This spring, American demographers calculated the growth rate of the earth's population, starting with the first representative Homo Sapiens. The figure turned out to be impressive: 108 billion.

Journalist and filmmaker Paul Ratner made a short video about the study and described its results for the portal "Big Think ".

Many people take it for granted that we live in a unique time - at the cutting edge of history. But one has only to think about how many people have already lived on the planet, and there is no trace of our arrogance. And the main question is not even how many people lived, but how many died.

According to estimates by demographers from the Bureau of Population Data, an NGO based in Washington, as of 2015, the total population of the Earth in its entire history is 108.2 billion people. If you subtract the roughly 7.4 billion that trample the planet today, we get the 100.8 billion earthlings who died before us.

So, the dead are almost 14 times more than the living! The result would be an impressive army of zombies, ghosts or White Walkers from Game of Thrones. If you consider yourself to be an optimist, then you can consider that your contemporaries are about 6.8% of all who have ever lived in the world. For the sake of simplicity (and to account for people born after Last year), round up the figure to 7%. We are 7%. Let's not lose face!

How did scientists get this result? The Washington bureau website has a demographer's report. It tells that the fifty thousandth year before the birth of Christ was taken as the starting point. It was then that modern Homo Sapiens are believed to have emerged. The dating can be disputed: the early hominids walked the Earth millions of years ago. But 50,000 BC is the date that the UN uses when calculating demographic trends.

Of course, no one knows exactly how many people have been born since then. The assessment is based on "knowledgeable speculation". Experts take into account many factors, for example, high mortality in the early stages of the evolution of our species (during the Iron Age, the average life expectancy was 10 years), lack of medicines and food, climate change, and much more. When all this is taken into account, it is not surprising that the world's population has grown so slowly. In our ancestors, infant mortality could be as high as 500 per 1000 births.

The organization's specialists have collected all their data on population growth rates in one table.

Population growth rates from 50,000 BC to 2011; also shows the number of births per thousand people and the total number of births between every two marks

Interestingly, the rate of growth slows down between the beginning of our era and 1650. In the Middle Ages, a plague epidemic raged in Europe - the "Black Death". There is also a population explosion after the industrial revolution. For a century and a half since 1850, the world's population has increased by about 6 times!

One of the most scandalous topics of official "science" is the problem with the population of the planet, which no one really knows. According to the data published in the "encyclopedias", 7.6 billion people live on Earth at the moment, but this figure cannot be verified.

The problem, let's say, is not statistics, but dynamics. Let us dwell only on the population size of past eras. The official history presents the following estimates:

Vertically they are billions of k.ltq, horizontally millennia. According to the figure, in the days of Ancient Egypt, the planet was as deserted as the Moon, so looking at the graph, even children ask the question: "Who then built the pyramids?" Anthropologists are very easy to get out: they shrug their shoulders and redirect them to Egyptologists, who continue to tell tales. However, in addition to Egypt, which is inexplicable by science, there is still such an interesting city as Paris in the world, under which it is not clear who built catacombs with a total length of 300 kilometers.

The length there, of course, is several orders of magnitude greater, since the structure is multi-level, in the lower part of which tourists are not allowed, because there are huge, wide, stone-lined corridors leading from Paris to other cities in France and Europe. But let's not argue either: three hundred so three hundred, at least 150, in this context it is not so important.

The important thing here is that the dungeons of Paris are filled from floor to ceiling with human bones, which are officially counted as "6 million skeletons".

According to the official explanation for the appearance of these bones, in the region of 1780, Paris was once again submerged by the overflowing Seine, destroying the local cemetery and throwing the corpses onto the city's pavements. Then the wise king Louis XVI issued a decree to remove all the dead from the cemetery and lay them in the catacombs of the city. The nonsense of academicians about how many people lived in Paris in 1780, we always had no time to watch, but at one time, many years ago, we looked at the contour maps of the area of ​​the 1720 model, on which the city plan is detailed:

In a modern metropolis, where people live either on each other's heads, or in towers stretching far into the sky, the population density is about 10,000 (USA) - 30,000 (China) people per square kilometer. Since there were no Empire State Buildings in Paris of 1720, the population density there had to be on the order of the density in a modern European town with a population of 50,000. People there live with a density of 2,000 to 4,000 people per square kilometer.

