If 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.
The original claim seems to have been based on an internet hoax.
> All in all, it now looks pretty much indisputable, eight years on and despite his many protestations to the contrary, that Kohler (and by extension, me, and, by further extension, all those who have read and giggled at this story -- written, I hasten to say, by a person in an office in a country which at the time barely knew what the internet was, let alone having reliable access to it or knowing how to use it) have all fallen victim to a particularly fine hoax. The admirable mythbusting Snopes and Urbanlegends websites certainly reckon so, and to prove it supply the fake Nasa document on which the relevant chapter in Kohler's book is based.
There was once a married couple, Jan Davis and Mark Lee who both flew on STS-47, a 7 day mission to Spacelab in 1992.
Not saying sex did happen, but this would be the incident with the highest probability.
My money would actually be on sexual intercourse having happened on Mir, if it happened in space at all. Smaller crew size, and being under the supervision of the slowly failing Soviet Union followed by early Russia surely made it much easier to ignore certain orders than it is on the ISS.
But if it ever happened it hasn't been made public. Not that that's saying much.
I know people who work in mission operations, where they're basically on a Skype call with the ISS all day. Several years ago, there was one astronaut in particular who had to be frequently reminded to cover up. Once they're up there, no one can prevent them from doing what they want, especially if it's their last flight. They're professional in the sense of completing the mission, but they're humans with pilot personalities and nearly zero privacy to begin with.
There was an article in Playboy many years ago that I read (and the search results in that domain are now far too polluted - and yes, I did read the articles) that basically said "either you're going to need a lot of velcro or assistants.
The problem being that every action has an equal and opposite reaction makes certain activities more likely to result in new force vectors which in turn results in velocity that may lead to bumping into things you'd rather not bump while trying to bump uglies.
If the two of you are weightless in the middle of a room shouldn't you remain in the middle of the room so long as you don't throw anything?
Like if you wiggle your arms you won't start to swim through space so as long as your bodies are wiggling then you also shouldn't start to swim? As long as you kick your shoes after before not during it seems to me that there shouldn't be an issue.
You're working on a one body problem there. This is a two body problem where some force applied will cause a transfer of momentum from one body to another. Without something to tether the two bodies together, it is quite likely they'll move apart.
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.)
"Error bands" aren't really calculable for something like this, because a lot of it is as much definitions as anything else. As the article points out, there is a lot of uncertainty just when we say the first "modern home sapien" "counts" as a person.
If I wanted to include some weird little subspecies though, or even expanded it out to H. erectus... surely they don't add much to the total. Prior to the invention of agriculture, they could never achieve high population densities, so "success" would mean what, hundreds of thousands of individuals across the globe?
Homo erectus existed for almost 2 million years, somewhere around five times as long as homo sapiens so far. So there may have been more than you think overall, even if there were never many living at the same time.
Makes me wonder how many more billions will have to die before we bother to put some actual effort into ending death, but I know that's a very obscure opinion. https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon
I think there's a much more firm reason you're right - life expectancy isn't increasing how most think it is. There was an interesting study [1] that examined the life expectancy of all known individuals from Ancient Greece, excluding those with violent deaths (assassination, forced suicide, etc) and found the average male born before 100BC lived to 72 years old on average. In America in 2019 (to avoid COVID biases), the life expectancy for a male was 76.3 years.
The knee-jerk response is to imagine there was a literal survivorship bias. Yet these individuals all made their names long before their deaths. Had Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, or whomever else (in general) died at 50 - their names would still have gone down in the annals of history. However, you certainly wouldn't have heard of them had they died at 10. And that's what's really changed.
We're now able to keep infants, even those who are unhealthy, alive at a much higher rate. Something like 40% of children in Ancient Greece did not make it to their 10th birthday. But for those that did, there was a chance pretty comparable to modern times that they'd see many more decades yet. By contrast today, even for unhealthy children, mortality before age 10 is approaching 0.
