Fact or Fiction?: Living People Outnumber the Dead

[BurtWorm]

What would you bet?


http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa004&articleID=09E07C6F-E7F2-99DF-3AD087F0DA77D94F


Booming population growth among the living, according to one rumor, outpaces the dead
By Ciara Curtin

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. " almost surely true people alive today are some small fraction of people," says Joel Cohen, a professor of populations at the Rockefeller and Columbia Universities in New York City.

For this myth ever to be valid there would have to be more than 100 billion people living on Earth. "How cozy," Cohen says. "It just doesn't seem plausible," he adds....

[Deja Q]

1. Don't blame Americans.

:D

100 billion also sounds like a figure from a sloppily written sci-fi show... and, sadly, I know one or two that have used such a bizarre figure!

[whistle]

8. Range from 45 billion to 125 billion, so we still have some ways to go

<link> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population


<snip> Number of humans that have ever lived


Estimates of the number of human beings who have ever lived on Earth constitute an extremely large range, with low estimates around 45 billion, and the highest estimates topping out around 125 billion. Many of the more robust estimates fall into the range of 90 to 110 billion humans.

It is impossible to make anything close to a precise count of the number of human beings who have ever lived, for the following reasons:

The specific range of characteristics, physiological, psychological and cultural, which define a modern human being, continue to be a subject of intense scholarly research and debate. Until such debates are completely resolved, it is impossible to know just when in human history one might begin the count. Resolving these debates would require drawing a thin line between early humans and pre-humans and in the lack of anthropological evidence, the placing of such a line is shaped by the personal interpretation of experts and remains arbitrary at best.
Even if the scientific community reached wide consensus regarding what characteristics defined the very first human beings, it would be nearly impossible to pin point the exact decade, century, or millennium which they first appeared. The fossil record is simply too scarce. Only a few thousand fossils of early humans have ever been found, most no bigger than a tooth or a knucklebone. While that may sound like a large number, it is truly minuscule when you consider that these few thousand bone fragments must be used to extrapolate the population distribution of millions of early human beings spread thinly across the face of the Earth.
Until the late 1700s, exceedingly few nations, kingdoms, or empires had ever performed a census that was considered to be anything more than a rough estimate. In many of these early attempts, the focus was not even on counting people, but merely a subset of the people for purposes of taxation or military service. Even with the advent of agencies like the United States Bureau of the Census, reliable census methods and technologies continue to evolve right into the twenty-first century. Even today, these reliable methods and technologies are not applied uniformly in all parts of the world. In short it has been less than two centuries that we have had anything that remotely resembles the robust statistical data that would be needed to perform a calculation regarding the total number of humans that have ever lived.
Any such precise population count offered by any source is simply the numeric result of populations statistics, which necessarily used estimates and rough averages as their basis. While they may, if done astutely, provide us with a remote idea about the number of humans who have ever lived on the Earth, the margin of error should always be regarded as being in the billions, or even the tens of billions of people.

"Guesstimating the number of people ever born... requires selecting population sizes for different points from antiquity to the present and applying assumed birth rates to each period..."<15>

According to 2002 data:<15>

The number who have ever been born is 106,456,000,000
The world population in mid-2002 was 6,215,000,000
The percentage of those ever born who were living in 2002 was 5.8%

[yella_dawg]

2. Only if the Earth is 6,000 years old.

Summation is a powerful tool when allowed to run for millennia.

[Quantess]

11. That's what I was going to say.

There's no way the living outnumber the dead.

[salvorhardin]

3. I've used it

I'll cop to having used that factoid before. I think I also recall it being used on James Burke's Connections. Good to know that someone actually thought this through.

[mainegreen]

4. Yah, that ones right up there with 'you only use 5% of your brain' or the ever fun

water goes clockwise down the drain in the Northern Hemisphere and counter-clockwise in the Southern.

[Esra Star]

10. I'm 27 degrees south of the equator and I can report that

the water does go counterclockwise down the drain.

[mainegreen]

12. its got nothing to do with what hemisphere you are in

and everything to do with the shape of your sink/toilet and how the water is deflected when it enters the sink.
The coriolis force does not control the direction that water goes down the drain. It's a big myth.

[Esra Star]

13. You sound pretty sure of your facts. I agree that the shape of the

container can influence the direction, but in a non-biased
situation, I would expect that the directions do differ
north to south.
It does beg the question as to what happens on the equator
and also at the poles.
I'll do more experiments using other basins.

[OPERATIONMINDCRIME]

5. Hmm. Upon Research On This Seems Definitely False

Different estimates put the dead at between 12 billion and like 110 billion, so I'd say no.

[pbca]

6. The figure I heard...

In Ronald Wright's "A Brief History of Progress" was that of all the humans (humans as we'd know them today) that have ever walked the Earth one in four is currently alive.

[IntravenousDemilo]

7. Whatever the case may be, "Hail Malthus!" n/m

[creeksneakers2]

9. Eeeks!

Where did they put all those dead people?

[Tom Joad]

14. Living people certainly move around more, and watch more TV, that's all i know.