DEMOGRAPHY
Birth and Death
When you start thinking about birth and death, you have to begin with populations. The current world population (mid-1998) is estimated at somewhere very close to six billion people. To understand what that figure actually means, one needs to display it both as total number, as well as a phenomenon of growth. The graph on the following page is based on world population estimates since the first year of the Common Era (C.E.).
It is quickly apparent that with the dawn of the Renaissance and the end of the Middle Ages the human race has grown fruitful and multiplied.
There are a number of reasons why this has occurred, and we can probably attribute most of them to changes in food production, medicine, law, and perhaps transportation.
There are some who see the population slowing down between now and the year 2080 or so. Looking at the current numbers, they have hypothesized that the world's population will actually peak out at only about 10,000 million around the end of the twenty-first century. They base these numbers primarily on the estimated number of years it now takes to add a billion to the overall population, then they figure in an assumed increase in the use of contraceptives by developing countries, and the continuing rise in average ages across the globe.