AMHERST, Mass. — Estimates predict that the global population will go into a steep decline around the year 2064. Various scientific models predict a “remarkable” drop in the human population, going from 9.7 billion people in that year to roughly 8.8 billion by 2100. Some nations may actually see their current populations cut in half by the end of this century. Now, an environmental health scientist from the University of Massachusetts Amherst is offering up a possible explanation for the predictions — too much social stress and meaningless, overwhelming social interactions taking place across social media and in real life.
Alexander Suvorov, associate professor in the UMass Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences, suspects that today’s culture of constant, empty, or overwhelming social interactions, often taking place online, are slowly but surely changing both reproductive behavior and reproductive physiology.
“A unique feature of the upcoming population drop is that it is almost exclusively caused by decreased reproduction, rather than factors that increase rates of mortality (wars, epidemics, starvation, severe weather conditions, predators, and catastrophic events),” Suvorov writes in the journal Endocrinology.
Dramatic declines in fertility
Prof. Suvorov’s hypothesis draws a line connecting reproductive trends with population densities. Essentially, the idea is that as populations grow and areas become more densely crowded, the quality and frequency of...
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