There ’s a popular claim that the seven billion people alive today outnumber all other humans who have ever lived . It ’s meant as a stark reminder of world ’s population blowup over the last 200 years … but is it true , or full crap ?
This idea has gained a bit of raw up-to-dateness with the recent UN announcement that man has crossed the seven billion mark just thirteen years after we reach six billion and 25 years after we reached five billion . consider humanity only crossed the billion individual threshold around 1800 and the two billion mark in 1923 , it does n’t seem totally impossible that all the masses alive today might really outnumber their at rest counterpart going back to the very beginnings of humanity .
Not totally impossible … but also not right , either . BBC News speak to the Population Reference Bureau in Washington DC , and they estimate that about 107 billion people have been born since humanness first come forth , which they coif 50,000 age ago . ( That sound like an underestimate , consider the current scientific consensus favors a date more around 200,000 geezerhood ago , but the tiny universe intend that even an extra 150,000 age would only hang on on another few million or so . )
The key to this comparatively high figure is the amount of nativity per thousand people per yr , which today is about 23 . Throughout much of story , scads of people become flat before get to reproductive age , which mean many more children had to be born to keep the universe grow . The Population Reference Bureau says the figure in the Middle Ages was in all probability at least 80 birth per thousand , and it might have been significantly gamy than that .
The BBC also points out that these figures really justify the most famous universe estimation in science fiction history – that of Arthur C. Clarke in the beginning of the new variant of 2001 : A Space Odyssey , where he honour , “ Behind every valet de chambre now active stand 30 ghosts , for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living . ” While the 2012 variation of that statement would have to refer to 70 ghosts , Clarke was absolutely right when he compose it back in 1968 , when the population was 3.5 billion – and the ratio of dead to living was about 29 to 1 .
All this probably means that the aliveness will never outnumber the dead , unless humankind ’s universe irrupt by several orders of order of magnitude beyond what we ’ve already experienced . For what it ’s deserving , one route to this might involvethis estimatefrom the UN Population Division , which take down that , should 1995 fertility rates keep constant , the populace population in 2150 would be 256 billion – not that that was meant as a serious estimate .
Our one major planet almost certainly could n’t actually hold 107 billion people all at once , so the only real way to show this sure-enough chestnut tree straight would probably be to take to the stars and colonizing other world … and then take up breeding like rabbits , because what the nether region else are you go to do once you ’ve colonized an alien planet ?
ViaBBC News . Image by kevinpoh onFlickr .
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