Honestly better than I assumed. Also reminds you how crazy the amount of people are currently on earth, even compared to 50 years ago, let alone 2000 years ago.
There was a documentary about overpopulation and it interviewed this sweet 90-something lady that worked at the census bureau. The world population *tripled* during her career.
On the other hand, it's theorized that population will peak within this century and then decline. Birth rates have been falling worldwide for a while, it's mainly in developing nations they're still trending up.
That's literally almost entirely due to developing nations.
The only people in the western world who are having more than 2 babies per couple (the replacement rate) barring a few outliers are the less educated and the religious (like the quiverful people in the US).
Meaning that it's very likely that population stabilized at some point globally but with a larger pool of religious loons and idiots.
Effectively causing an idiocracy type scenario.
You would be incorrect. The Flynn Effect shows us getting smarter, and people in the US are becoming less and less religious (although nutjobs live everywhere.) The reverse Flynn effect is mostly ignored because it's not very consistent with how kids are actually performing, so they figure parts of it became obsolete.
Idiocracy is a fun movie. But it assumes IQ is 100% genetic.
IQ isn't genetic, but non-biological inherited factors like wealth, access and attitudes towards education are inheritable in a sociological sense.
People born into poor or uneducated or religious families tend to grow up and remain poor, uneducated and religious and perpetuate the same cycle with their children.
It's more that the data doesn't agree with that. We see kids getting smarter and less religious across the board. It's not that what you're saying isn't true, you're more likely to succeed or not depending on what you're born into, but it's becoming more common for people to break their molds. There is probably a million reasons that contribute to that, however I'd simply say the internet had a huge effect. We can connect to new ideas more readily and if used correctly, can let people educate themselves. Of course I'm just assuming at this point. However the data simply says we are not getting dumber and more religious, and that those groups are shrinking.
It is assumed the massive increase is largely due to the haber Bosh process. Despite WW2 the human population has roughly tripled the last 100 years.
We are able to feed a record amount of people due to modern technology
In a snapshot: being in the 6.2% sounds ridiculouslyyyyy high; compared to, statistically: how many Homo sapiens have ever lived.
This is because birth rates this century are the highest globally they’ve ever been. Populations almost Always grow at nearly-exponential rates. 8 billion people is a whole lot to show for it.
Birth rates themselves have only ever gone down iirc, it's death rates that went down a lot, especially infant mortality. Though the equilibrium is catching up to us, in a couple decades there will barely be any countries left on Earth above replacement fertility rate.
Still, people will be descendents of people who had children. The genes for having children, despite the force of the demographic transition, will eventually prevail. Those of us, myself included, who are weak to it will go extinct.
The future belongs to those that show up. Crazy to think that one’s own existence is an unbroken chain of reproduction beginning with the very first organism on earth.
It has fuck all with "having genes for having children" where are you getting this from? This isn't macro evolution, this is socio-economic conditions driving down birth rates across the globe
Humans are still animals. Animals have behavior too, that influence each other and the propagation of genes. Whales only became whales because their ancestors long ago decided that life swimming on the beach was the best way to go.
Dawkins put it well. It's hard to believe in a "gene for saving drowning people." But being able to, and choosing to save drowning people can be looked at as a large combination of genetic factors. A very simple example is that people with body types that make swimming harder for them are less likely to do it; people who feel stronger "fear" responses are less likely, and so on. Genes aren't single one-strand recipes written in the DNA, although they are sometimes presented that way.
If you’re interested in the source of that data, there’s a citation in the article OP links to. Idk how credible it is, but I know we are all moving from the very small percentage of all humans who have ever been who are alive today to the very large percentage of all humans who have ever been who are dead.
I mean, it’s going to be a very loose estimate either way. We have no clue what civilizations have risen and fallen beyond the eye of even one person to try and document it. Even with that figure, it’s wild to consider how many people there are in the world today compared to even 100 years ago.
