I asked Grok how many humans are currently living on Earth. It said, “As of June 12, 2025, the world population is approximately 8.23 billion people. This estimate is based on projections from the United Nations and other demographic sources, which indicate the global population surpassed 8 billion in November 2022 and continues to grow at a rate of about 0.84% to 0.89% per year.”
Eight billion two hundred thirty million is a big number. That’s a whole lot of people. At the same time, most advanced countries are barely or not even replacing their dead with children. At the same time, we’ve been told that AI will make almost all of our cognitive work skills redundant and substandard.
These three facts being true at the same time means that the future of humanity is in flux. We know that people like Bill Gates and the other globalists think the answer is stop humans from producing children. That simplifies their work to merely managing a last generation of aging humans while the population of Earth is reduced to some tiny fraction of the current billions. And that lucky remnant will be the globalists who will inherit the Earth without all those messy and expensive plebians.
And they’re making a very good start to the plan. They’ve brainwashed a good chunk of the Millennials and the Zoomers into thinking producing children is morally wrong. They’ve convinced them that Gaia isn’t happy sharing the planet with humans and the best thing to do is play video games, watch porn and take drugs while waiting for death. Of course that’s not everyone. Plenty of people are still having kids but the numbers are way down.
The real question is how do we want the human population of Earth to exist going forward? Well, when I was young, we were told that the opposite problem existed. Malthusian theory said that eventually human population growth would eventually outstrip food supply and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; starvation, war, pestilence and death would ensue. The reason this didn’t happen is a combination of technological advances in food production (chemical fertilizers, pesticides, mechanical planting and harvesting equipment and superior plant species) and effective birth control agents.
At this point governments have to incentivize people (especially women) to have children. Hungary is one of the pioneers in this idea. They provide incentives for Hungarian women to have children and even provide lifetime tax-free status to women that have four children.
Obviously unlimited human reproduction could become a problem again in the future but currently the globalist campaign has made that an unlikely problem for the foreseeable future. But the question is will the United States shift its policies to try and restore fertility to at least replacement levels or will we depend on immigration to take up the slack? If we go with immigration then it’s inevitable that the country will change drastically. The culture that made America such a desirable place to live has already been eroded by the globalist program of demonizing the European descendants that built the nation. If this continues much longer it will inevitably turn the United States into a third world country like Brazil or Mexico.
As to what will be the eventual population of Earth (my original question), I think inevitably it will decrease. And this will be caused by the decay of Western civilization and the attendant degradation of food production capacity. Currently western countries feed the third world. And feed them so well that obesity is endemic throughout these poor countries. When Europe has transitioned to a majority non-European population it will no longer be able to “feed the world.” And the four horsemen will reappear to balance out the population back to food production limits. Within a century the population of Earth will be about a billion people. Should it be more? We’ll never know.