Life expectancy is increasing, but longevity isn't really changing much at all. Even in a world of mortality obsessed billionaires using every technological method known to try to increase their life expectancy, they're not really getting much further than the average man. What little longevity they do gain can probably be more accurately explained from simple things like better exercise habits and lower levels of obesity, than esoteric young blood plasma treatments and the like.
That study is based on a very biased sample, and is very much not about life expectancy at birth. It is based on records of noteworthy people: "both ancient and
modern samples were comparable with respect to
males who survived into adulthood and who achieved
notability (or notoriety)."
Well we’ve made heaps more people live that long, and live their potential.
For me, Bostrom is an egotist of the type that wishes to escape his thanatotic drive and acceptance that life just ends. It’s unfortunate, terrible even, but it seems as natural as birth. Proposing solutions such as “mind uploading” are not only ridiculous but the reality of the idea would be hellish. What’s worse is that he’s a philosopher so actually creating the technology to do it simply is not his problem – someone else will have to do the implementation, regardless of how nightmarishly difficult it could be. He could just as easily be inventing hoverboards or time machines. It’s not his problem to stay within the bounds of possibility, even the accepted bounds of what can realistically be designed and coded and implemented – he just has his graphs and statistics of work that other people have done in the past, and can now order them to fulfil his desires in future, one of the main ones being his egotistic desire for his ego to never die.
I don't like to comment much anymore, but I feel like I have spent a substantial portion of my life on this topic, and consequently can direct people to some resources that can bridge the knowledge gap a bit in this regard.
>delay it by decades
Yes, but we aren't solving the problems, we are dealing with symptoms. The entire industry is currently treating old age diseases as diseases, and not as symptoms of bodily decay. This is covered extensively by the work of Dr Aubrey de Grey (yes, that one), in any case, he documents 7 different ways in which the body accrues damage over time, and is actively researching in all these fields to find methods to mitigate, and reverse said damage.
To aid in this regard, feel free to visit the SENS research foundation website at https://www.sens.org/
This approach is very different from the one currently deployed in the field afaik. The idea is that the human body, like a car, can be kept in pristine condition if these 7 sources of deterioration is reversed/addressed.
It is really quite fascinating. I would advise you to go check out the healthspan discord on https://discord.gg/sCwyPXu
There are a number of highly motivated individuals actively researching and following the SOTA as well as excellent news aggregation.
I mean if you want to get real crazy speculative, my personal philosophy assumes that the universe is on a loop and at some point in every loop, some version of that universes intelligent system figures out how to build the Daemon and that kicks off the next loop.
Something like proton decay resulting in the permanent non-existence of baryonic matter is unimaginable timeframes, but the Earth will lose all of its carbon dioxide, and hence all eurkaryotic life, within around 1.3 billion years of now. So that's the longest any multicellular creature inhabiting the ocean can still be around, unless far future tool-users figure out how to migrate to a new planet with chemically similar oceans and give them an assist by taking some.
I would argue that by invoking the concept of immortality, you have therefore invoked the “unimaginable timeframe” of infinity to the conversation from the outset.
so it’s not like it was ever not part of the conversation
The better word to avoid confusion here is amortal, meaning it would not die of old age. True immortality is much harder, as accidents would still pose a risk in the long term. Like the janitor pulling the plug on the livable space you set up for the jellyfish, without warning.
I think technically what would be desirable would be to end or pause aging, not death. I have this feeling that if I reach some crazy 3 figure age and have the body to go with it, death is going to be a welcome concept.
Yes, because I totally want to continue working to pay taxes, rent, utilities, clothing, food, etc. forever. Frankly, I am not trying to hasten my death, but I am looking forward to it. Finally a break from the eternal go go go go, just to maintain life.
Death has its advantages: for the living, it is clarifying and for the future it is clearing.
That said it’s a loonshot that will undoubtedly have spinoff benefits for increased life quality.
If death becomes a choice, then the character of prevailing culture will likely match the characteristics of those who choose not to die. What would that look like? Would that be a culture worth living in?