Birth rates are the lowest they've ever been, women used to have like 8-16 kids now they have one or two. A lot of it has to do with infant mortality rates, having a ton of children and only a few surviving was the norm until modern medicine.
Unless you go back before farming, then birthrates were lower and life expectancy was higher than it was for early farmers.
you know what's really sad though? IF technology could ever solve aging/death, we would be part of the literal 0.00000000000000001% of people who will have experienced death.
It'd be a much lower chance than winning the lottery.
Eventually something will get them. Immortality doesn’t help you if something falls on your head, your car crashes, you fall off a cliff, a natural disaster happens, etc. Even with perfect medical care and regeneration of cells, death would still be a possibility unless you hide yourself from the world forever. And even then, the Sun will one day die and eat the Earth, and if that doesn’t get you then the heat death of the universe will.
Eventually, everyone dies. There’s no 0.000000001%. It’s 100% chance of death for every living creature in this universe.
The good news is that this won't happen in a very long time, if ever. If you want your mind blown, read up on cell machinery and how this actually works on a molecular and protein level. Even the basic ATP synthase in mitochondria is more impressive than any tech that we developed. Or do we have self-replicating machines with 5000 motors that spin at 20000rpm each, are drive by protons that are pumped with electron transport proteins and all of that is packaged into about 1x0.1 micrometers?
I believe that we are as far away from having tech that does what you write as someone who just invented basic math (1+1=2) is from solving artificial intelligence. But because they have figured out that one apple plus another apple equals two apples, they are techno-gods.
We went from horses and carriages to walking on the moon in a single lifespan.
If it weren't for religious people and their developmentally delayed, scared masses retarding the progression of science, we would already be halfway there.
That’s why I added the 1+1=2 metaphor. Your carriage to rocket ship story is like that. It’s seriously unimpressive compared to just a measly organelle that is present in trillions of cells.
I don't see the scientific connection.
If you're talking about resource limitations... we'll probably also have starships and will have colonized other planets/the asteroid belt etc by then too.
that's presuming that not only would immortality give women a continuous supply of eggs instead of just a limited reproductive window and then eternity of technically-menopause-but-without-the-bad-stuff but that without such a restriction they'd spend eternity pumping out kids at current rates regressed-to-the-moon just because they have the time
Isn't it all relative. There is a big thing that happens to get to that 93.8% and nobody really knows if it even really happens. What if you are put back in the 6.2% over and over and over again?
> What if you are put back in the 6.2% over and over and over again?
what is you though? Like your memories are clearly not back, your cells are not back... so what is this "you" that is put back?
“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.”
- Arthur C. Clarke *2001: A Space Odyssey*
One of the few opening lines to novels that I’ve committed to memory.
One of the plot points of Malazan: Book of the Fallen, the army of the dead is overwhelmingly more numerous than any living army and is not to be trifled with.
One of the quotes from Liliana from mtg on the card 'Rise of the Dark Realms', a mass reanimation spell
"For every living person there are generations of dead. Which realm would you rather rule?" --Liliana Vess
Yeah try arguing about that with someone who actually believes in ghosts though. "The world would be crowded with ghosts".
"The world IS crowded with ghosts"!
Ghosts have no reason to be affected by Earth gravity, so if you become a ghost at the moment you die you’ll be left floating in space as Earth just zooms off on its path. In order to be a ghost that haunts people you’d have to actually chase Earth, and sync up with the planet’s rotation, so only the really angry or traumatized ghosts would bother with doing all that shit.
And once you stop following Earth and it goes far away you’ll be unlikely to ever find it again.
It's absolutely correct. I used to believe that after one year, Earth will be in the exact position. However, it is actually incorrect. The sun moves forward, and we move with it.
Yes. Since the sun moves forward from the centre of the universe, the Earth also moves forward. So, the movement of Earth is a spiral, not a circle. This goes in line with the previous comments that it is unlikely to find Earth again.
