A lot of people worry about overpopulation, but maybe it’s population decline we should worry about instead?

- Norwegian version: Menneskeheten kan risikere å dø ut hvis vi ikke utvikler livsforlengende teknologier

In earlier times, population growth was limited by the fact that the majority of children died before they were old enough to have children themselves. Illness and lack of resources has probably contributed greatly to the high childhood mortality. Today our technology is better, and so we are able to utilize the Earth’s resources more efficiently, and now, luckily, most people survive childhood. This has led to a population explosion. The greater number of people has led to faster technological progress, which is making room for still more people, and so on — a virtuous circle that helps to give human beings a better standard of living.

But as we have gotten better standards of living, the number of children we get has declined. Just during the last 50 years, the number of children born per woman (fertility rate) has more than halved from 4.9 to less than 2.4 worldwide:

Yes, aging is the world’s biggest problem!

In this article I’ve compared aging to other potential world problems in terms of how many years of life each problem takes away from an average person.

Aging takes away about 1000 years of life per person in developed countries, so, obviously, no other problem comes close to that.

What’s the world’s biggest problem? Is it possible to say? Well, to be able to compare alternatives, you at least need some criterion to evaluate against, and what should that criterion be?

Here are some possibilities:

I wrote this two years ago, so should be 28 years now smile

“So considering how far we’ve come already and how fast technology is improving and can be expected to improve in the future, I don’t think there’s any doubt that we’ll have the aging process under control in less than 30 years. Maybe 30 years is too cautious an estimate, even. Ray Kurzweil has said that already by 2030, life expectancy will increase by one year per year, and I actually won’t be very surprised if he’s right. But everyone in the world won’t get access to the technology as early as Kurzweil estimates, which is why nearly 30 years might still be closer to the truth for most people?”

- Norwegian version: Hvis du lever om 30 år, er det gode sjanser for at du også kan leve om 1000 år

Sounds unlikely? It’s not — it’s actually quite likely.

The only way to get people to live for a thousand years or more is to develop advanced technologies that can manipulate our bodies down to the cellular and molecular level. So the question is whether humanity will develop the necessary technologies over the next 30 years, or not. Personally, I think it’s very close to 100% certain that we’ll manage to do this.