Excuse me, if this is the wrong sub for this but I’m genuinly confused. According to [this graph](https://flic.kr/p/5T5hkE) I found by accident, the world population barely increased at all between 1300 and 1900. And then it suddenly took off like crazy. What caused this sudden fast increment of the world population?
In: 78
Answer: there’s a few things, but I’ll mention food.
Artificial fertilizer was created in the 1910s, meaning that instead of depending on nature for nutrient boosts, we could make material to do that. More nutrients a field gets, the more food it can grow.
Mechanized farming started becoming commonplace. A tractor can do the work of dozens of people, and a dozen tractors the work of hundreds. Machines for other parts of the agricultural process meant more produce could be harvested faster and now you can grow more food in a year than you could have in several.
Insecticides also started to become mass produced. A lot of the early ones were as toxic to us as it was to the bugs, but it meant a farmer could now drive off waves of insects that would eat their crop. Eventually safer (somewhat) pesticides came on the market and meant you wouldn’t be infertile and suffering from seizures.
Refrigeration and packaging meant most foods could be preserved well beyond their original forms. Dough conditioners in bread, vacuum sealing, shrink wrapped meat, refrigerators in the homes of most of the developed world.
But most important was widespread adoption of genetically modified seeds. With enough changes, wheat seeds could be planted that had just as much crop as the normal ones, built in resistance to heat or cold, grew faster than normal wheat and required less water. This expands to other plants and now every farmer can grow some of the toughest yet highest yielding wheat dependably.
In combination, food could now be grown almost anywhere, with chemicals and genetic modification to ensure successful harvest, genetic modification to provide a bumper crop every year, machines to harvest all of this food, food science and packaging to ensure it can stay fresh for days or weeks, and the ability to store any extra food you have left into your own personal refrigeration unit.
All this food means you can feed a lot more people.
Before that date people generally had a high child mortality and as a result, many babies (4-8) oh which only a certain number reached ~5 years. The advances in medicine, better access to food and as the same time motorisation (or earlier, trains) meant that now you can mostly solve high child mortality.
At this time, we have an imbalance, since people where still having meant babies at the rate of before while having them all survive, which didn’t happen before. It took some time before this changed (very simply, look at first, second and third world countries where this is one of the many reasons they are called like this) and modern contraception (not that they’re weren’t contraception methods before) arrived.
This is the main reason why there have been increases in the world population, and it will likely continue to grow until either all the world had reached a new population ‘ceiling’ or until eventually one of these systems fail and there is a decline. Aka, mass starvation, drinking water problems, …
There is a name attached to this, but I’m writing this from my bed and can’t be bothered to look it up. 😀
I would think it would have something to do with the invention of antibiotics. Any little infection could kill before Penicillin. A UTI infection could get into your blood, a paper cut could lead to an amputated arm which could also get infected and kill you.
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