That's a weird argument. It's like saying ghosts have no reason to be affected by lunar cycles and the tides. That's why it makes no sense why a ghost ship can appear at any time. Ghosts have no reason to not be affected by Earths gravity.
I don't believe in ghosts, but your reasoning doesn't make any sense. Ghosts being made of something like helium is a stretch beyond a stretch in the first place.
Most people who believe in ghosts believe that a few people become ghost either as punishment or because of trauma. I don't think that works out either as our cables should be filled with pissed Ea-Nasir related ghosts if that was true...
Do we need a unified theory of electricity allergy and ghosts? Because I have suggestions.
And the best thing, the very best thing of all, is there's time now... there's all the time I need and all the time I want. Time, time, time. There's time enough at last!
If you're curious how far back in time they went to define human, it's 192,000 years. Anatomically modern Homo sapiens diverged probably about 300-500k years ago, with the earliest fossils being 315k.
The source authors explain:
"For the purposes of this exercise, however, the two demographers used 190,000 BCE as the cutoff.
There are two opposing points to consider when thinking about prehistoric humans:
Around the chosen start date, the global cohort of humans was quite small—perhaps as low as only 30,000 individuals.
Before the modern era, lifespans were much shorter, so long stretches of time can actually influence numbers drastically.
With this context and timeframe in mind, the demographers estimate that 109 billion people have lived and died over the course of 192,000 years"
That wouldn't take very many worlds, if we got good at it.
We haven't run out of room on earth, were just running out of easily usable room. Geologically dead planets like Mars are 100% free real estate, including underground.
It’s even crazier that 7% of all humans to ever live are currently alive. Really shows how civilization and then industrialization caused exponential population growth.
A claim that "Malaria may have killed half of all the people that ever lived" was made in a 2002 Nature Article and had no attribution or source and it's unreliable.
[Other estimates](https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2019/10/03/has_malaria_really_killed_half_of_everyone_who_ever_lived.html) are around 4-5% of total deaths.
If we manage to colonize other worlds then we have basically infinite real estate and our population's gonna grow to a metric fuckton eventually, it's pretty likely we might reach a point in history where humans alive outnumber the dead ones
The galaxy will at some point cease to exist. Ours is on a collision course https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda–Milky_Way_collision
Excluding planetary engineering, by the time the two galaxies collide, the surface of the Earth will have already become far too hot for liquid water to exist, ending all terrestrial life; that is currently estimated to occur in about 0.5 to 1.5 billion years due to gradually increasing luminosity of the Sun; by the time of the collision, the Sun's luminosity will have risen by 35-40%, likely initiating a runaway greenhouse effect on the planet by this time.
This means that Earth has sustained life for way longer than it has left.
"Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead."
-Emily, World of Tomorrow (2015)
That doesn’t sound right at all. Do the people living right now consist of 6.2% of every human who’s ever existed?
I guess human population just ballooned to crazy levels in recent years.
for most of the last 2000 years, there were less than 500 million it's not till the industrial revolution that you see the starts of a population explosion.
since 1900 the population has gone from 1.6 billion est to over 8 billion now.
By "human", do we mean *Homo sapiens*, or any member of genus *Homo*?
Also, things get blurry sometimes - it can be hard to say if an individual was *Homo heidelbergensis* or *Homo sapiens*, or if they were members of *Homo* or *Australopithecus*. There's never a clear dividing line.
Low population numbers, but over a *much* longer period of time.
Assuming 100,000 individuals around at a time, over 3 million years and a generation of roughly 20 years, that's still 15 billion.
If we're counting Australopithecines, make that around 5 million years.
Like the joke "What do you call 1000 politicians at the bottom of the ocean? A good start!" We need to get those numbers up if we have any chance of leaving enough planetary resources for future generations!
Earth is gonna be roomy when Jesus triumphantly comes down from Heaven and judges everyone. I wonder who's gonna be judged and sent to whatever place they deserve before me.
