People
Today I read jwz's post linking to an article that claims "Of all the people in human history who ever reached the age of 65, half are alive now."
That reminded me of a question I've had for a while: "How many people have every lived on Earth", so I finally googled it. Of course, first you have to define "what is a human", so I put the marker at around 10,000 years ago. I found that in 8,000 B.C., scientist project there were about 5 million people on Earth, about 300 million in 1 A.D. and about 2.5 billion in 1950. Then it shot up over the past 50 years to the current 6 billion.
When you do that math, it turns out about 100 billion people were ever born, with about 6 billion alive right now. That's 6% of all people who have walked the earth are alive right now, and 10% of the people who live in the past 10,000 years have been born in the last 100 years.
Ref: pbr.org
That reminded me of a question I've had for a while: "How many people have every lived on Earth", so I finally googled it. Of course, first you have to define "what is a human", so I put the marker at around 10,000 years ago. I found that in 8,000 B.C., scientist project there were about 5 million people on Earth, about 300 million in 1 A.D. and about 2.5 billion in 1950. Then it shot up over the past 50 years to the current 6 billion.
When you do that math, it turns out about 100 billion people were ever born, with about 6 billion alive right now. That's 6% of all people who have walked the earth are alive right now, and 10% of the people who live in the past 10,000 years have been born in the last 100 years.
Ref: pbr.org