Your use of the word “exponentially” triggered my inner math teacher: no, the growth is not exponential but more than linear since the industrial revolution.
If a couple have 2 children, then in an ideal condition the population is constant, so the death/birth is linear. Human birth can be exponentially if every couple have more than 2 children and they also have more than 2 and so on in this ideal scenario with no early deaths.
In reality you need 2+some fraction to balance out the early deaths, other couples with no children, unmarried, etc.
Plus with limited resources, population can’t grow a lot because you’ll start having a lot of death due to starvation, conflicts, accidents, etc.
Problem is due to industrialization, we can now support higher number of humans compared to the past, and due to vaccines and medicines we have smaller numbers of early deaths, so we have a population growth problem. But as we hit our limits it’ll stabilize, or if we overshoot, it’ll go down.
There is an additional element to it: along human history the birth rate has been usually significantly higher than 2, but that was compensated by a significantly higher death rate too. So the number of deaths definitely did not increase a huge lot over the last hundred years.
Your use of the word “exponentially” triggered my inner math teacher: no, the growth is not exponential but more than linear since the industrial revolution.
Is it not exponential? Dont human births exponentially increase? And if thats the case, dont death increase exponentially?
Or am I wrong about births too?
If a couple have 2 children, then in an ideal condition the population is constant, so the death/birth is linear. Human birth can be exponentially if every couple have more than 2 children and they also have more than 2 and so on in this ideal scenario with no early deaths.
In reality you need 2+some fraction to balance out the early deaths, other couples with no children, unmarried, etc.
Plus with limited resources, population can’t grow a lot because you’ll start having a lot of death due to starvation, conflicts, accidents, etc.
Problem is due to industrialization, we can now support higher number of humans compared to the past, and due to vaccines and medicines we have smaller numbers of early deaths, so we have a population growth problem. But as we hit our limits it’ll stabilize, or if we overshoot, it’ll go down.
There is an additional element to it: along human history the birth rate has been usually significantly higher than 2, but that was compensated by a significantly higher death rate too. So the number of deaths definitely did not increase a huge lot over the last hundred years.
Couldn’t anything O() of linear be modeled as exponential?
Exponential would be O(x^n) for any n. X^2 is O(x) but not exponential.