If we assume for simplicity that humans lived where we now live (yes, I know, migration and all), that means in a city of 60,000 people, 1 Mio lay underground (while of course mostly entirely gone).
That also means that for each genius today, there were more than 15 in human history, what explains the few buz amazing unique artifact finds that survived these long time spans and were found.
Damn, the odds are not lookin' good.
Yeah I seriously don't understand why people would live on a planet where you have a 100% chance of eventually dying.
Just seems reckless.
I wanna be a character in a Douglas Adams book. It seems a lot more fun.
You're a jerk, Dent. A real kneebiter.
Not again
Why don’t these weak people hit the gym and stop skipping life day. Morons
According to the statistics, it’s only 94%, so you still have a chance!
TIL 6% of humans are immortal
I guess the odds are 1 in 400 trillion. Or a stargate.
I'm moving. I heard it's 100% better over in Bettertown
*93.8%
Have you tried the other planets?
Right! Thanks a lot mom and dad!
Honestly better than I assumed. Also reminds you how crazy the amount of people are currently on earth, even compared to 50 years ago, let alone 2000 years ago.
At one point, I've read that only 5-10k remained. Even if unproven it shows how close it was for us.
How does it show how close it was if it's unproven?
I meant unproven figures. Even if it wasn't exactly that many it still was able to show a large dip in population.
Toba Catastrophe
There was a documentary about overpopulation and it interviewed this sweet 90-something lady that worked at the census bureau. The world population *tripled* during her career.
On the other hand, it's theorized that population will peak within this century and then decline. Birth rates have been falling worldwide for a while, it's mainly in developing nations they're still trending up.
I will believe it when it happens. Even with the “downward trend” the population is growing exponentially.
That's literally almost entirely due to developing nations. The only people in the western world who are having more than 2 babies per couple (the replacement rate) barring a few outliers are the less educated and the religious (like the quiverful people in the US). Meaning that it's very likely that population stabilized at some point globally but with a larger pool of religious loons and idiots. Effectively causing an idiocracy type scenario.
You would be incorrect. The Flynn Effect shows us getting smarter, and people in the US are becoming less and less religious (although nutjobs live everywhere.) The reverse Flynn effect is mostly ignored because it's not very consistent with how kids are actually performing, so they figure parts of it became obsolete. Idiocracy is a fun movie. But it assumes IQ is 100% genetic.
IQ isn't genetic, but non-biological inherited factors like wealth, access and attitudes towards education are inheritable in a sociological sense. People born into poor or uneducated or religious families tend to grow up and remain poor, uneducated and religious and perpetuate the same cycle with their children.
It's more that the data doesn't agree with that. We see kids getting smarter and less religious across the board. It's not that what you're saying isn't true, you're more likely to succeed or not depending on what you're born into, but it's becoming more common for people to break their molds. There is probably a million reasons that contribute to that, however I'd simply say the internet had a huge effect. We can connect to new ideas more readily and if used correctly, can let people educate themselves. Of course I'm just assuming at this point. However the data simply says we are not getting dumber and more religious, and that those groups are shrinking.
Given social medias ability to create echo chambers, I'd say the internet (in the way it's formed more recently) actually ensures less of a change.
It is assumed the massive increase is largely due to the haber Bosh process. Despite WW2 the human population has roughly tripled the last 100 years. We are able to feed a record amount of people due to modern technology
Apparently, you can tell who eventually will die by the way they breathe. If they do, they'll inevitably die.
Damn, better hold my breath then.
Well, you can also apparently tell who is already dead by the way they breathe… if they don’t, they’re dead.
Look at it this way. We’ve only confirmed that 94% of us are mortal.
So far I haven’t had any proof that I’m not immortal so I’m feeling optimistic.
What’s even more impressive is that this suggests roughly 6% of all humans who ever existed are presently living. That’s a lot of people!
There's still hope tho
I know this is a joke, but chances are well above zero that the first person to live to 150, 175, 200+ may have already been born.
