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While some people live beyond the age of 100, the human race would only be around for a few decades art a push, according to Birmingham University anthropology Professor Michael Little/
The Professor said this is because society needs young people to care for the elderly and drive economic growth.
He wrote: “Eventually, civilization would crumble. It’s likely that there would not be many people left within 70 or 80 years, rather than 100, due to shortages of food, clean water, prescription drugs and everything else that you can easily buy today and need to survive.”
After the final human is born, a countdown would begin as everyone simply grows older until everyone dies from old age.
Professor Little said: “Eventually, there would not be enough young people coming of age to do essential work, causing societies throughout the world to quickly fall apart.
“Some of these breakdowns would be in humanity’s ability to produce food, provide healthcare and do everything else we rely on.
“Food would become scarce even though there would be fewer people to feed.”
There are many reasons why people could stop having children, Professor Little said, such as a disease making people infertile or a nuclear war.
While a few viruses, like HIV, the Zika virus and a few STIs such as HPV, can lead to infertility, they very rarely do so or only have very mild effects.
So, a virus wiping out the world’s ability to have children is, for now, just science fiction, though male fertility rates area worry among scientists.
But a rapidly ageing population and declining birth rate are very much real.
Earth is home to 8,200,000,000 human beings, with the global population increasing since the end of the Black Death around 1350.
And the number of humans will keep rising until about 2080, when the \un expects the size of humanity to peak at 10.3 billion, before it drops slightly.
A reason for the slowdown is because people are having fewer babies in some parts of the world. But those countries are now having a new issue, an ageing population, as they’re under the 2.1 children per woman rate with their population stable. In China, for example, the population rate is just 1.18.
This is also happening in the UK, where the fertility rate fell to just 1.44 children per woman down from 2.47 in 1946.
The Ageing population is a problem, Professor Little said, because young people are the “engineers of society” who keep new ideas flowing and work jobs that elderly people would struggle to do.
Source: Metro
