From More Than Human
Ramez Naam examines the future of population in the light of advancing healthy life extension technologies, a discussion reprinted with permission from his book More Than Human. Copyright © Ramez Naam. How will longer lives affect world population? Certainly anything that keeps people alive longer will increase the number alive at any given point. However, the details of population growth can be rather counterintuitive. Consider that today the countries with the longest life expectancies at birth have populations that are remaining steady or even shrinking. For example, the UN Population Division expects the populations of Japan, Italy, Germany, and Spain to all decrease over the next 50 years, despite the fact that Japan has the highest life expectancy of any large country, and the Western […]