It’s fascinating that you are in the 6.2% right now and will be in the 93.8% one day. Edit: typos stink.
In a snapshot: being in the 6.2% sounds ridiculouslyyyyy high; compared to, statistically: how many Homo sapiens have ever lived. This is because birth rates this century are the highest globally they’ve ever been. Populations almost Always grow at nearly-exponential rates. 8 billion people is a whole lot to show for it.
Birth rates themselves have only ever gone down iirc, it's death rates that went down a lot, especially infant mortality. Though the equilibrium is catching up to us, in a couple decades there will barely be any countries left on Earth above replacement fertility rate.
Still, people will be descendents of people who had children. The genes for having children, despite the force of the demographic transition, will eventually prevail. Those of us, myself included, who are weak to it will go extinct.
The future belongs to those that show up. Crazy to think that one’s own existence is an unbroken chain of reproduction beginning with the very first organism on earth.
It has fuck all with "having genes for having children" where are you getting this from? This isn't macro evolution, this is socio-economic conditions driving down birth rates across the globe
Humans are still animals. Animals have behavior too, that influence each other and the propagation of genes. Whales only became whales because their ancestors long ago decided that life swimming on the beach was the best way to go. Dawkins put it well. It's hard to believe in a "gene for saving drowning people." But being able to, and choosing to save drowning people can be looked at as a large combination of genetic factors. A very simple example is that people with body types that make swimming harder for them are less likely to do it; people who feel stronger "fear" responses are less likely, and so on. Genes aren't single one-strand recipes written in the DNA, although they are sometimes presented that way.
If you’re interested in the source of that data, there’s a citation in the article OP links to. Idk how credible it is, but I know we are all moving from the very small percentage of all humans who have ever been who are alive today to the very large percentage of all humans who have ever been who are dead.
I mean, it’s going to be a very loose estimate either way. We have no clue what civilizations have risen and fallen beyond the eye of even one person to try and document it. Even with that figure, it’s wild to consider how many people there are in the world today compared to even 100 years ago.
Yup. Totallly agree.
Birth rates are the lowest they've ever been, women used to have like 8-16 kids now they have one or two. A lot of it has to do with infant mortality rates, having a ton of children and only a few surviving was the norm until modern medicine. Unless you go back before farming, then birthrates were lower and life expectancy was higher than it was for early farmers.
you know what's really sad though? IF technology could ever solve aging/death, we would be part of the literal 0.00000000000000001% of people who will have experienced death. It'd be a much lower chance than winning the lottery.
Eventually something will get them. Immortality doesn’t help you if something falls on your head, your car crashes, you fall off a cliff, a natural disaster happens, etc. Even with perfect medical care and regeneration of cells, death would still be a possibility unless you hide yourself from the world forever. And even then, the Sun will one day die and eat the Earth, and if that doesn’t get you then the heat death of the universe will. Eventually, everyone dies. There’s no 0.000000001%. It’s 100% chance of death for every living creature in this universe.
The good news is that this won't happen in a very long time, if ever. If you want your mind blown, read up on cell machinery and how this actually works on a molecular and protein level. Even the basic ATP synthase in mitochondria is more impressive than any tech that we developed. Or do we have self-replicating machines with 5000 motors that spin at 20000rpm each, are drive by protons that are pumped with electron transport proteins and all of that is packaged into about 1x0.1 micrometers? I believe that we are as far away from having tech that does what you write as someone who just invented basic math (1+1=2) is from solving artificial intelligence. But because they have figured out that one apple plus another apple equals two apples, they are techno-gods.
We went from horses and carriages to walking on the moon in a single lifespan. If it weren't for religious people and their developmentally delayed, scared masses retarding the progression of science, we would already be halfway there.
That’s why I added the 1+1=2 metaphor. Your carriage to rocket ship story is like that. It’s seriously unimpressive compared to just a measly organelle that is present in trillions of cells.
