global revolution. Moscow: Progress, 1992.