Reference: The Wilson Quarterly and Martin Walker's article,

The World's New Numbers (2009). www.wilsoncenter.org

Why current U.N. population projections (2009)

may turn out to be serious underestimates

This is to offer two observations concerning the

revised U.N. population projections
tions of 2008:

I.
Medicine, Life
Life-extension, and Underestimates
The most recent U.N. population projections could, like so many demographic projections in the past,
again turn out to be dramatic underestimates of the numbers that actually emerge. Why?

Because in the past, decades of falling birth rates were expected to slow rates of population growth. The
factor that has repeatedly confounded such projections, however, is that medical advances end up
lowering death rates more dramatically than expected so that dramatic reductions in mortality end up
canceling-out
out tendencies otherwise suggested by falling birth rates.

Result? In the past, real-world

world populations with decades of falling birth
birth rates (e.g., Sri Lanka 1938
1938-1984)
routinely ended up not just growing larger, but growing faster-than-ever
ever (see data below).

Births Deaths Extra

Year per 10000 per 1000 per 1000
Campbell, Mitchell, and Reese, 1997.

1939 35 21 .14 .
1940 34 20 14
Birth rates
1945 38 20 18
1947 36 19 17
1950 39 11 28
1955 35 09 26
1960 32 08 24
1965 33 09 24
1970 30 08 22 Death rates
1975 28 06 22
1980 25 06 19
1984 27 06 .21.

Examining the data,, we notice that for every thousand residents of Sri Lanka in 1939,, there were 35 births and 21 deaths. Thus, by the end of the
year,, each person who died had been replaced, physcially-speaking, and then - fourteen extra babies were born per 1000. By 1984, however, as a
result of dramatic reductions in the death rate (due partly to the war on malaria) there were twenty-one extra babies born per thousand. Thus, not
only was Sri Lanka's population almost a half-century
half larger, but its rate of growth had actually increased by fifty percent.

This last fact is the lesson that Sri Lanka holds for the world today: Even if we succeed in lowering birth
rates around the world, progress in medical research, life
life-extension,
extension, and biotechnologies may well end up
loweringg death rates even more. Thus, while both trends each constitute one sort of good news, at the end
of the day, when taken together, our populations could end up growing faster instead of more slowly.
If a similar set of events takes place worldwide and affects generations now living, world population by
2100 could end up closer to 13 billion than to the 9 or 10 billion imagined by current U.N. projections.
And, if we are already close to or beyond earth's long-term limits (we are), each of these extra and
unexpected billions increases the possibility and seriousness of overshoot (and the likelihood of collapse).

Recent research studies, for example, have succeeded in multiplying lifespan in laboratory organisms six-
fold. In a recent review article, for instance, Cynthia Kenyon (2005) reports on six-fold extensions of
lifespans that have already been achieved in laboratory organisms, noting that in human terms, an equi-
valent extension would result in healthy, active 500-year-olds.

(If what has already been accomplished, then, in actual laboratory organisms can ever be widely-achieved
in human populations, some replacement-level fertility rates may, perhaps, have to fall to just 4/10ths of a
child per woman - per century?)

(And life-extensions of 500 years in human beings are not necessary in order to confound current U.N.
population projections. If only twenty or thirty or forty-year extensions develop out of the research that is
currently taking place, we will far overshoot the U.N.'s world population prospects as published this past
spring.)

Thus, the suppostions above may actually be surprisingly more realistic than they at first seem. For ex-
ample, over the past one hundred years, our species has followed a repeated pattern following new dis-
coveries and technical advances:

First there is an initial achievement or discovery that is quickly followed by rapid advances, proliferation,
and wide and novel applications. A good example of this is illustrated by the development of aeronautics.
At Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright flew a heavier-than-air vehicle for
twelve seconds and a distance of 120 feet. Less than seven decades later, U.S. astronauts traveled to the
moon, landed on its surface, and returned safely to earth again in just over one week.

Similar patterns have also characterized the development of computers, DNA technologies, commun-
ications, and molecular biology – each beginning with technical advances, followed by quick proliferation
and progression to today's capabilities with breathtaking speed.

All of the above examples thus suggest that today's advances in medicine, molecular genetics, and life-ex-
tension may have far-reaching impacts on death rates and demographics in the half-century just ahead.

II
Problematic Aspects of Demographic Transition Theory

Suppose that science and medical research bring about advances that result in relatively sudden and
unexpected reductions in mortality. In this circumstance, current demographic theory envisions a period
of “demographic transition” during which there is a time-delay before reductions in fertility occur to
reflect the reduced mortality (and during this lag-time, populations skyrocket as births greatly exceed the
lowered death rates).

Finally, however, after one or more generations, current theory postulates a gradual decline in fertility
rates that slowly reduces them to levels commensurate with mortality rates, and a population stabilizes.
Thus, demographers commonly envision our time of soaring populations as a transition period during
which fertility rates have not yet caught up to our falling mortality rates. And they hope, imagine, and
suppose that the transition will complete itself any decade now. One problem is, however, that such
anticipations may well be subverted by a problematic aspect of transition theory.

How? Why? Because science, medicine, and technology lower mortality rates not just once, but
repeatedly - over and over and over again – so that we live in a perpetual state of transition. In other
words, we repeatedly extend and perpetuate the period of demographic transition (with its skyrocketing
populations) so that its completion never occurs or is repeatedly postponed.

(In effect, each of our breakthroughs in medicine and life-extension re-initiate the transition period,
delaying its completion and extending its duration more and more - so that our falling fertility rates are
never allowed to catch up.) As fertility rates slowly and gradually adjust to an initial mortality reduction,
today’s genetics, technologies, and medical advances institute a second, third, fourth, and fifth mortality
reduction in increasingly quick succession.

As a result, falling fertility never catches up to the multiple new reductions in mortality and the interim
stage of the transition (with its period of soaring population) is never completed. (It will be completed
eventually, of course, but with each delay in the transition, the completion is increasingly likely to occur
as a collapse.)

What current theory does not fully articulate, therefore, is the role of science, technology, and medicine
that are currently making reductions in death rates so quickly and repeatedly that offsetting fertility
reductions do not (or cannot) occur in the short times available.

And finally, the coup de grace of all this is that the emerging advances in longevity seen in laboratory
organisms (and compounds, perhaps, like resveratrol) seem set to perhaps amplify and worsen our current
overshoot and carry us calamitously past natural thresholds and tipping points that should not be
transgressed, so that our degree of overshoot becomes so great that complete collapse can no longer be
avoided.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, the earth's carrying capacity for an industrialized humanity is almost
certainly somewhat less than two billion, and, considering the fact that we are on-track to add our seventh,
eighth, and ninth billions between now and mid-century, a continuation of today's demographic tidal
wave may constitute the greatest single risk that our species has ever undertaken.

As a member of the natural science community, I concur entirely with one of the "asides" in Martin
Walker's article, The World's New Numbers (2009): "Whether the biosphere can adapt to such increases
in consumption remains a critical question."

Copyright 2009, R. Femmer.

All rights reserved.
Anson, A. 2009. What Every Citizen Should Know About Our Planet,
The Wecskaop Project, M. Arman Publishing, Florida.

Kenyon, C., 2005. The plasticty of aging: insights from long-lived mu-
tants. Cell 120 (25 Feb 2005): 449-460.

Kenyon, C., et al. 1993. A C. elegans mutant that lives twice as long as
wild type. Nature 366: 461-464.

U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2009. World Popu-

lation Prospects Report, 2008 revision.

Walker, M. 2009. The World's New Numbers. The Wilson Quarterly.

http://wilsoncenter.org, accessed August 30, 2009.