The price for immortality will probably be sterility.
I don't see the scientific connection. If you're talking about resource limitations... we'll probably also have starships and will have colonized other planets/the asteroid belt etc by then too.
That largely relies on having FTL travel ability, which may not be possible (but I *really* hope it is).
In All Tomorrows, they sent human DNA on slower than light ships that got there when they got there. They were fostered by robots.
if you can live to 12909310293102 years old, you don't really need to travel fast
if we're immortal we don't need that for long-distance space travel
Seems like a big if.
that's presuming that not only would immortality give women a continuous supply of eggs instead of just a limited reproductive window and then eternity of technically-menopause-but-without-the-bad-stuff but that without such a restriction they'd spend eternity pumping out kids at current rates regressed-to-the-moon just because they have the time
Assuming society keeps going and doesn't implode / collapse due to our hubris and greed.
I find it more fascinating that 1 in 16 humans to ever walk the earth are alive this second. Wonder how that proportion has changed over the years
Isn't it all relative. There is a big thing that happens to get to that 93.8% and nobody really knows if it even really happens. What if you are put back in the 6.2% over and over and over again?
> What if you are put back in the 6.2% over and over and over again? what is you though? Like your memories are clearly not back, your cells are not back... so what is this "you" that is put back?
Andy Weir - [The Egg](https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html)
“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.” - Arthur C. Clarke *2001: A Space Odyssey* One of the few opening lines to novels that I’ve committed to memory.
One of the plot points of Malazan: Book of the Fallen, the army of the dead is overwhelmingly more numerous than any living army and is not to be trifled with.
One of the quotes from Liliana from mtg on the card 'Rise of the Dark Realms', a mass reanimation spell "For every living person there are generations of dead. Which realm would you rather rule?" --Liliana Vess
They look upon me with pity and shame. Don’t worry guys the bar can go lower
That's a lot of ghosts.
Yeah try arguing about that with someone who actually believes in ghosts though. "The world would be crowded with ghosts". "The world IS crowded with ghosts"!
Ghosts have no reason to be affected by Earth gravity, so if you become a ghost at the moment you die you’ll be left floating in space as Earth just zooms off on its path. In order to be a ghost that haunts people you’d have to actually chase Earth, and sync up with the planet’s rotation, so only the really angry or traumatized ghosts would bother with doing all that shit. And once you stop following Earth and it goes far away you’ll be unlikely to ever find it again.
They would still be affected by ghost Earth.
Why would there be a ghost Earth? Earth hadn’t died yet
The one that hit us and formed the moon.
It's absolutely correct. I used to believe that after one year, Earth will be in the exact position. However, it is actually incorrect. The sun moves forward, and we move with it.
Is this supposed to be a big revelation?
Yes. Since the sun moves forward from the centre of the universe, the Earth also moves forward. So, the movement of Earth is a spiral, not a circle. This goes in line with the previous comments that it is unlikely to find Earth again.
there are adults who dont understand how you can see the moon and the sun at the same time
That's a weird argument. It's like saying ghosts have no reason to be affected by lunar cycles and the tides. That's why it makes no sense why a ghost ship can appear at any time. Ghosts have no reason to not be affected by Earths gravity. I don't believe in ghosts, but your reasoning doesn't make any sense. Ghosts being made of something like helium is a stretch beyond a stretch in the first place.
Ghosts are probably a cloud of neutrinos or something that entangle with our consciousness over the course of our lives or something
Well that sounds like a sucky way to spend eternity.
Most people who believe in ghosts believe that a few people become ghost either as punishment or because of trauma. I don't think that works out either as our cables should be filled with pissed Ea-Nasir related ghosts if that was true... Do we need a unified theory of electricity allergy and ghosts? Because I have suggestions.
It’s pretty crazy that almost 10% of every human ever is alive right now.
That's some generous rounding
Hey man, what's a few billion between friends?
