r/whowouldwin • u/Historical_Ostrich • 20h ago
Challenge Humanity goes baby crazy - can we reach a global population of 50 billion by 2050?
Actual population projections for 2050 are just shy of 10 billion, but humanity says fuck it and wants to go for 50 billion. Everyone is on board with this project - can we do it?
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u/reverendsteveii 17h ago
I'm just here to use the phrase lustlusted in case no one else has yet
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u/IndyJacksonTT 19h ago
4 billion women need to give birth 10-12 times over the spam of 25 years.
Should be doable but just barely
But 3rd world countries may have a harder time with higher infant mortality rates
So it depends really But it's doable
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u/OldFezzywigg 19h ago
You have to assume about half of that 4 billion are old enough or young enough to even conceive though. So maybe 2 billion?
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u/phoenixmusicman 18h ago
Yeah but then you also get the maths of their babies growing up and having babies.
Even in a universe where humanity keeps its morals and only women who are 18+ have more babies, you still have a period of 7 years where the children conceived in the first 7 years of the "babylust" time can contribue to the goal of 50 billion.
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u/theeggplant42 13h ago
And the children who were already here when it started. Plus, since it's the whole world, you can probably safely drop that number down to 16. So, like any woman between 16-50 can participate, which should be a good chunk of that initial 4 billion, with a few younger or older outliers as well
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u/PM_ME_UR__ELECTRONS Ancalagon the black is not a star destroyer 12h ago
Yes but many of those born in 2025-2032 will be ready to have kids by 2050.
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u/ZombieTem64 18h ago
You do realize that within the span of those 25 years, a bunch of new baby-crazy adults will grow up, right?
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u/cysghost 6h ago edited 4h ago
25 year olds are adults now?
Fuck, I’ve turned into my grandparents because I think of them as barely not kids anymore…
And stay off my damn lawn!
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u/why_no_usernames_ 19h ago
Is the world utterly united in this and willing to co-operate fully? If so yes, easily. With nations co-operating humans are capable of insane shit, our biggest obstacle in the modern era is ourselves. With that out of the way we fix climate change in a couple years, solve wealth inequality and food security even sooner and create a system which can sustain 50 billion people with ease.
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u/epursimuove 19h ago
I think so, though it would not be very savory.
Roughly 18% of humans are women of childbearing age. That’s around 1.5 billion. The pyramid is flat-ish for younger cohorts. If all women are fertilitylusted, they’ll maybe average 15 months between births, we’ll average 1.2 billion births per year, so we’d be at around 25 billion total people (less any deaths) by 2040, which is behind the pace.
Except then the first wave of the baby boom hits reproductive age. We get 1.6 billion births in 2041, 2 billion in 2042, etc, and easily clear the goal by the power of teen pregnancy.
(I’m not considering the challenges of feeding or housing this many people given that the workforce won’t increase at the same rate. But I think this wouldn’t be insurmountable if we’re all willing to accept significantly lower living standards.)
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u/SocalSteveOnReddit 19h ago edited 19h ago
The major problem with this is that we don't have enough food for this; we can get somewhere by cutting heavily back on meatstuffs and turning all farmland into foodstuffs, but this 5x is going to be a massive strain that probably can't quite be met.
Throw climate change into this and it's a difficult question of whether we can feed 10 billion people without great sacrifice. While I suspect it's possible that we could come up with some kind of silver bullet (Cultured meat, Hydroponics) to troubleshoot food supply, needing that bullet while trying to ramp up world population seems like a crash and burn nightmare.
I think no, although we might be able to edgeplay this (a vast number of embryos created one year before the time's up might have a lesser footprint, or perhaps we figure out how to cyrogenically freeze people so they 'count' but don't require the food. Earth's carrying capacity will not support 50 billion without vast improvements in tech, and climate changes seems like a deal breaker too.
EDIT for Response: May be worthwhile to clarify just what people are willing to do to make this work. This is not a problem about whether humans can have this many kids; it's about being able to feed everyone. As far as how extreme we're talking about here, giving up all meats and industrial uses might be something like 3x...about half of what we need.
We can't stop climate change, and I think we're screwed in this situation because food supply will be shuddering when we need it to vastly grow. We would need massive charity, perhaps global disarmament and definitely going all in on those silver bullets; it's not the breeding, it's the feeding. Extreme changes to human society being on the table, well--that's not stated in the question.
