It was 72,000 years before Christ when the Toba volcano on the Indonesian island of Sumatra erupted. It is considered to be the biggest event in the world in the last one hundred thousand years.
As a result, a large area of the continent of Asia was covered in a layer three to ten centimeters thick. Some scientists believe that this sent the world into a volcanic winter that lasted for decades and nearly wiped out the human race.
Research shows that this event took place between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. At that time the total human population on earth was limited to only 10 thousand people.
Some experts believe that this is not just a coincidence. According to him, the reason for the low population of the world was the eruption of the Toba volcano. This is a very controversial theory, but there is no doubt that the ancestors of such a large population of humans today are very few.
Today, after thousands of years, man has reached every corner of the world. Even in the year 2018, scientists found a plastic bag at a depth of 10,898 meters in the ocean, while recently some man-made chemicals were found on the summit of Everest. Neither drought nor drought has escaped the impact of human activity.
The United Nations says that on November 15, 2022, the number of people alive on Earth at the same time will reach eight billion, 800,000 times the human population at the time of the Toba disaster.
The world's major forests are disappearing from the face of the earth
Opinions are divided about the massive increase in population. Some experts call it a success. In the year 2018, Jeff Bezos, the billionaire of the world of technology, predicted that in the future the number of humans will be one trillion (ten billion) and they will have spread throughout the solar system. He said that he is already preparing plans for it.
On the other hand, Sir David Attenborough, a British broadcaster and environmental historian, describes the enormous increase in human population as a 'plague for the earth'. He believes that this increase is behind every environmental problem facing humans today, whether it is climate change, loss of biodiversity, or conflicts over water, land, and other natural resources.
In 1994, when the total population of the world was five and a half billion, the Stanford University based in the US state of California calculated that the ideal human population in the world should be between one and a half to two billion.
So, has the human population on Earth exceeded the limit and what will be the effects of human dominance on the Earth? What should be the ideal human population on earth? There is no single agreed answer to these questions, but time is running out fast.