Based on these considerations and the size of the contour map, the population of Paris in 1720 was about 10-20,000 people. That's rough. Five years ago, a more accurate estimate flashed - 12,000 people. This raises the question: where did the six million come from in the quarries?
The quarries of Lutetia (that is, Paris) are only one, most likely familiar to our readers, an example of the discrepancy between real statistics and scientific fiction. However, there are much more shocking examples that are no longer known to anyone. Back in 2013, when Google Earth had just started to work normally, millions of people rushed to look at all sorts of interesting places on the maps.

Among them was Gary Schuning, who found artifact structures in South Africa that were very incomprehensible to the uninitiated: However, unlike many YouTubers who look out for star fortresses and traces of thermonuclear explosions on Google maps, he turned out to be a certified enlightened adept from agriculture. With the trained eye of a specialist, he immediately saw in this system a colossal irrigation complex, about which he made simple mathematical calculations: The entire complex covers an area approximately equal to the state of Arizona in the United States.

The system is about 350 miles wide and about 300 miles long, at least for the remnants that are still visible. This system represents approximately 67 million acres of sustainable agriculture. Given the complexity of the design, it is likely that the system was feeding at least 90 people per acre on an annual basis. Moreover: technically, the system could provide sustainable aquaculture (i.e. marine farming).

I have no reason to suspect that this is not the case. Given the size and scale of this complex, (the canals are about 1 mile apart on average) and collectively are approximately 350 X 300 miles in a rough rectangular format. (At least the observable parts). The complex may have actually been much larger, but it is now approximately 105,000 square miles. One square mile = 27,878,400 sq. feet or 640 acres, so the entire complex had a stable production area (640 acres x 105,000 square miles) or more than 67,200,000 acres (67 million acres).

One linear mile of the canal had 47,520,000 cubic feet of water per linear mile. Multiplying this by the number of canals of the structure, we get 5 trillion cubic feet of water in the canals, which is simply excessive for irrigating this area. Therefore, it is quite possible that the system was used not only for irrigation, but also for the production of marine food, which increases its productivity at least twice.

However, even if we do not take into account the possibility of parallel irrigation of aquaculture, we will calculate the yield of agricultural crops from this area. They vary widely, depending on management and crop choices, but the minimum figure can provide an annual diet of anywhere from 60 to 120 people per acre. Since the area (visible remains) of the system is 67 million acres, itself the complex produced the amount of food required to feed 5 billion people during the year.

Here is such a simple statistics, so it is not at all surprising that a scientific discovery is not trumpeted from morning to evening on TV. We don't even ask a stupid question about who built and processed all this. The more important question is: who was this system feeding? How many people were there on planet Earth? Was this system one? If there were several systems, then what was the population of the Earth at that time?

Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences S. KAPITSA (Institute for Physical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences).

Of all the global problems of concern to mankind, the issue of world population growth 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, first of all, because the accumulation of facts and concepts must precede their 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. To do 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 it was not suitable for describing the development of mankind, because only having well understood the mechanism of demographic processes, one could explain them, measure their characteristics, and already pass 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 a population explosion that could shake 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 pass much faster than in Europe, where a similar process began at the end of the 18th century. Now the transition covers most of the world's population, it has already ended in the so-called developed countries and is now 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 a habitat for mankind. In terms of 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 POPULATION GROWTH

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 - very a large number generations, so as not to take into account neither the life expectancy of a person, nor 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. And 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 will 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 was increased tenfold, this moment would 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 for many centuries by a number of researchers (Mackendrick, Forster, Horner), who saw in it only an empirical relationship that 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 passes into 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; this is why it is not possible to summarize growth factors by region or country.

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 way of development and self-organization specific to people. 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 considered 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 is striving 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 expectancy 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 gigantic 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 outlines 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 increasing speed.

From the concept of the model, it follows that when connections between certain 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, 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 a 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. This change in the time scale by hundreds and thousands of times clearly shows the scale invariance of the historical process, its self-similarity. 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 the 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 of "The Path of History. From the oldest man to the present day "clearly indicated an exponential reduction in the duration of historical periods as we approach our time. The thoughts of the historian are fully consistent with our model, where the same conclusions are simply clothed in another - mathematical - form. This example shows how closely they touch, even intersect , the vision of traditional humanities and images belonging to the exact sciences.

