End of the Human Race?

This Excel spreadsheet is a comparison of the predictions of the United Nation's World Health Organization, WHO, and the Verhulst, or Logistics equation.  

Antoine Verhulst was an 18th century science teacher who observed paramecia cultures increased population to a peak, then declined to zero.  He could not maintain a constant culture.  He tracked them by stirring vigorously, taking a sample and counting those one drop, extrapolated to find the population.  

From this data he derived an equation predicting the life of a culture.  With this he accurately predicted the population of the Dutch population in 1995 from 1780!  His equation has been applied to other species and predicted the rise and fall accurately, but we have not seen an application to the human race.  Perhaps it is not interesting politically.

Meanwhile back at the United Nations WHO they claim the human race will expand apace so we ran their projection in the second column, "per WHO" while we ran a Verhulst prediction in column five, "per Verhulst."

Nothing sells better than dystopian books and films presenting the end of the world or the end of the human race at the hands of space people, plague, CO2, ozone depletion, starvation or Donald Trump, if you live in New York, Massachusetts or California.

Meanwhile, at the National Vital Statistics System and Mortality agency there has been a recent release that has many people concerned:  "Life expectancy for the U.S. population in 2015 was 78.8 years, a decrease of 0.1 year from 2014.

The age-adjusted death rate increased 1.2% from 724.6 deaths per 100,000 standard population in 2014 to 733.1 in 2015.

The 10 leading causes of death in 2015 remained the same as in 2014. Age-adjusted death rates increased for eight leading causes and decreased for one.

The infant mortality rate of 589.5 infant deaths per 100,000 live births in 2015 was not significantly different from the 2014 rate.

The 10 leading causes of infant death in 2015 remained the same as in 2014, although two causes exchanged ranks. This report presents 2015 U.S. final mortality data on deaths and death rates by demographic and medical characteristics. These data provide information on mortality patterns among U.S. residents by variables such as sex, race and ethnicity, and cause of death. Life expectancy estimates, age-adjusted death rates by race and ethnicity and sex, 10 leading causes of death, and 10 leading causes of infant death were analyzed by comparing 2015 and 2014 final data."

Meanwhile back at the spreadsheet:  Notice at the top of column three, the progressions, labeled "Progress.", increase from 1960 to 1970, which could be an error, but decline from that point on, per the Verhulst Principle.  There is a bump up in 2010, but otherwise the trend is consistently down.  We approximate the rate to go forward all the way to 2250.  What does it all mean?

We trust Verhulst and the adaptability of man far more than the Paul Ehrlich generation of alarmist fear-mongers.  The rate of population decline is now well under way in Japan, Europe and the middle class of America.  We feel it is possible man will realize an equilibrium population point when science and technology are put to good use by our people.  The real challenge of the future will be what to do with our abundance?

Adrian Vance