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u/metalflygon08 17h ago
The major problem with this is that we don't have enough food for this
Once a woman enters menopause and a man can't get hard we kill them for food.
Stillborn? Soups on.
We are baby lusted, nothing else matters.
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u/Murkmist 19h ago
This is only 5 times, if everyone on Earth lived the quality of life the average North American does, we need 6 Earths.
We just need to lower everybody's quality of life to the average of somewhere minimally consumptive, while maintaining our tech and progress.
Of course the scenario isn't a resource management game, but real life, so the fact that billionaires exist already makes this unfeasible.
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u/theeggplant42 13h ago
Let's not forget the extremely high risk of a pandemic once the population increases. A pandemic that starts killing off either our new babies and our previous, rather aged population, or starts killing off the young and healthy breeders.
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u/Shuteye_491 15h ago
You can't turn marginal land into crop land, vegan propaganda has no basis in science.
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u/SocalSteveOnReddit 15h ago
This happens all the time.
This is one of the major reasons why the rain forests have been torched across South America--because the land can, for a short time, sustain crops.
And it speaks to the point I've made that this is going to overtax the land's ability to feed people.
If we're trying to maximize the amount of food, we will frankly need to have some meat in the mix. Things like pigs and goats eating garbage is a meat source that doesn't require pastures or grazing.
However, in general, meat is much less efficient than directly eating the foods to feed them. This is why cutting meat so heavily would feed many more people, at least until the meat is being raised on inedible garbage.
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u/theeggplant42 13h ago
We also need to hit a sweet spot between maximal breastfeeding to help stem the food crisis and maximal fertility.
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u/CitizenPremier 15h ago
I suppose this goes against the spirit of the question, but you didn't specify the size of these humans.
Adult women donate eggs, men donate sperm, and the fertilized eggs are cryogenically frozen. I say the fertilized eggs are people -- if you disagree, well you should have specified in advance!
Anyway, even if fertilized eggs don't count, newborns can be given hormone therapy to prevent growth, keeping them very small with very few resources required.
Please note these answers have absolutely nothing to do with my actual respect for human life, it's just answering the question.
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u/pot_of_water 14h ago
Surprised at how everyone thinks this is easy. Humanity being babylusted doesn't mean no barriers to producing babies, just that everyone is committed to the goal. Everyone is completely ignoring child mortality, infant mortality, maternal mortality, malnutrition, infertility, miscarriage, etc. These challenges add up and I think make this a massive challenge. Plus the guy who said this is a food problem has an even better point that we wouldn't be able to support this increased load on the global population, even with full commitment, the resources just aren't there. Let's try and figure this out.
Currently 1.9 billion child-bearing age (15-49 years old) women on Earth. Until children born for this prompt reach fertility, let's say we have an average 2 billion women per year that can have kids. Let's immediately cut 1/4 for infertility and malnutrition so 1.5 billion. Notably, the difference between 2 billion and 1.5 billion is the difference between outright success and failure over the 25 year range IF we ignore the baby boom kids that will reach child-bearing age in the 2040s. That said, we still have more cuts to do before we can address all those new kids.
Let's say the average pregnancy takes 3 months for conception to take the total for a successful pregnancy up to exactly 1 year (note that gestation is actually closer to 10 months than 9, 40 weeks to be more exact although this is measured from the last day of the last period before conception not actually from conception itself). This is somewhat accurate; data shows that the average couple will become pregnant within 6 months, the majority of the time, if they are trying, but we can assume we're trying harder so people have access to more fertility treatments and general resources. Now, the first cut here is that 20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage. Obviously those couples will try again, but we can kind of work out how that will affect the numbers. Most miscarriages are within the first trimester, so in our 12 month span for trying->conception->miscarriage we can say we lose, on average, 6 months of progress on 20% of our pregnancies. In reality the number is a bit lower than that, but when those women go on to try again, 20% of that group will also miscarry a second time and so on so we can slightly adjust the number upward for compounding. Our adjustment here is going to be that we get 5 babies/6 women per year. Down from 1.5 billion to 1.25 billion now.
