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Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl
How are you supporting over a billion people in the USA? Are we talking a dystopia society like Judga Dredd where human life is hardly worth the bullet to end it?
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Nope. Life in the USA in 2120 is actually fair-to-decent for most people (it's not utopia, some poverty and misery still exists, but for most people life is OK to decent). They support ~1 billion people the same we support ~300 million, by means of more advanced technology and complicated infrastructure. The USA of 1850 couldn't have supported 300 million, either. It's not even necessarily any more crowded than today, because one of the paradoxes of large rich populations is that you can afford to spread out.
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How do you end up with a billion people in the USA anyway? Population growth is +6.7% per decade with immigration in 2020, and it is trending down. It is supposed to stabilize by 2040 and turn negative after 2050, like what is happening in Europe right now. At best, the population will be 500 million in 2100. At worst, it could be 300 million, less than the current population.
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The short answer is: several major waves of politically and economically driven immigration, interspersed with closed periods, combined with female fertility refusing to follow trends any better than it has in the past, plus cloning/artificial people and life-extension techhnologies and other technological 'newness' that did not exist in the past. The long answer is that it's a
long story. Global population in 2100 is about 12.5 billion, with Asia still leading.