Is human population growth exponential or logistic

Logistic population growth graph. Still have a question? Ask your own! The human population is following a roughly logistic growth curve. During the 70s up to the 90s, growth was near exponential. Now it’s slowing down, we have passed the point of inflection on that curve only in the last ten years or so. After the logistic curve levels off, the model predicts it will reach an equilibrium, rise again or fall. we may see what happens in the coming century. May you live in interesting times. I would have to say that it is clearly exponential, though there are a number of factors to consider, especially over what time period you are looking at. Under shorter time periods it has been logistic, but over all it has been exponential and it will almost certainly continue being exponential for a number of reasons. Now, in real life the growth rate is effected by many different factors which over time can cause it to follow an exponential growth for a period and a logistic growth for a period a combination of the two at different times, or some more complex pattern. Are the resources abundant or scarce, is there room to grow or not, what is the death rate compared to the birth rate, etc. The Human Race is in a Technological Development Surge which began decades ago and should peak this century as we: > Master the molecular engineering of living and nonliving systems, atom by atom. > Master the merging and blending of living and nonliving systems to greatly blur the boundaries we now hold for what is living and what is not. > Master the engineering of intelligence which will allow Humans to evolve into a race of Pure Minds. > Master Nanotechnology, which is the combination of the above. > Perfect Artificial General Super Intelligent Brains (AGSIBs). > Begin merging with AGSIBs to become a race of Pure Minds which can move between supportive AGSIBs, thus be capable of inhabiting custom designed cybernetic bodies made up of nanomachines and molecularly engineered hard structures. The result of this is going to be a massive surge in abundance of resources, a very sharp dropping of the death rate, and the ability to have a birth rate as fast or slow as we want (with some limitations, but the range will be huge). On top of this, we will rapidly colonize every planet and moon in our star system and begin colonizing other star systems with a rate of expanding colonization of between 50% to 90% the speed of light. The overall population of the Human Race (well, the race of “Pure Minds” we are becoming) will be rapidly growing for a very long time. Now, as a planet or solar system become fully colonized it would likely eventually level off in a more logistic style growth, but when that will occur and how large that will be is far beyond our ability to estimate at this time. promoted by The Vintage News. It is neither. All species attempt exponential growth. Reproduction is exponential, but it can only achieve exponential growth for short (relative to the species existence) time spans because we are in a finite environment. Exponential or logistic growth happens when a species is introduced into a new environment that has more subsistence than the numbers consume. The population grows exponentially to what the environment can handle and from then on the attempted exponential growth is throttled by the limited nature of the environment. There are a few environments where it is pretty clear that there was a moment when humans were introduced, for example Easter Island, but the bulk of the other environments are more of a genetic evolution or diffusion of people such that there probably was never a moment when there was plenty of food and space allowing the numbers to grow exponentially. Regardless, we are long past any logistic or exponential growth phase that theoretically happens. Our growth is following the subsistence availability growth. We discovered refrigeration, modern fertilizers, the green revolution and countless other technologies that increase subsistence production and the sum of all of that does not follow any simple equation. It certainly looks like we have exponential growth, and that has fooled a lot of population scientists into the untenable belief that somehow magically we never reached the limit of how many can be sustained by the environment. Unfortunately during the past remarkable few hundred years of increasing subsistence, we have never managed to increase it as fast as our births attempted to grow our numbers. The result is starvation related child mortality. We have always, and are continuing to, kill by averaging too many babies.