re: #3 b_sharp

You missed the point of the article — feeding even a hundred million was not possible at one point, now it’s nothing to do that. Here’s a hint: if we can farm at least as well as 16th century Japanese peasants did, then we will have enough food for 12 billion people or more. The truth is that we can farm much better than that already, that tale is told by the fact that farmland is overall decreasing in most countries, not increasing. Once a country achieves a certain modicum of wealth the population starts to become self limiting - you’ve seen that over the past 30 years in China, India, and Bangladesh.

Our tech is high energy now, but each year we are able to do more with less - right now we are at the verge of the micro machine revolution, and a hop skip and a jump away from the nano machine revolution. What used to take tons of energy now takes a trickle. (Compare the energy consumed by an old Western Electric / Bell stepper switch that served a small branch exchange to a modern voice portal server that’s a thousand times more capable and you might have a scintilla of an idea of the power reductions that will come with just the micro machine revolution we are undergoing.)