Tales of the Talking Tiger

How many people have ever lived?

Sep 2nd 2008
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I don’t know how I came to ask myself this question, but there’s nothing like a question that has an answer that is impossible to know!

We know how many people are alive today (roughly 6.8 billion according to this funky counter). We know how many people lived in 1970 (roughly 3.6 billion).

But we don’t know how many people have walked the face of the planet since day 1.

One scientist suggests that 5.8% of people ever born are on the earth today (at least, that was the estimate in 2002). The ever questionable Wikipedia states that estimates of total world population range between 45 billion and 125 billion. I’m not sure if a range of 80 billion is good or not – it doesn’t strike me as being particularly conclusive.

Yet we can conclude that (even in the age of Google) there are some things we don’t know, and will never know the answer to.

What else fits into this category?


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One Comment

  1. Oct 9th, 2008

    Dave

    I have heard those figures myself but would like to put this one forward for you to rap your head round.

    Now bear with me on this one as it ties into the post quite well.

    Lets set the scene.

    I have 2 parents, they have 4 parents between them and therefore I have 8 Great Grandparents and 16 Great Great Grandparents – I hope you see where I am going with this.

    If with every generation we go back we double the number of direct ancestors and making the assumption that a new generation comes along say every 25 years, then 50 generations ago (1250 years) each of us would have 562,949,953,421,312 Great, Great, Great, … Grandparents. YES – that is the number – , 562 trillion or 562 thousand billion.

    At that rate in less than 5 thousand years we are talking figures with in excess of 50 zeroes on the end. And don’t forget man is believed to have come into existence about 2 million years ago. I tried to work out the final number on the computer but it just wouldn’t do it.

    I would love it if someone could explain how these numbers come about when the worlds population was so small all those years ago and the human race had to have started with a very few.

    .BTW – First post ever

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