Can anyone guess what the maximum number of people that can live on Earth? The answer to this question is YES.
The world’s population is expected to rise from 6.5 billion today to around nine billion in 2050, but according to Viorel Badescu at the polytechnic university of Bucharest in Romania that is nowhere near the limit of the planets capacity.
BADESCU’S calculations, which appear in the International Journal of the Global Energy Issues, next month, are based on the earlier work by the British Physicist John Fremlin. In 1964 Professor Fremlin suggested that the earth would be habitable as long as the amount of heat of heat it received, from activity on the surface and incoming sunlight, equaled the heat it gave out. Too many people and the planet would get too hot to handle. On that basis, Fremlin concluded that the largest population the earth could comfortably was 60 MILLION BILLION PEOPLE.
Badescu and Richard Cathcart a geographical consultant in California repeated Fremlin’s calculations, using more up to date thermodynamic models. Assuming that every person emits 120 watts of heat and it would be uncomfortable if the average temperature at the earth’s surface rose too much, the researchers declared the earth could sustain 1.3 million billion people.