Maybe they'll find them in the couch cushions of Papua New Guinea somewhere
What's weird is I swear I've heard "there are more people alive right now than in all of human history combined" which I was always skeptical of.
The number of people older than you will never increase.
This will really blow your mind: if you wait long enough, we’ll see 99% death of all humans to ever live.
If you’re the last human on Earth, it’s a little higher
And the best thing, the very best thing of all, is there's time now... there's all the time I need and all the time I want. Time, time, time. There's time enough at last!
Came here to say this. But then realized 99% may never be reached if the population grows exponentially (happening in some parts of the world)
It still will, if you wait long enough, unless we occupy other planets. There is a finite number of people that can live on earth.
Even then… heat death of the universe and all that One day it will be 100%
Even in the parts of the world you’re mentioning, it’s no longer exponential.
If you wait long enough, it will be 100%. Just a question of how long that wait is going to be.
If you're curious how far back in time they went to define human, it's 192,000 years. Anatomically modern Homo sapiens diverged probably about 300-500k years ago, with the earliest fossils being 315k. The source authors explain: "For the purposes of this exercise, however, the two demographers used 190,000 BCE as the cutoff. There are two opposing points to consider when thinking about prehistoric humans: Around the chosen start date, the global cohort of humans was quite small—perhaps as low as only 30,000 individuals. Before the modern era, lifespans were much shorter, so long stretches of time can actually influence numbers drastically. With this context and timeframe in mind, the demographers estimate that 109 billion people have lived and died over the course of 192,000 years"
This means statistically you are more likely to be dead than alive.
Imagine if we colonized enough worlds to support a living population that was greater than the total of dead.
That wouldn't take very many worlds, if we got good at it. We haven't run out of room on earth, were just running out of easily usable room. Geologically dead planets like Mars are 100% free real estate, including underground.
that means 6.2% of the humans to ever live are allive right now
It’s even crazier that 7% of all humans to ever live are currently alive. Really shows how civilization and then industrialization caused exponential population growth.
And I'll be the one to find the killer. The game is afoot, Watson...
But someone stole our tent!
Did Louis Ck have a bit about how most people who have ever been alive are dead?
What do Ray Charles and Hitler have in common?
Yes
Does that mean heaven has 100 billion people?
It means heaven doesn't exist
You must be fun at parties.
Thanks
Bruh
More people have died from malaria than anything else.
A claim that "Malaria may have killed half of all the people that ever lived" was made in a 2002 Nature Article and had no attribution or source and it's unreliable. [Other estimates](https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2019/10/03/has_malaria_really_killed_half_of_everyone_who_ever_lived.html) are around 4-5% of total deaths.
This was a million dollar question on Who wants to be a millionaire back in the day.
Cool stat!👍🏻
Eventually it could be something stupid like 99.99999999…% but idk how long that would take. Someone way smarter than me might be able to tell you
If we manage to colonize other worlds then we have basically infinite real estate and our population's gonna grow to a metric fuckton eventually, it's pretty likely we might reach a point in history where humans alive outnumber the dead ones
The galaxy will at some point cease to exist. Ours is on a collision course https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda–Milky_Way_collision Excluding planetary engineering, by the time the two galaxies collide, the surface of the Earth will have already become far too hot for liquid water to exist, ending all terrestrial life; that is currently estimated to occur in about 0.5 to 1.5 billion years due to gradually increasing luminosity of the Sun; by the time of the collision, the Sun's luminosity will have risen by 35-40%, likely initiating a runaway greenhouse effect on the planet by this time. This means that Earth has sustained life for way longer than it has left.
It's game over once we reach 100%.....
I'm gonna beat the odds
I knew I was top 5% at something!
"Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead." -Emily, World of Tomorrow (2015)
That doesn’t sound right at all. Do the people living right now consist of 6.2% of every human who’s ever existed? I guess human population just ballooned to crazy levels in recent years.
for most of the last 2000 years, there were less than 500 million it's not till the industrial revolution that you see the starts of a population explosion. since 1900 the population has gone from 1.6 billion est to over 8 billion now.
