Supplement to Pascal's wager: what if having subscribed to the nonsense could cost us immortality. (Jean Rostand, 1894-1977, Thoughts of a biologist) ---------------------------------
Theme of the month. Demography and life with an aging negligible.
--------------------------------- Never in the history of mankind, we n 'have been so many. And every day the world population is still increasing. But it increases less rapidly.
more citizens have a high standard of living, the longer they live. And parallel, more citizens have a standard of living and long-lived, less children they have. In recent decades, this has been so spectacular that even in countries where life is longer, the population began to decline.
It is therefore possible to imagine that, contrary to intuition, a world without aging will be a world with a relatively weak growth of the population.
A Russian researcher Leonid Gavrilov, and was delivered to projections based on the Swedish population. If by some miracle tomorrow (or "by nightmare" for some), mortality due to aging disappear, but other parameters remained the same, in a half-century, the population of the Scandinavian country would have risen only 35%.
In fact, if it slows the aging radical, the most likely evolution is:
- Firstly, if life expectancy is much longer, it will be possible for women to be fertile much longer, the population will have almost tends to stabilize because many women decide to wait longer to have kids.
- Then, for several decades, the population would increase relatively slowly at a rate slightly faster than if the death of old age was maintained but not much more.
- This is the long term, though several generations able to coexist and have children if previous generations continue to have children than the population change is worrying. But when the aging become negligible, we have decades to adapt. In fact, the adjustment period will be as long as the time that was necessary-in many states of the world to go to the birth of four children per couple to two-child per couple or less.
Fear of overpopulation dates back centuries. It is an Anglican clergyman and economist Thomas Malthus who will be the most famous propagator of the idea of the danger of too rapid increase of population, there is a little over 200 years. This fear was spreading that the world population was less than one billion inhabitants. Today with more than 8 times the world's citizens, the level way of life achieved is immensely greater than that which prevailed in the year 1800. Even if there is enough for hundreds of millions of global citizens,
So it is, we repeat, that after half a century we have to choose between living longer and have much children today. Unless the world has changed in the meantime so that these issues arise in a way that most of us can not even imagine today.
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The good news this month: Belgium expectancy of healthy life seems to increase faster than expected Life
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According indicators of social protection in Belgium published recently, not only contrary to what is often asserted, not only increases life expectancy but also life expectancy in good health. And even better than that, according to published figures, life expectancy in good health rise more quickly. Thus, between 2004 and 2006, life expectancy in good health at age 65 would have increased by one year for men (from 8.5 to 9.5 years) and 1, 4 year for women (from 8.4 to 9.8 years).
• For more information: http://sens.org , http://imminst.org , http://heales.org and http://immortalite.org for information on population projections in Sweden: http://www.psychologytoday .com/blog/adventures-in-old-age/200912/would-immortality-become-overpopulation-nightmare and indicators for social protection in Belgium: http://socialsecurity.fgov.be/docs/fr/ publicaties/belgian-social-protection-2010-fr.pdf .
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