IMPACT OF RESOURCES AND ENVIRONMENT ON POPULATION GROWTH

The human development model predicts that the population growth limit is not influenced by external factors - 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 a 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 humanity 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, modern development which 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 one, 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", this wonderful time of 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.

At present, however, the potential for sustainability of growth may be lost, as the demographic transition in 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 what kind of world our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will have to live in. 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-Mexico border, and similar processes could occur with Indonesia's 200 million people north of 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 at the beginning and middle of the 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 concepts 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, diversity of geographical conditions, historical paths of 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 age-old process is superimposed on the events of the last ten years, and first of all - the 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 the 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 fate 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 makes it possible 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 claim 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 methods of nonlinear mechanics 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 develop 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, the demographic problem should be seen as 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 for 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.

Remember:

Question: What is the number of people on Earth?

Answer: the population is constantly changing, currently it is approximately 7.4 billion people.

My geographic research:

Question: How many years did it take for people to reach 1 billion people (Fig.2.2)

Answer: by 1830, the population was about 1 billion people

Question: How did the periods of time change in the future, during which the number of inhabitants of the Earth increased by 1 billion people.

Answer: The population of the Earth began to grow at a phenomenal, explosive rate.

Approximately 100 years after reaching the billionth level (1830), it reached 2 billion, 30 years later - 3 billion, etc.

There are 7.4 billion people living on Earth now. According to UN calculations, in the coming years this figure will increase by an average of 78 million annually, and by 2050 it will reach 9 billion. Population growth will continue mainly in the most populous and poor regions.

Question: What, according to the calculations of scientists, will be the number of earthlings in 2050? How much will it increase compared to the current population?

Answer: According to the forecasts of scientists by 2050. the number of earthlings will be about 9 billion. people, and in comparison with 2016 will increase by 1.6 billion people

Questions and tasks:

Question: Why are population censuses carried out?

Answer: The objectives of the population census are economic in nature. To know how much water, food, household items, clothing, transport, etc. is needed for the population today and how much will be needed tomorrow. For production planning, in order to provide the population of the country (planet) with the conditions necessary for life, you need to know how many people live in a particular country, mainland, world, for this, a population census is carried out, which is carried out once every 5 or 10 years. In Russia, the population census has been conducted since 1897.

Question: How did the rate of population growth change?

Answer: Until 1800. the population grew at a slow pace, no more than 10 million in a hundred years.

The world's population is currently growing at a rate of about 1.15% per year. Average annual population changes are currently estimated at more than 77 million (i.e. 1 billion + 1 year = 1.07 billion, etc.).

Annual growth rates peaked in the late 1960s, when the figure was 2% or even higher. The growth rate has therefore nearly doubled since its peak of 2.19 percent, which was achieved in 1963 at the current 1.15%.

The annual growth rate is currently declining and is projected to continue to fall in the coming years, however the rate of future change is still unclear. It is currently projected to be less than 1% by 2020 and less than 0.5% in 2050.

This means that the world's population will continue to grow in the 21st century, but at a slower pace than in the recent past. The world's population has doubled (100% increase) in the 40 years from 1959 (3 billion) to 1999 (6 billion). It is currently assumed that a 50% increase will take another 42 years, in 2050 the mark will exceed 9 billion.

Question: What are the reasons affecting the population size?

Answer: The reasons influencing the population size include the level of economic development of the country, the level of education and well-being of an individual, national and religious traditions, such social phenomena as hunger, disease, as well as natural disasters, and the worst offspring of mankind - war.

Question: What indicators determine the change in population size?

Answer: Population change is determined by the ratio of fertility and mortality, the positive difference between fertility and mortality is an indicator called Population growth.

Question: Name the mainland in the countries of which is the largest natural growth population.

Answer: mainland Africa.

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.


Moreover, all more people tend to live in large cities, where there are more opportunities to find a good high-paying job, and the rural population is becoming less and less. 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 African countries and South-East 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, unaffordable for the economies 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 a rise in the level of the World Ocean and flooding of 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” are occurring in countries that effectively solve two main problems: ensuring population 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 fertility through the proliferation of contraceptive drugs and technologies have so far failed to show the expected effect in those countries most in need of birth control - in the poorest countries in 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.