Earth Overshoot Day
If everyone lived like people from the year 1910, we&#x27;d all have long since starved to death. If we lived like people from the 1950s, food would cost far, far more than it does today.<p>The Haber process and modern agriculture feed us all, and cheaply. We get five times more milk per cow and eight times more corn per acre than we did a century ago. We synthesize fertilizer out of thin air instead of scraping bird shit off of remote islands.<p>On top of that, human fertility rates have dropped far, far below replacement in substantial parts of the world, and when the developing  world is developed, I suspect they also will see declining population. Each person needs slightly more than one child for us to have a stable population. So, a fertility rate of ~2.1 (2 children per woman). In the US it&#x27;s 1.7, in Germany it&#x27;s 1.54, in Japan it&#x27;s 1.36, and in Korea it&#x27;s 0.94. China: 1.7, Brazil: 1.72, India: 2.2 (just above replacement, and dropping)<p>We can outsmart, and have repeatedly outsmarted, all sorts of potential disasters.<p>We can&#x27;t ignore our problems, but neither have we met with any sort of defeat.