• Question: As medicine constantly improves, so does life expectancy. It is estimated that by 2050 that the world's population will be 9.6 billion. What will happen when diseases no longer cause any deaths and the world's population becomes too high?

    Asked by to Bethany, Hannah, Keith, Peter, Ramya on 18 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Hannah Tanner

      Hannah Tanner answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      Thinking about this from a ecological perspective, when a population of any organism gets so big there are not enough resources left, the population gets smaller. If the population gets so big there is not enough food people would die of starvation. When resources like water, land, housing, food, fuel etc become scarce the price of them goes up – this means only some people can afford them. When the gap between the haves and have-nots gets too big this usually leads to conflict and wars – unfortunately it’s not only disease and disaster that kill people. Let’s hope that we can learn to live together and use science and technology to help make sure there’s enough for everyone.

    • Photo: Peter Elliott

      Peter Elliott answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      The amazing beauty of our world is adaptability. We are effectively in a constant war between our health and disease. Some times we win (we managed to eradicate small pox) and sometimes we face uphill struggles (cancer treatment, malaria etc).

      Currently we are facing a crisis over the use of antibiotics. We have not been using them properly and as a result we have been selecting for bacteria that can survive the drugs that use to kill them, they are adapting. It is feared that if antibiotics become ineffective then surgery will become high risk, even for simple procedures.

      So I think that the world will never become disease free. You are correct in that current knowledge is improving our life expectancy and there are strains being put on our planet. However, at the moment at least, there is more than enough food and water for everyone on the planet it is just not distributed evenly. Science has increased food supply once and I am certain that once the pressure gets to breaking point someone will find the answer to cater for the populations needs.

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