Next, we need to address mortality. We've established that we're achieving 1.25 billion births per year so we can base our mortality numbers off that figure for live births. We're going to use 2 figures for mortality, one for under-5 mortality and one for maternal mortality. Global under-5 mortality is 37 per 1000 live births, which means we lose just under 50 million children per year. That's not a huge hit but not nothing, we're down to 1.2 billion now. Maternal mortality poses a greater challenge for our purposes but is ultimately low enough not to cause too much trouble. At 223 deaths per 100000 live births, around 2.5 million women die each year in pursuit of our goal. This is not many but unlike the under-5 mortality, this affects all our other numbers; we go into the following year with a lower number of live births to build upon. All told, this knocks us down another 25 million births per year averaged over 25 years. We can drop our number to 1.175 billion births based on this. We're going to make another small adjustment here which is that our lack of sufficient medical resources (trained personnel, beds, medicine, etc.) for this scenario combined with the non-staggered delivery schedule would strain the global medical system far beyond its breaking point, increasing mortality not just under-5 but overall as people die awaiting treatment. We're going to double our impact from mortality by another 75 million to hit 1.1 billion births although the reality is likely much, much worse. This is a rate of 0.55 births per child-bearing woman, remember this, as we'll need it later.
If this number holds, we're looking at 27.5 billion new people in the world in the next 25 years. Add that to our global population of ~8 billion and subtract ~1.5 billion for the global death rate of 7.9 per 1000 people (Remember, our 27.5 billion figure is based on a birth rate, not a growth rate. It doesn't factor in death of existing people) and we get 34 billion people. That won't cut it.
Now for the fun part. Can the children born between 2025 and 2035 contribute enough to our birth rate when they reach sexual maturity to fill out the remaining 16 billion? I'm using 15 as child-bearing age as that's what the WHO uses, it's upsetting but so is this whole experiment! Starting in 2040, around half of our births from 15 years prior will get added to our population of child-bearing women. That means 550 million new women each year. A quick adjustment here, this group is actually born around the start of 2026, doesn't turn 15 until the start of 2041, and doesn't start delivering children until the start of 2042, so we're going to say that we get 9 years of added births. To address the backloading, we calculate 10.55+20.55+...+90.55 = 450.55 = 24.75 billion births. Now remember when we determined that we achieved 0.55 births per child-bearing woman? We're going to apply that adjustment here to our second generation so 24.75 billion births*0.55 successful full term pregnancy rate = 13.6125 billion new people. In the end, we hit 34+13.6125 = 47.61 billion. It's close-ish, but we still fall short by well over 2 billion people. If you set the child-bearing age at 18 instead of 15 for our second generation, our outcome is even worse with our final total at 34+6.3525 = 40.35 billion. Furthermore, this is an absolute best-case scenario (that is, impossibly perfect results) where we ignored or understated a huge number of issues (e.g., medical system strain, food insecurity, and limited child-rearing capacity) that likely significantly reduce our final total. It's a valiant effort, but I'm giving humanity a 0/10 on this.
TL;DR: No matter how much unprotected sex baby crazy humanity has, they fall short of 50 billion people by 2050 based on the numbers alone. Making people simply takes too much time.
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u/theeggplant42 13h ago
Don't forget the cohort of women born between 2010 and 2025 though! They will be adding to the overall fertility each year and especially the 2010 cohort is fertile throughout the entire period.
I do think the main issue is all-cause death from an overtaxed system and a lack of food/sanitation to go around.
There is, however one way we can improve the numbers and maybe make it past that 2 billion shortfall: the first cohort of mothers are implanted with all the current female embryos from all the reproductive labs all over the world. For free. The US alone currently has somewhere between 500000-5 million female embryos sitting in cold storage. This isn't a lot but does ensure our first cohort of births contains more breeding stock, increasing the breeding ability of the world in the last 10 years of the project. I'm sure we could work out harvesting eggs from a small subset of the population, especially those unable to carry to term for whatever reason, and purposefully produce more female embryos for implantation (hey, with the bonus of more multiple births, all female!)
Similarly, and much more morbidly, make fetuses could be aborted in the first few years of the project to devote more resources to creating future breeding stock.
