In the middle of the seventeenth century the philosopher Thomas Hobbes described life in a state of nature, a hypothetical condition without government or rule of law, as ‘nasty, brutish and short’. Those words, particularly the last, could have been applied far beyond the shores of Hobbes’s England. Besides the issue of war in both his homeland and abroad – relative constants prior to the twentieth century but particularly severe in the 1640s – his was also a world absent of modern medicine and where adult men rarely lived beyond forty. By the mid-1800s, however, that had changed as the application of the scientific method to healthcare and hygiene saw the mortality rate of infants and children sharply decline. Previously high fertility rates, combined with more children surviving to adulthood, inevitably meant unprecedented population growth among those countries at the forefront of the Second Disruption.
The implications of this were profound. While it took hundreds of thousands of years for the world’s human population to reach 1 billion by 1800, it would only be another hundred and twenty before it doubled once more. This proved to be just the start, however, and by the end of the twentieth century the Earth’s human population had reached 6 billion, with forecasts for the middle of this century of around 9.6 billion. If confirmed that will mean the world’s human population has increased tenfold in around 300 years.
Two other trends accompanied this surge in population. The first was extended life expectancy. By 2015 the average human, anywhere in the world, could expect to reach seventyone years of age – an improvement of four decades on even the early twentieth century. The second was an inverse correlation, with fertility rates falling as a country becomes wealthier. Just as a country’s population increases during industrialisation, this later self-adjusts as birth rates fall once a certain level of development is attained. Thus while the last two centuries have seen the world’s population surge, and the time between respective doublings becoming successively shorter, this is now slowing down, and many expect the world’s population to peak towards the end of this century. Just as with energy consumption, it appears that there is something of a ‘natural’ limit on demographic growth.
Editing Destiny
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