Why would you want to end death? Or you mean ageing so your body never deteriorates from a certain point?
Your brain's capacity to handle memory would still be a blocker for any meaningful extended survival.
Any decent scifi novel would name many of the very simple problems it would cause at an individual and societal level, not to speak of every other biological ramification of the body.
What do you think would happen if perpetual longevity were achieved? I mean realistically, not ideally? I think it's almost certain we'd see those at the top become [even more] vainly obsessed with their own mortality to the point of doing absolutely every single thing they could, with no norms of behavior, to ensure no other human could ever, under any circumstance - no matter how remote, pose a possible threat to them.
You'd most likely have been born into society as something between a serf and a slave, with your life strictly by controlled to ensure you never might imperil the perpetuation of those who would almost certainly come to see themselves as Gods. And no, you wouldn't be immortal. That'd be too risky for the Gods. It'd be the absolute worst of humanity, frozen in time, due to the lack of death.
And oh boy, imagine the punishments they could contrive for anybody who might indeed imperil (or even deny) their utter supremacy. How about a million years of torture, if for no other reason than to use you (and the millions of others granted similar accommodation) as warnings to the rest of society? I can say, with at least as much confidence as you express about there being nothing after this life, that this life will end. But the thing I can add to this, is that that's also a very good thing for all of humanity to come.
Would it be good for the species even if life was fair for everyone? One can easily imagine that it would create stagnation where very little would change over very long periods of time.
Since we’re doing hypotheticals how about this. We colonize mars and have large habitation modules flotations in space. Humanity has a large new space to expand into and doesn’t have to curtail growth rates.
It's fun doing hypotheticals on this. I'd actually argue that 'perpetual' humans would be much less likely to explore the stars! Take, for instance, the people who recently died on the Titan. They knew they were taking a risk going on it. At least one of them had also recently flown on one of Bezos' rocket launches. Their mindset is really easy to understood, as it also happens to be my own.
They were looking to experience all that life could offer, because in the end - what's the worst that happens? Well you die, but you're going to die anyhow. And living a rich life, ended prematurely, seems infinitely more desirable than living a drawn out life, doing everything to minimize risk, where you die all the same but perhaps without having ever given yourself a chance to live.
But imagine those individuals could have reasonably expected they might be able to live forever. I expect there is exactly 0 chance they would have even considered going on that sub, in one of Bezos' rockets, or engaged in basically any activity with any possible risk whatsoever. Because suddenly what you're risking, your life, has literally infinite value unless you happen to be suicidal to begin with. And this would pose a major problem for society doing much of anything.
There's going to be a high rate of mortality for the first colonists on Mars because there's a zillion things that can go wrong, and we aren't going to be able to anticipate even a fraction of them. Who in the world would ever want to risk this if you could live forever?
Eh, you can't slow an exponential growth with a linear gain in living space. There might be a lot of space out there but not nearly enough of the stuff we need to live in order to consider physical space the limiting factor. You might buy time but you'll run up against the familiar discomfort of too little living space again, and will have to downsize or expand out again before very long. Same as it ever was.
We’re not dealing with exponential growth in most of the world at this point. It’s on average around 2 in most places. So this would be a linear increase if that because the average is still dropping.
It's not empirically testable. Nobody has truly died and come back and no one can. Even if all religions are false it does not follow that there is absolutely nothing after clinical death.
This is just a limitation of science, because we need a conscious mind to test and/or interpret the results.
> it does not follow that there is absolutely nothing after clinical death.
Where's your evidence?
What if I claimed when you die you are reincarnated as a zebra on omnicrom-5? Why is that more or less reasonable than an explanation some religious leader made up one time when he was high?
Anyone can come up with some ungabunga, but unless you have evidence there's no rational to believe it.
The point is there is no evidence, and also there is no claim that I am making. It is unknown. The only claims of resurrections are religious in nature, which proves my point.
dude... whether it's jesus or eternal nothingness, it takes faith to believe in both. There's no evidence for any of this so the only correct answer is we don't know.
