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Originally Posted by redpoint5
Agreed, and the calculation should include the tens of billions of people who existed due to fossil fuel exploitation and the ensuing massive increase in life expectancy.
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Medicine has increased life expectancy, and you can say it is part of industrialization. Could we have gotten as far as we have with medicine without the rest, or most of the rest of industrialization? I don't know, perhaps not.
But as for "billions of people who existed due to fossil fuel exploitation" is completely false. The industrial revolution did not increase population growth and in fact countries that are industrialized tend to have lower birth rates. If we hadn't gone into an industrial revolution there would be more people than there are now. And as more countries become more and more industrialized the worlds population will stop growing and start shrinking. So no, you can't attribute the existence of tens of billions of people to the exploitation of fossil fuels.
But in the end, having fewer people but that live longer isn't necessarily a bad thing either. So yes, in some ways some people live longer due to technology and an industrialized world, and others die younger. I wonder what the total life expectancy would be if you included all the people who have died that can be attributed to industrialization, such as people who died in modern warfare or in third world countries affected by things like pollution.