World War II

[Twizeguy]

Certain sources label the death toll of the war at 62mil to 78mil, so lets call it 70. If they had three kids each approximately how many more people would be alive today?

[imatfaal]

Depends on their age amongst other things. You can see this by imagining (this is clearly extreme) that all who died were 75 - ie all too old in normal course of events to have children, therefore no future births were stopped in this extreme.

 

Not sure you could ever be able to take account of every variable - and even if you did would the number really be interesting.

[Marat]

A further complexifying factor would be something analogous to the heightened death rate in bacteria when they grow in crowded circumstances causing the build-up of toxins to kill them off and thus restrain further growth. If the human population had been increasing at an accelerated rate because of the lack of deaths in World War II, there may well have been negative side-effects of this population growth which would have limited its impact, such as famines and more wars resulting from increased struggles for territory and resources.

 

Another thing to keep in mind for calculations is that most of the World War II deaths were male, and the population growth of a community is much more dependent on the number of women than the number of men, given that a very few males can fertilize countless females, while females can only have a limited number of offspring, though in humans this is again complicated by social rules regulating reproduction.

[michel123456]

If you look at a Population Pyramid, you can take an idea of the consequence of a war.

Here is the pyramid of Germany in 1946 (from here)

Special Population Pyramid: Germany, 1946

Population pyramids are a good way of spotting unusual circumstances in the composition of a population. Examine the population pyramid for Germany in 1946. The pyramid indicates that there were fewer young men then young women. This was of course the result of the loss of life incurring during World War II. There were also fewer births after the war due to the shortage of men.

 

If you go to this site, you will find something analog for the whole world. You can scroll through chronology. For year 1950, you will see 2 incursions: one for 5-9 years old population (loss of births during the war) and for 30-34 years old (the victims of War). As you go to next years you can observe the anomaly move up in the pyramid.

Edited June 3, 2011 by michel123456