World population (rounded)
1804 (and all human history up to this time) - 1 billion (usually much less)
1927 (123 years later) doubles to 2 billion
1975 (48 years later) doubles to 4 billion
c.2024 (50 years later) doubles to 8 billion.
Before the Industrial Revolution, the world population could not rise about approximately 1 billion. It is the increase in productivity that began in Britain in the late 1700s - and was initially driven by the European/ descended industrialising nations - that allowed the eightfold increase since that time.
The extra 7 billion people that the world carries currently, is a consequence of the Industrial Revolution; with its vast and complex infrastructure of specialisation and trade sustained by a vast infrastructure of functional human capability and work.
In turn, that vast infrastructure depends on growth in production of essentials fuelled by growth in productivity - that growth in productivity is just-as essential as food, water, medicines etc. But productivity has now been locked-down on a global scale, into a sudden and massive reversal (with size unknown and sequential consequences unknowable).
History is therefore no guide to our present situation. For example, the crucial difference between the world during the Great Depression of the 1920s and 30s and the world now, is an extra 6 billion people.
When The System goes down, most of the people in the world will die - since they absolutely depend on The System for supporting that extra 7 billion.
And when most of the people in the world die, that fact also will have (ahem) many knock-on effects.
History is no guide: there is no guide. Our situation is unprecedented and the outcome cannot be predicted, beyond such broad-outline realities as described above.
Yet there is nothing to be gained in worrying about what's coming.
We are each and all standing in the path of a tsunami/ comet/ pyroclastic flow in a real-life mega-disaster movie; and there is nowhere to run.
As WmJas says https://narrowdesert.blogspot.com/2020/04/to-those-in-despair.html: our primary (minimal) task here-and-now is to learn Not to be scared.