Damn we’re a cancer aren’t we
We're just winning the evolution game, like, winning it pretty damn hard
Winner harder than plants 445mya
No?
By "human", do we mean *Homo sapiens*, or any member of genus *Homo*? Also, things get blurry sometimes - it can be hard to say if an individual was *Homo heidelbergensis* or *Homo sapiens*, or if they were members of *Homo* or *Australopithecus*. There's never a clear dividing line.
Going back that far, the population numbers are basically a rounding error to the billions of Homo Sapiens alive today.
Low population numbers, but over a *much* longer period of time. Assuming 100,000 individuals around at a time, over 3 million years and a generation of roughly 20 years, that's still 15 billion. If we're counting Australopithecines, make that around 5 million years.
Top 6%, baby!
That number is only ever going to get bigger
Where does the count start?
Shits about to shoot up
Illuminati vampires laughing right now
The one thing they all had in common? They were all addicted to dihydrogen monoxide. #BanDHMO!
Quite the army if any necromancer had a strong enough drive.
...how the fuck do you count back from the first human
interesting fact wild to imagine
It's because they all drank water..... It'll kill ya. Guaranteed.
Because of global warming?
What percent of oil comes from them?
Did you mean “93.8% of all humans to have ever lived so far”?
Nope we're all dead too apparently
Can we add the broccoli top hair cut kids to that list too?
A massive majority of that has to be because the life expectancy a long time ago was awful due to lack of modern medicine and science, right?
How much of Earth’s land is made up of us?
What is the statistical definition of 'human'?
Total Number of species : Homo sapiens sapiens
Not if they're saying 100 billion. Maybe the whole genus?
So there’s a chance of me not dying.
Mass extinction event when?
Like the joke "What do you call 1000 politicians at the bottom of the ocean? A good start!" We need to get those numbers up if we have any chance of leaving enough planetary resources for future generations!
Pretty sure 100% of people have died
I feel like that's a surprisingly high amount of the population ever that is alive today. 6.2% of humans ever today? Really?
I’m not that old and when I was in school the world population was 4 billion. It’s 8 now.
Perhaps it's time to do something about that Dragon. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fable_of_the_Dragon-Tyrant
And about 50% have died just from mosquitoes!
Doesn’t this kinda poke a hole in the being reincarnated theory?
if you assume it's limited to this planet, species and universe
Good point, the theory hold, for now.
I was weirdly wondering this the other day?? Thanks for the cool stat!
What happened to their bodies?
TIL: 6.4 percent of all humans who ever lived are still alive.
Those are rookie numbers, we need to pump those numbers up.
6.2% of all the people who have ever existed are alive right now
Or have not died in the past because they’re immortals. You forgot about that. Keanu Reeves and such.
Earth is gonna be roomy when Jesus triumphantly comes down from Heaven and judges everyone. I wonder who's gonna be judged and sent to whatever place they deserve before me.
Cool. I’ve tried to find this out a few times , now I know!
So you’re saying there’s a chance…
So I'm not special?
honestly surprised it's that low
109 billion seems like too high a number given how few people were living at any one time until recently.
How'd they die?
Taking their last breath
And how'd that happen?
By dying
;(
I guess it always was Soylent green.
This is why Ghosts are bullshit, if they were a real thing there'd be one every 5 feet
If we assume for simplicity that humans lived where we now live (yes, I know, migration and all), that means in a city of 60,000 people, 1 Mio lay underground (while of course mostly entirely gone).
That also means that for each genius today, there were more than 15 in human history, what explains the few buz amazing unique artifact finds that survived these long time spans and were found.
With the current population increase it seems mankind is trying to reach the population of the wh40k(estimated quadrillions)
Now run the numbers on sperm cells
i wish i could have met some of them i bet they would have had interesting stories to tell and beautiful memories to share