I was a bit skeptic about your comment and Jaruzel's one until I saw this chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#/media/File:P...

Population is doubled every 2 generations during the 20th century. If nothing else changed, the probability of human advancement should have been at least 2x.

There are other factors like better life expectation that speed up advancement a lot (more probabilty of having advancement per generation).

But I think the literacy factor is the key. Sadly I have no data to prove it, but I bet this was the cause of all this.

Not just the raw population, 100-200 hundred years ago most of that population was involved in agriculture, now it's a few percent. Dabbleing in science used to be a rich mans hobby, now it's a career path for many.

Seconded. In 1900 there were 1.2 billion people on the planet, and it took over 100,000 years to get to that number.

In only 116 years we've added another 6 billion to that total. :(

...and people say we're not-overpopulating the planet...

I had a bowl with 1 cracker in it for 3 weeks. Over the last 24 hours it now has 7 crackers. And people say my cracker bowl is not overpopulated...

Look. Raw numbers mean nothing. What is the sustainable population of this planet. 1 billion? 10 billion? 100 billion?

I have no idea. As tech improves, our impact per person could be lower. So perhaps the limit today is 5 billion... But in 20 years it could be 20 billion.

Ultimately though, we WILL run out of habitable space.

Assuming you do know we are currently only using 3% of the Earths land surface, what reasons are there that humans will run out of space?

Could live vertically, even above ocean if tech allows it (with instant transortation maybe.). Theoretically we have some good amount of room left.

At even midsize population density, I am pretty sure we have space for WAY over 100 billion people on this planet. Food production needs some more work, perhaps a bit of us eating lower on the food chain..

10 billion people could fit within the USA with a population density of less than New York City.

However, 9.999 billion people wouldn't want to live there if Trump was president. (Sorry, couldn't resist...)

If you add all the people who ever lived on earth, it's still less than people who are alive right now.

Industrial growth, more room for more population, more manpower to evolve, loop until earth cannot sustain certain limit of population unless there's a breakthrough to feed 10s of billions.

From 1900 till date it was luxuries that brought forward human advancement?

The point is that literacy is not considered a luxury now, but has been in most of human history.