My calender gives a daily fact. Today's: 10% of humans ever born are alive at this moment - surely not???

Answer 1

The Glasgow Science Centre seems to agree

10% of all human beings ever born are alive at this very moment. (and over 3 billion of the World’s 6 billion population is under 25 years of age.

Answer 2

I would have thought it was higher. However, on further reflection it seems about right.

There are over 6 billion people alive today. As recently as 50 years ago, the population was 2 billion. For much of history, it was a lot less than that. I would guess that for most of the last two thousand years, the population was under 100 million, and prior to that, only a few million total.

Whether the 10 percent is right or not, I think it's in the ballpark.

Answer 3

Yeah, I don't think that is right. I think it is..

There are more people alive today then all the people ever born. If everyone had 2 kids and each of those kids had 2 kids and so on, then at 4 generations (assuming 20 years a generation), you would have 16 times as many people alive. Hmmm. Maybe that 10% is correct.

Answer 4

estimates vary (and 10% seems very low) but when you consider that even when i was born the population of the entire world was less than half of what it is now, and in 1900 it was less than one third, it seems likely that a large proportion of the entire human race is alive right now.

consider that rome was probably the largest city in the world for nearly a thousand years, but never got much over one million inhabitants. you could probably take ever roman who ever lived and you would still have only the current population of nigeria.

the world was an empty place before 1750 - there were huge forests between most of the major european cities.

the persian army at plataea was the largest military force ever assembled by the greatest empire the world had ever seen. it was probably about 250,000 strong.

more people turned out in pittsburgh to welcome the steelers home.

Answer 5

10% is a very low estimate. It's nearer half of all people ever are alive today.

The sheer scale of the numbers is blinding but count your own personal generation and realise how few people are responsible for it. Assuming you're an adult there's your brothers and sisters, all your kids and theirs, your own parents, maybe, and their brothers and sisters and their kids and their kids. How many is that from 4 grandparents? Every generation global generation reduces in number just as dramatically as you trace it back.

Think of it like a tree. The current population is like the leaves and the past generations are the branches and twigs. Which are there more of?

Answer 6

That seems to be an exaggeration. In 2002, the magazine Population Today, in its most requested article ever, estimated that 5.8% of those ever born were alive. http://tinyurl.com/gfxq Others give different numbers:
http://www.drhern.com/fulltext/why/paper.html
sometimes ridiculously different numbers (50%, 75%). 20% is a commonly cited figure:
http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/World_population
Such numbers are often attributed to Wikipedia, but Wiki's population page doesn't say that. You can make your own calculation from what it does say:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
Or you can look at the UN World Population Survey. Here's a site that gives sources:
http://esa.un.org/unpp/sources.html

Answer 7

Well the human race is expanding and its not like there is a major conflict going on to keep the numbers down. Iraq doesn't really count as a major conflict, things like WWI WWII , The Napoleonic wars. American Civil War .
Conflicts on a larger scale kept the numbers down, Now they are allowed to run out of control.

Answer 8

I have thought that before too. My number change a bit. I got to the conclusion that is something like 1 percent or less. That counting
6000 thousand years to today and knowing that the world never had been this populated.

Answer 9

It's possible. World population used to be very little, probably less than half a billion, for a long long time. The boom was fairly recent... but I don't have all the data, let alone the proof of it, and so I cannot be sure of the math.

Answer 10

That's impossible, even though the population of today is growing and growing, humans have been alive for millions of years, so my guess is surely not also.