Why do I keep (mis)remembering a fact that most members of the human race are alive right now?
exponential growth is something our brains cant naturally process.
How many people have ever lived on Earth?
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Re: How many people have ever lived on Earth?
#12If you are just curious, the number is 117B people who was ever born on Earth. High amount of guesstimates and assumptions involved. Yadda yadda popsci article phrases.
what are the error bands on this?
Doing some rough back-of-the-envelope calculations, I wouldn't be shocked for any value between 100 and 200 billion.
You end up with estimates of high single billions for all humans pre-Neolithic (pre-urban settlement)--the error bars are very high, but it doesn't make a large difference in the grand scheme of things because it's the smallest component. For urban settlement essentially before good, sustained record keeping (think ~10kya to 1kya), you're looking at several tens of billions of people, with several tens of billions more in the era of modern record keeping. Right now, it takes about 6 years or so for a billion babies to be born.
(For my part, I think the estimate they give here is on the low end. I don't know the sources they're using, but I've generally observed that estimates of pre-modern demography have generally trended upwards in more recent scholarship.)
Re: How many people have ever lived on Earth?
#13Why do I keep (mis)remembering a fact that most members of the human race are alive right now?
Same thing -- I know I came across that at some point in the past few years, and it seemed reasonable enough given exponential growth that I just accepted it as true without researching it further.
Turns out it's one of those totally wrong "factoids" that nevertheless keeps getting repeated (like the only man-made structure you can see from space being the Great Wall, etc.), and which dates as far back as the 1970's according to Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...
Re: How many people have ever lived on Earth?
#14Why do I keep (mis)remembering a fact that most members of the human race are alive right now?
2007 Fact or Fiction?: Living People Outnumber the Dead
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...
Arthur C Clarke https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/212808-behind-every-man-now... "Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth."
also Snopes (updated 2007) https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/recount-your-dead/
no they don't. Here is the beginning of the Scientific Amercian article:
The human population has swelled so much that people alive today outnumber all those who have ever lived, says a factoid whose roots stretch back to the 1970s. Some versions of this widely circulating rumor claim that 75 percent of all people ever born are currently alive. Yet, despite a quadrupling of the population in the past century, the number of people alive today is still dwarfed by the number of people who have ever lived.
In 2002 Carl Haub, a demographer at the Population Reference Bureau, a nongovernmental organization in Washington, D.C., updated his earlier estimate of the number of people that have ever existed. To calculate this, he studied the available population data to determine the human population growth rates during different historical periods, and used them to determine the number of people who have ever been born.
For most of history, the population grew slowly, if at all. According to the United Nations' Determinants and Consequences of Population Trends, the first Homo sapiens appeared around 50,000 years ago, though this figure is debatable. Little is known about this distant past and how many of us there might have been, but by the time of the agricultural revolution in the Middle East in 9000 B.C., Earth held an estimated five million people.
Between the rise of farming and the height of Roman rule,population growth was sluggish; at less than a tenth of a percent per year, it crawled to about 300 million by A.D. 1. Then the total fell as plagues wiped out large swathes of people. (The "black death" in the 14th century wiped out at least 75 million.) As a result, by 1650 the world population had only increased to about 500 million. By 1800, though, thanks to improved agriculture and sanitation, it doubled to more than one billion. And, in 2002 when Haub last made these calculations, the planet's population had exploded, reaching 6.2 billion.
To calculate how many people have ever lived, Haub followed a minimalist approach, beginning with two people in 50000 B.C.—his Adam and Eve. Then, using his historical growth rates and population benchmarks, he estimated that slightly over 106 billion people had ever been born. Of those, people alive today comprise only 6 percent, nowhere near 75 percent. "[It is] almost surely true people alive today are some small fraction of [all] people," says Joel Cohen, a professor of populations at the Rockefeller and Columbia Universities in New York City.
... more at above link https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...
Re: How many people have ever lived on Earth?
#15Why do I keep (mis)remembering a fact that most members of the human race are alive right now?
It's not most, but it's still remarkable that about 5% of humans who have ever lived haven't died.
To Whom It May Concern,
By reading this, you have confirmed your membership in the Five Percenters Club. Welcome.
Re: How many people have ever lived on Earth?
#16Why do I keep (mis)remembering a fact that most members of the human race are alive right now?
There's a version of this that may actually be correct if you restrict it to the number of humans ever older than 60 years old, but I admit I never followed up on that one. The roughly 100 billion ever claim I recall more readily as it's an interesting remark to give to people who think they see ghosts to see what they think of it and the related question of where they all are.
Re: How many people have ever lived on Earth?
#17Why do I keep (mis)remembering a fact that most members of the human race are alive right now?
It’s a catchy structure/fact that people use for many true things that reenforce misremembering false things. For example there have been many articles recently that more scientists are alive now than in all of history, which is probably true.
Re: How many people have ever lived on Earth?
#18Re: How many people have ever lived on Earth?
#19All of them.
Speak for yourself...
Re: How many people have ever lived on Earth?
#20Why do I keep (mis)remembering a fact that most members of the human race are alive right now?
There's a version of this that may actually be correct if you restrict it to the number of humans ever older than 60 years old, but I admit I never followed up on that one. The roughly 100 billion ever claim I recall more readily as it's an interesting remark to give to people who think they see ghosts to see what they think of it and the related question of where they all are.
Looks like that is false as well:
https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol36/54/36-54....
According to that, it's between 5.5 and 9.5% for age 65, nowhere close to 50+%.