Population Oscillations

[Prime-Evil]

"I've got this theory, and the only cure, is more cowbell."

 

Most human population models are of two kinds.

1. There are the friendly models, popular with the UN, where all the countries of the world eventually achieve mutual prosperity and stable fertility rates and the world population eventually reaches a steady state where the new people being born is in balance with the number of people being 'lightly killed'.

2. There are the fruit fly models, popular with others, where all of the people of the world breed like fruit flies until they use up all of there resources and then their population crashes, assuming of course they are not able to escape and find more fruit in another bell jar in a galaxy far far away.

 

What about a third model, with humans, where instead of reaching a stable steady state or have an appocolyptic crash we instead enter a period of extreme oscillations, resulting from the destabilizing effect of conflicts over resources with periods uncontrolled of regional and global population growth intersperced with periods of extreme regional and global die-offs due to war, famine, pandemics, embargoes, riots, revolts, genocide. You know, civilized homo-sapien stuff. I'm thinking population increases of 50-100 million per year, balanced by die offs of as many a 1 billion people at a time every 20 years or so, or at least within a 5 year period due to some related cause. We've never had that many people die at once before. That's a lot of people. But we have never had 10 billion pyromaniacs run out of stuff to burn before either.

[SmallIsPower]

Unfortunately, in poor economies, the birth rate goes through the roof

http://www.indexmundi.com/g/correlation.aspx?v1=67&v2=25&y=2003

 

So if we go downhill as a result of resource depletion, we're likely to have another baby boom, which will keep the population artificially inflated for a while(decades? 1 or 2 generations?) causing more resource depletion causing a larger oscillation.

[Edtharan]

What you need to be looking at is feedback loops. The ocialation moddel you proposed is more likely as it is what can occure in a time delaed negative feedback loop. This is a negative feedback loop where the results are slightly delayed form their cause. (Wikipedi on feedback loops: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_loop). Wars over limited resource, desease, etc are all contibutors to the negative feedback.

[walrusman]

You know that's an interesting model because I've always wondered if perhaps the human design is to be just smart enough to dominate, but just stupid enough to stay in conflict with one group or another, aiding population control. If we're at the top of the food chain, who else is really going to eat us except for us?

 

Sorry, don't mean to spoil your post, but it sounded interesting to me...

[SmallIsPower]

I'd hadn't thought of conflict among large groups, but that would be deveatating, possibly nuclear winter, even extinction. Here's a scary possibility: African nuclear powers, dealing with the collapse of the Gulf Stream which carries heat from Africa to Europe. Africa broils, the Pentagon is accused of "weather control", and African countries feel they have nothing to lose by nuking America.