Does the birth of one person guarantee the indirect death of another?

Question

Has anyone created a computer simulation that predicted how the effects of immortality or extended life would effect humanity on a global scale?

Answer 1

The birth of a person guarantees the death of one person, that same person. Right now, the death rate is 1 per person.

Scientists are doing computer simulations of population growth all the time. Any meaningful increase of average lifespan would of course result in an increase in population growth rate, if nothing else changed. You could predict growth until earth's resources were depleted. You could predict that intelligent people would reduce their birth rate to help prevent this occurrence. You could predict that the ignorant and apathetic would just keep on reproducing as they do now.

The really good side of serious longevity research is that it looks like it will extend our healthy life, not just our life. That means more productive years to balance our unproductive years, to amortize and exploit our education, to accumulate wisdom.

Answer 2

Not at the moment, no. Should the resources on the planet ever become so limited that there is only enough food, water, clean air, shelter, etc., to provide minimal survival to the entire world population, THEN the birth of another person might guarantee the death of another. Should the population continue to increase at that point, it would be highly likely that each birth might then result in the deaths of SEVERAL people, as resources would need to be redistributed to keep this new child alive and, in the redistribution process, essential resources might be taken from multiple people... directly or indirectly resulting in their own slow, miserable deaths.

Despite the incredibly large world population of current, it seems as though the world DOES currently have enough essential resources to provide survival for the entire human race. However, it is important to note that thousands, perhaps even millions of people die every year due to starvation, dehydration, respiratory problems, etc., and many of these deaths could be prevented by increasing the quantity and improving distribution of essential survival materials.

As of yet, I know of no such computer model that is able to determine exactly how many lives could be saved (though I'm guessing that most, if not all of these deaths could be prevented if the world's resources were not so unevenly divided between wealthy and poor nations). Whether or not there is an exact population number, i.e., a population "cap" of the planet earth at which the planet is no longer able to provide the necessary resources to continue population growth, I can not say for sure; if there is, it is highly unlikely that anyone in our lifetimes will be able to accurately predict or produce a computer simulation or equation that might be able to determine this number, as there are far too many factors involved (quantity of available food depends on quality of soil, distribution of plant and animal species, weather conditions, etc.; quantity of clean breathable oxygen depends on ratio of flora to fauna as well as the quantity of chemicals and particulates present in the air, and so on).

One thing that I can virtually guarantee, however, is that the birth of one person does indirectly guarantee a lower overall quality of life for the remainder of the population; in a world of finite resources that must be divided amongst an ever-growing quantity of lifeforms, ultimately, the more consumers present in the system, the fewer resources will be available to allocate to each individual person or animal. Think about it this way: if you have 3 children and 12 hamburgers, and you wish to divide these resources evenly amongst your children, each child will be able to have 4 hamburgers. However, if you have a 4th child, and you still wish to be fair to all of them, each child will only be able to have 3 hamburgers. If you continue to have children, each child will have less and less to eat, unless you either acquire more hamburgers, or get rid of some of your children (which would be highly unethical, so the only viable choice is to somehow acquire more hamburgers). Obviously, in our world, the resources are certainly not evenly distributed; some of the children have 12 hamburgers all to themselves, and others have only mere crumbs. Those with more 'hamburgers' are able to enjoy a higher quality of life than those with fewer, at least in terms of survival resources.

Of course, eating hamburgers every day would eventually be detrimental to your health, actually leading to a LOWER quality of life; but I used hamburgers only as an example. I think you get the idea.

Answer 3

hey man let me remind u of age of empires ,yeah the same old game try making more and more of people and then u will see what happens ,the best example would be

black and white - this pc game is known for its life like simulation ,here people need food all the time and the rest of the shelter gold etc etc,try making them immortal by using a cheat and you will soon see the result.

Answer 4

Oy vey. Look, what in the world makes people think that these things really effect each other that way. If they truly did, numbers wouldn't steadily increase in the population. I think that the way to diminish overpopulation is to busy people working on their lives goals. This makes people have less time to get bored and start looking for something/somebody to do.

Answer 5

Atoms are the first organization of matter and are not very stable. They are constructed and reconstructed. (please somebody fix a computer simulation).
Life is, one way or another, organization of matter.
Death is the decomposition of matter.
New life and death are of course related.
We cannot be immortal.
We cannot predict future by computer simulations, yet. We have the life and death cat-mice simulations but this gives us a very narrowed glimpse of future.
Life expectations is very complex, so maybe in another life ...

Answer 6

no- if that were the case then the world would not be over populated. america has doubled in size in the last 21 years. and poorer countries 50% more than America

Answer 7

No, births and deaths happen, they don't necessarily cause each other...otherwise, the planet wouldn't have seen a population increase.

Answer 8

Well we would be over populated adn would go in to a meltdown for resources etc

Answer 9

they say that it is true, that when one is born, another in the family will die! but i dont think its true, or at least not for my family! im sure in some families, its worked out this way.. so many babies come into the world, so someone has to eventually die too.

Answer 10

What? If that were true, why is the earth's population increasing?