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Raising the Bar on Bad Overpopulation Articles
(Wednesday December 16 2009)
 | I see that the work of the Gavrilovs on population trends with large increases in human longevity, funded by SENS Foundation, is reaching a wider audience. It is good to envisage a future in which we see less hysteric nonsense propagated about overpopulation: "In computer simulations, Gavrilov concluded that 'population changes are surprisingly slow in their response to a dramatic life extension. For example, we applied the cohort-component method of population projections to 2005 Swedish population for several scenarios of life extension and a fertility schedule observed in 2005. Even for very long 50-year projection horizon, with the most radical life extension scenario (assuming no aging at all after age 50), the total population increases by 35 percent only (from 9.1 to 13.3 million).' ... In other words, a population of immortal reproducing organisms can grow indefinitely in time, but not necessarily indefinitely in size, because asymptotic growth is possible ... The startling conclusion is that fears of overpopulation based on lay common sense and uneducated intuition are, in fact, grossly exaggerated. ... In brief, we found that defeating aging, the joy of parenting, and sustainable population size are not mutually exclusive. This is an important point, because it can change the current public perception that life extension necessarily leads to overpopulation." |
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