> All empirical evidence from thousands of years of scrutiny
Yes, I'm very curious to see empirical evidence of what happens post-death and someone who lived to tell us.
Since religions come and go, there are hundreds, it can be empirically reasoned that it isn't Jesus, because Jesus is just the latest made up thing. IF there was one true god/religion, then why haven't we stuck with the same one for 200k years, right from the beginning. Why aren't we born knowing it? Why don't we know it from birth? Instead we believe whatever we were raised with. And that is a pretty flimsy basis to base some actual physical reality that exists after death.
On other hand, guess since we don't know what is after death, we can't also say with complete 100% certainty that it is nothing. But for there to be something, then that would mean there is something in this physical reality that gets transported, and we should be able to detect it. And since there has been nothing detected after a lot of tries (experiments), at this time there is nothing.
Eyewitnesses wrote that Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, and later rose from the dead himself. If this really happened it makes sense why none of the apostles were afraid to die for what they were certain was true.
So? The followers still all died. Whether or not they may have been happy about dying doesn't change that.
And I'm not sure what Lazarus has to do with this unless your suggesting that his raising means that he couldn't die i.e. he's still alive. That would be a very unusual interpretation.
It shows that this death is like a temporary sleep which God will wake us from. None who believe in Jesus will perish (experience the permanent second death after the judgment). John 5:28-29
If that's a question then no, the Romans did not use the word pagan to refer to Christians.
The early usage (according to the OED) was
[ad. L. pāgān-us, orig. ‘villager, rustic; civilian, non-militant’, opposed to mīlēs ‘soldier, one of the army’, in Christian L. (Tertullian, Augustine) ‘heathen’ as opposed to Christian or Jewish. The Christians called themselves mīlitēs ‘enrolled soldiers’ of Christ, members of his militant church, and applied to non-Christians the term applied by soldiers to all who were ‘not enrolled in the army’. Cf. Tertullian De Corona Militis xi, ‘Apud hunc [Christum] tam miles est paganus fidelis quam paganus est miles infidelis’. See also Gibbon xxi.
Cf. payen.
The explanation of L. pāgānus in the sense ‘non-Christian, heathen’, as arising out of that of ‘villager, rustic’, (supposedly indicating the fact that the ancient idolatry lingered on in the rural villages and hamlets after Christianity had been generally accepted in the towns and cities of the Roman Empire: see Trench Study of Words 102, and cf. Orosius i Præf. ‘Ex locorum agrestium compitis et pagis pagani vocantur’) has been shown to be chronologically and historically untenable, for this use of the word goes back to Tertullian c 202, when paganism was still the public and dominant religion, and even appears, according to Lanciani, in an epitaph of the 2nd cent.]
1. One of a nation or community which does not hold the true religion, or does not worship the true God; a heathen. (†In earlier use practically = non-Christian, and so including Muslims and, sometimes, Jews.)
2. fig. or allusively. A person of heathenish character or habits, or one who holds a position analogous to that of a heathen in relation to Christian society.
Guess I wasn't implying that Romans literally used the word "Pagan" as we use it today, but they had their own religion before Christianity, and also had a word for other religions. So just like Christians call others pagans, The Romans had a word to call out others. (thus my main point, everyone thinks they are the 'one', and have a word to disparage others).
So maybe they didn't use Pagan, but Figuratively, they thought of Christians as the weird/low class/savage, "A person of heathenish character or habits, or one who holds a position analogous to that of a heathen".
If you are disputing this because by definition "Pagan" means non-Christian, thus by definition Christians can't be "Pagan".
Fine, how about "Superstitio"?
