The last 10 000 years in human history is unprecedented in terms of our success in overcoming ecological limitations and attaining inordinate population numbers. However, the question of to what extent are the current demographic and resource use trends sustainable is still unanswered. Mounting scientific evidence suggests, on the one hand, that our large-scale transformation of the biosphere is close to exceed the limits of sustainability, diminishing our natural capital and affecting our quality of life. On the other hand, our great innovation capacity led “cornucopian” to propose that through technological development, it will be possible to solve potential constraints on population growth and resource use, making the human enterprise sustainable.
Different models have been developed to evaluate the sustainability of current human population growth dynamics, but none has explicitly determined whether innovations can sustain the future (increasing) demands of the growing human population on a finite planet.
Results/Conclusions
We developed a simple biological model aimed at explicitly evaluating how innovations expand natural population limits, determining the sustainability of the subsequent dynamics of a population. Our model shows that depending on the “technological impact” and the strength of “technological feedback”, different regimes can result. Among them, the human population can sustainably fill the entire planet without exhausting ecosystem services, but assuming well-beings as different as those proposed from a “star-trek” to “mad-max” scenarios (sensu Costanza 2000).
Whenever the conditions settled in the model associate to positive or green technologies that increase the provision of ecosystem services with few negative externalities or environmental costs, basic standards of human well-being are guaranteed. However, only under strong positive technological feedback in generating new technologies of the same kind can human societies rely on continual well-being development, establishing a “star-trek” scenario. Otherwise, limits toward well-being are necessary, either through “big government” or “ecotopia” scenarios.
On another hand, the only way to fill the planet with humans under negative technologies is by reducing the technological stock to a minimum, not guarantying the establishment of basic well-being standards to human inhabitants and developing a “mad-max” scenario. Other regimes in the model determine either limits to human population growth or the acceptance of its potential collapse. A rapid shift to clean technology to power modern societies is necessary, now more than ever.