Longevity and coping with an ever increasing population
Replace the defence budget with a space colonisation budget and everyone board can be shipped off planet
Join the club for FREE to access the whole archive and other member benefits.
A common concern about life extension is that we would rapidly overrun the planet, and without management, this could happen. However, there a few factors in our favour.
In many countries, fertility rates are already dropping below that required to maintain a population, and without immigration the number of people living there would be falling.
Even with biological immortality, if people were limited to one child each, then there would be a finite maximum population to deal with. And biological immortality does not mean fictional immortality - people will still die in accidents, conflict or by choice, meaning the global population would eventually start falling again.
We will have a lot of time to come up with a solution - the population won't double overnight, it might take a 100 years or so, and it's impossible to imagine what technologies may have been developed by then to help.
According to David Wood of London Futurists if death stopped tomorrow it
would take a hundred years to double the planet's
See also: Space Colonization
Click on resource name for more details.
Replace the defence budget with a space colonisation budget and everyone board can be shipped off planet
Telegraph - 03-Mar-2023
China’s population could peak at 1.4bn in 2025 then almost drop by half by the end of the century
Read more...BBC - 25-Aug-2022
Billions of dollars spent as incentive is not convincing people to have children
Read more...The Guardian - 17-Jan-2022
Government policies have not reversed long-term decline in population growth
Read more...Guardian - 20-Sep-2021
Worldwide 28% of countries adopt pronatalist policies to drive up the birthrate
Read more...BBC - 25-Jun-2021
Covid may not be the only reason; fewer births and older population also fuel death rates
Read more...