Suetonius and Tacitus used the terms "superstitio"
"On the other hand, Romans believed Christians, who were thought to take part in strange rituals and nocturnal rites, cultivated a dangerous and superstitious" sect.[60]: 125
Stable persistent settlement has been dated by genetic clocks, various types of radiological markers on rock art and layered artifacts and middens with ranges at differing locations from comfortably 30k years out to 70k years at a stretch - it's a very big country.
eg: at least 50k established by genetics for most of the land area:
I'd like to substitute your picture for a more plausible one: imagine a world full of incredibly wealthy robber barons, using their fortunes to ensure that "colored" workers stick to their designated bathrooms, putting lead into everything because dying is something that only happens to the poor, and refusing jobs to workers with the wrong skull shape.
And if you think owning a home is hard, just wait until every property in your city is owned by a group of immortal British lords who insist on women dressing modestly and "No Irish need apply" signs everywhere. This may not be too far away from what your actual town looks like right now, but at least we currently have the hope that those people will die and be replaced by slightly-saner ones.
Yeah the naivety and/or selfishness of folks wishing to be immortal is beyond me, something about primary school math lessons skipped. I do hope they are not parents (at least yet). I can accept it in some form once we reach other stars, but not in this century and definitely not in next one neither.
First of all, such technology would be usurped by dictators for dictators only. Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Putin and endless stream of other pathetic figures, they all desperately clinged to life and would burn this world to the ashes 1000x over just to stay immortal. I can't imagine how we could avoid global semi-permanent slavery, not with actual real human nature that we see manifested in the news every day. Its fine if you wouldn't use it malevolently, that says nothing about more capable and more sinister individuals who are out there in numbers you probably would have hard time accepting.
Second, where do we put all those folks if we actually achieve some hippie paradise? How do we feed them? Concept of individual ownership goes very much against this. The opposite is communism, which has 100% failure rate, and we tested it already on few hundred millions, no thank you. You have to live through it to see and feel its failures in their many aspects to understand, I did and never ever want that back in any form.
If we managed to cut death, we probably would turn much more risk-averse. An unfortunate accident would make you lose eternity, not just a couple decades. I bet that would not foster many explorers.
We could launch a vessel to Proxima Centauri right now that would arrive in thousands of years. If the passengers have lifespans measured in millions of years, that's comparable to a month for someone who lives 80 years.
Has a method of long term stasis been found yet (like you see in Interstellar or other movies) where you can nap and be kept alive for that long? Otherwise I think you'd still need to overcome the mental limitations of being stuck in a metal tube for thousands of years with no way out and no way to pass the time. Or at the very least, some way of staying asleep for a few years--wake up for a few months--sleep for a few years--wake up for a few months and so on.
My guess is that stasis would be feasible sooner than keeping people fully alive and awake for the whole journey. In the latter case, they'd probably spend most of their time in the holodeck. Either way, on the scale of the universe, living in a metal tube is not very far removed from being stuck to the surface of a small iron pebble as we are now.
“The silent majority” was originally a euphemism referring to the dead, who outnumber the living. It only got its political meaning in the 19th century.
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...
This is worth a read for those unfamiliar with this argument. Essentially, it’s a way to make a probabilistic guess for when humans will go extinct based on the number of humans that have been born. There are several variants and as far as I know, the argument’s premise has never been conclusively refuted.
I think the biggest problem with this utter nonsense is this:
> In other words, one can assume with 95% certainty that any individual human would be within the last 95% of all the humans ever to be born
"any individual human" really means "a human chosen at random" from all humans who will ever live. Then they go on to assume that this is representative of the humans who have already lived. But clearly there's a problem there. They find a statistic that is true of all past-and-future humans and then assumed it must be equally true of all past humans as well. In fact we've exactly chosen the subset (past humans) as those that are least likely for this statistic to apply. It'd be like deriving some statistic about being 95% sure any given human can run a mile within 10 minutes, and then applying that statistic specifically to those humans with no legs. It's that dumb -- clearly past humans are fundamentally different from past-and-future humans in exactly the property they're sampling.
You can easily see this problem by simply going back in time and applying the same argument at any point in history. At some point, the total number of humans who had ever been born was 1 billion. At that point, we would have been 95% sure that the total number of humans would never exceed 20 billion. Oops! In fact, we would have been 99% sure that the total number of humans would never exceed 100 billion. Double oops!
