Now that I just said we will avoid major lifestyle changes, I remembered the work of Jay Forrester.
As he pointed out in the early ’70s, the earth has a limit of how many people it can support. If I recall correctly, his world models typically produced a disturbing result – the population grows to N people, then scales back to N-M people before finding a steady-state sustainable population.
N and M vary in magnitude based on the modelled effects of technology, disease, and economics, but the shape of the curve always showed an overshoot in this century, then a population reduction to a sustainable level.
It’s a disturbing finding as it suggests the dark ages may be upon us before the end of the century.
Possible that this population reduction could occur after oil runs out and all replacement solutions are in place, but the replacement solutions don’t quite suffice.
Very interesting stuff.
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