Even if millions of people were to die in a five year long global war that killed the same proportion of people as both the World Wars did, it would not significantly change the world’s population by the year 2100.

There will still be between 5-10bn people on the planet in 86 years if there was a major event that knocked out millions of people, researchers from the University of Adelaide, Australia, have said.

They also said that if the world had the same one-child policy that exists in China it would also not make a huge difference to the overall population size.

At present there are around 7.25bn alive on the planet today – which has more than doubled in the last 50 years. But this will continue to grow with no “quick fix,” according to the researchers.

“Even a world-wide one-child policy like China’s, implemented over the coming century, or catastrophic mortality events like global conflict or a disease pandemic, would still likely result in 5-10 billion people by 2100,” said Professor Barry Brook who worked on the research.

“We were surprised that a five-year WWIII scenario mimicking the same proportion of people killed in the First and Second World Wars combined, barely registered a blip on the human population trajectory this century,”

The scientists say that the growth has been so dramatic that roughly “14% of all the human beings that have ever existed are still alive today.”

And the continuing growth will naturally put a strain on the planet’s resources.

“This is considered unsustainable for a range of reasons, not least being able to feed everyone as well as the impact on the climate and environment,” said Brook.

“We examined various scenarios for global human population change to the year 2100 by adjusting fertility and mortality rates to determine the plausible range of population sizes at the end of this century.”

However it may not be as gloomy as the researchers are predicting as the number of growing technologies that can provide us with more energy is growing by the day.

Scientist Aubrey de Grey has previously said that nuclear fusion and other advanced tech will be available by the year 2100, which will help to balance out the increased demand.

The news that even another world war could not prevent the growth in population will hopefully put to bed the age-old theories that a war will slow down the growth of the plant.

But the researchers say that there need to policy decisions made which can help to constrain the size of the population.

Effective family planning decisions and more reproductive education will ease some of the strain in the short term, it was said.

Brook said: “Often when I give public lectures about policies to address global change, someone will claim that we are ignoring the ‘elephant in the room’ of human population size.

Yet, as our models show clearly, while there needs to be more policy discussion on this issue, the current inexorable momentum of the global human population precludes any demographic ‘quick fixes’ to our sustainability problems”

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