Go back to when the total number of humans who had ever been born was 1 million. We would have been 99.999% sure the total number of humans would never exceed 100 billion. Triple oops!
There are a number of counter arguments that I don’t see represented in this article. For instance:
1) this argument makes the implicit assumption that the “number of years before a species goes extinct” is anti-correlated with “the present population of the species” meaning that the greater the present population in comparison to the historical population, the less time we should expect the species to survive for. This is already a contradiction because in reality it is the opposite. Species abundance is directly correlated with species longevity. Necessarily so! In order for a species to go extinct all members must die!
2) there’s no particular reason you should take the emergence of anatomically modern humans as the start point. We represent a continuous lineage of related animals going back to the last universal common ancestor of all life. By naive copernican principal, you may expect our lineage to go on for another 4 billion years! This is not to say that this is likely, just that the copernican principal is entirely subject to what you consider the starting point to be. If you say you care about “homo sapiens and their direct descendants” rather than “homo sapiens” you get a very different answer.
Well, this text may be read by a person born in the future. It's hard to tell whether the population will keep growing or if it will fall by then. It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future
Even more remarkable is that by the estimate in Table 1, the percentage is increasing over time.
If this trend continues over the centuries it is conceivable that >=50% of all human beings to ever exist could be extantly alive. Either growth rate exploded or death rate arrested.
It recalls to mind Fyodor the one-time teacher of Tsiolkovsky of the rocket equation, who conceived a kind of akashic immortality project he called the Common Task. So like maybe this Kaneda-Haub statistic asymptotically approaches 100%.
Supposing a starting population of 2 we can call Adam and Eve divided by 0 dead ancestors do note it started at infinity before dropping precipitously near 0 for a 202k year exponential climb to today's ~7%. Fwiw I consider such plot affirmative evidence assuming the demographic inputs are not wildly inaccurate.
I've never heard most, but I think back the population of earth was only about 6 billion there were people claiming that about 1/5 of people who have ever lived are alive right now.
I've read that at the smallest bottleneck our species had fewer than 10,000 individuals, although I don't think that sad state lasted long.
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.
Why are the ghosts usually wearing clothes from the last few hundred years? Where are the Bronze Age ghosts? Or do ghosts dissipate after a period of time? Has anyone ever asked these questions of ghost believers?
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.
I think it's precisely this. We see exponential population growth of population, so we naturally assume most humans are alive now. What this intuition fails to grasp is quite how long humans have been around: eventually that adds up.
True. Maybe the fallacy is seeing exponential(ish) growth now, and pretending it was always exponential. Maybe population was linear(ish), for a very, very, long time.
It can't be exponential.
If in 1800 there was 1G people, in 1900 2G people and in 2000 6G people, and we fit an exponential curve thought that we get less than 10 people alive in the year 0.
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."
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.
I wonder if there were old estimates based on religious teaching that Earth is only 6000 years old. We have only recently known the age of humanity and prehistoric population.
Or maybe it was saying that wasn’t based on estimate.
This article starts 190 000 years back. Our species, Homo Sapien, goes back anywhere from then, up to 300 000 years ago. The genus Homo around two million years.
I think it's a very interesting question, what does human mean? It's easy to think early humans were intrinsically different, merely because not much physical evidence survives. But given Neanderthals were doing cave art 64 000 years ago, maybe even they weren't that different.
Evolution occurs through birth and death. If humans stopped dying, then presumably they would also stop having kids, because why keep having them, and thus we'd get stuck on that last generation. Then, with no new generations, we would also stop evolving, as a species.
I found it an interesting statistic that 1.2 billion people have lived on the continent of Australia over the course of human history. Only likely around 50 million of those are non-aboriginal
This is a common misconception about how life expectancy works. If you have 10 children, 9 of them die at age 5, and the 10th dies at age 55, the life expectancy of your children is 10. Those 9 children who die early aren't going to go through puberty and become parents, but the life expectancy of those who do reach that stage is decently long. Low life expectancy doesn't mean you're considered some decrepit geriatric at age 12; it means that you get to grow up with lots of siblings who didn't make it.