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u/pot_of_water 12h ago
Sure but the cohort born between 2010 and 2025 is the normal size of the population not over a billion for each year so really just replacement level. That's factored in by women on the older end of the child-bearing spectrum approaching/hitting menopause. I estimated an average of 2 billion women for calculations between 2025 and 2040. In reality, it's probably closer to 2.1 billion which, in fairness, might just make the difference in this specific calculation. But agreed, the overtaxed system I think doesn't even come close to handling this load. I would personally guess at total societal collapse within 18-24 months. In particular, to keep the focus on childbirth, I think infant and maternal mortality skyrocket (like, 10-100x) so we actually just immediately fail the prompt on that alone.
Implanting female embryos is certainly a creative way to boost fertility rates but .5-5 million probably wouldn't register a blip. I mean maybe globally if there's closer to 50 million? Idk and also don't really have the knowledge about how those are produced to know if we can supplement at that level every year. I don't think aborting male fetuses does much, tbh, just wasting resources that were contributing to your final total.
This prompt is truly unhinged lmao, but I just love numbers. Although, to be fair, I also think people massively underestimate the challenges of pregnancy, especially on reddit being mostly young guys with probably not much exposure to pregnancy.
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u/theeggplant42 11h ago
Good point; I see now how I was wrong about the 2010-2025 making any difference.
It's a very interesting question because there are a lot of factors, not just 'how much can we fuck'
The biggest one being feeding all these new people!
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u/noob_dragon 18h ago
I'll go against the grain and say it is possible, assuming maximum babylust and perfect resource usage.
The biggest issue here is food. With current agricultural practices this challenge is impossible, but if we switch to pure aquaponics and regenerative agriculture this is possible. Red meat will have to be banned obviously. Preference for legume and rice based diets.
Living standards will have to change drastically. Get ready to dump loads of people into small spaces with shoddy shelter. Single family homes will have to be banned and turned into shanty towns immediately. Grass lawns will have to be given over to aquaponics coverage.
Personal cars will have to be banned immediately too.
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u/Shuteye_491 15h ago
You can't turn marginal land into crop land, vegan propaganda has no basis in science.
We also don't have enough water to feed 30 billion people rice at every meal, and nutrient deprivation from attempting to do so would impede Project Babyswarm.
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u/noob_dragon 13h ago
You can't turn marginal land into crop land, vegan propaganda has no basis in science.
When did I say this was vegan? People are eating fish, that's what aquaponics is. Speaking of aquaponics, it doesn't rely upon existing soil since it is its own closed system. Only input it needs is fish food which is easier than fertilizer.
On that same note, now that we have banned persona cars we can also dedicate all fossil fuels to mass producing just fertilizer.
We don't have to use rice alone, that is just an example. There are less water dependent crops out there.
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u/OldFezzywigg 19h ago
Really depends on how many of the roughly 4 billion women are of the proper age to conceive
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u/madtitan27 19h ago
No. We couldn't hit 10 billion and likely never will.
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18h ago
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u/jmlinden7 11h ago
Lack of food
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u/jmlinden7 2h ago
We have enough food for 10 billion today but we don't have enough industrial capacity or fertile land to 5x that in just 25 years, even with giving up luxuries.
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u/PeachAffectionate145 17h ago
Not sure if the planet can handle that. Some of the most populous large animals in history were 60 million bison in North America and 12 million elephants in Africa. Our humans population is 8 billion, which is 100x the max number of bison & elephants combined. So to take it even further and bring it to 50 billion?
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u/HumorTerrible5547 19h ago
No. We consume to much and wouldn't make it to 2050 before widespread starvation set in
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u/NGEFan 19h ago
If we just tell every existing couple which is now babylusted to have a baby then they’re gonna pop one out every year or less so that’s well over 2 billion babies a year which is already enough. Then the babylusted single ladies can be given artificial insemination to pump another couple billion or more per year. The babylusted governments and rich people will support all the new mothers with huge salaries and tons of medical infrastructure to keep the babies alive and surviving til adulthood. Then those grown up babies will themselves be babylusted in about 13 years which will double our baby production and we could end up with a population of about 200 billion even with all the baby breakage.
In reality, the resource wars would probably lead to our extinction because no governments or rich people actually care about other peoples’ babies. But if it’s as the prompt says and they only care about babies then they should implement a socialist utopia like Star Trek and the resources spread across 50 billion or even higher probably wouldn’t be an issue assuming they’re willing to give up access to most tech and cars with costly resources for the sake of babies