When you look at pre-modern societies (essentially until around 1900 or so), there are four large causes of low life expectancy that don't really exist anymore. Infant mortality was extremely high (a quarter or so of live births didn't make it more than a few days). Then child mortality itself was high (you had perhaps a 50-50 chance of making it to puberty). For young women, there's an extra hit to life expectancy due to risky childbirth (you have about a 10% lifetime chance of dying in childbirth). For young men, they get extra risk due to endemic warfare--the baseline casualty rate of premodern warfare is basically WW2-levels of total war. Of all these factors, the infant mortality is the heaviest drag on life expectancy, as dying at age 0 really pulls down the average lifespan.
I think a more useful metric would be average life expectancy of the subset of people who lived over say 20 or 30. We could compare that number at 1600s with the present to see the net impact of lifestyle changes (fast food, minimum exercise) vs advances in medical care.
I think this is a case where an average value cloaks the distribution. Consider very high infant and childhood mortality rates, and how that might skew the average value.
The Doomsday Argument[0] relates to this. It says that since the reader is born in the current times with there being X billion humans so far, statisticslly there shouldn't be too many more (not say tens of trillions).
I don't think the logic is too sound though. Or rather that the premises should be taken for granted.
Reading admitedly quickly, it appears to actually say that there shouldn't be more than 2 trillion total humans, and we're, at 117Bn, so yeah, there's a lot left if we make it all the way to the upper bound.
> Almost everyone who hears this argument immediately sees something wrong with it. The problem is, everyone thinks it's wrong for a different reason. And the more they study it, the more they tend to change their minds about what that reason is.
I guess I'm one of those people because I read Wikipedia and this seems like a complete non-sequitur to me:
> The Copernican principle suggests that any one human is equally likely (along with the other N-1 humans) to find themselves in any position n of the total population N.
I feel like I must be misunderstanding the argument because it just doesn't make sense to me.
First, why should I even assume N is finite? Second, even if I did, not everyone had an equal chance of participating in this hypothetical thought-experiment (or random selection, or whatever you want to call it) -- only those alive at the time of your sampling can participate in it.
Our current understanding of physics dictates that the (observable) universe has a finite size and a finite lifespan, from which it logically follows that there can't be an infinite amount of humans.
If that's genuinely the basis for this reasoning, it only makes the argument seem even more dubious to me. If the statistical argument is really so sound, it shouldn't have to rely on our understanding of cosmology.
Also, is there no phenomenon here where a sufficiently large N becomes increasingly indistinguishable from infinity?
The entire universe could very well be infinite, with infinite “Earths” and “humans”. In which case the argument doesn’t work since you can’t choose uniformly from an infinite set.
I don’t think the argument is wrong but it has the same problem as any non-repeatable statistical prediction. Namely that you don’t get to repeat it so it’s easy to make an error and hard to calibrate.
I suspect within 1000 years humanity will be effectively immortal and have much less children than we do now. So I'd guess on the lower end of that estimat.e
I believe current estimate is that the Earth becomes uninhabitable in 1 billion years (increased luminosity will remove all liquid water), well before the sun completes its lifecycle.
I don't think that Earth had 300M people in 1 c.e.
Roman empire with client states probably had population 30M, maybe another 30M for China and 30M for Indian subcontinent. These would absolutely dwarf everything else. No room for 3x of that.
And dopplegangers are living proof that God does recycle faces. Somewhere out there in amongst all the people who have ever lived are people who look just like you.
I distrust numbers like the ones they use in this analysis. There are so many unknowns and unknowables that the best we can hope for is to SWAG (Scientific Wild-Ass Guess) a few numbers and call it good. I think that is what we have here. It serves a purpose even if it is more likely to be wrong.
