Are there more people alive today than have ever been born ?

Question

If there are, can you please explain ?

Answer 1

I assume you actually mean do the living outnumber the dead. Despite a popular myth, and even some song lyrics, this is completely untrue.

To calculate the actual ratio depends very much on where you start counting form, but conservatively, I've started just 10,000 years ago, and assumed only 1 million people lived in the entire world then. I've assumed an annual birth rate of 30 per 1000 people per year, which is typical of undeveloped countries.

I increased the population double-exponentially, which is how population has grown in recorded time. That is, the population not only increases by a percentage per year, that percentage itself increases. I adjusted the percentages until it gave me a modern population of about 6.5 billion.

I calculated the population in 100 year steps and added all the steps together. I figure that at the very least 100 billion people have been born in the last 10,000 years, of whom about 6.5 billion are alive today. So the dead outnumber the living by at least 15 to 1, but the real figure is probably double that, and maybe far more.

As the world's population is predicted to stabilise and even decline this century, the living will never get to outnumber the dead, and the proportion will actually decline.

Answer 2

illogical.
If there are 5 people alive today than these 5 people had to be born. So add those five births to all the other births and it is higher than the five alive.
No, there are not more people alive today than have ever been born.

Answer 3

You ask a great question and one that cannot be answered in this forum. The only way to know is to integrate a graph of human population vs time. But how much time? And how quickly did the human race grow? And, do you believe in a cataclysmic flood? To make a very long story short, I would estimate about 80 billion have already existed. Now you do the math.

Answer 4

No.
Let P = people who have ever been born.
Let A = people who are alive today.

Now, Abraham Lincoln is a member of P, because he was once born.
Abraham Lincoln is NOT a member of A, because Abraham Lincoln was shot dead in 1865.
Clearly, A is less than P.

Answer 5

No, there aren't. For that to be true, each generation would have to double the generation before them, meaning that each couple would have to have 4 children, 5 or 6 if you make some room for infertility and early death. And that would have to hold true generation after generation. Clearly, that is not the case.

Answer 6

I'm not quite sure what you mean.If you are asking if the number of people alive to-day,is greater than the number of people who have died through-out history,then the answer is no.The dead are in the majority.

Answer 7

To answer your question the way I read it, No, everyone living today was born!

Answer 8

That would be a little hard to accomplish, eh? If they are alive today, they would have had to have been born, correct?

Answer 9

That is a statistical impossibility. But there are more people alive than dead.

Answer 10

the current world population is around 90% of the population of all time. i don't know when i heard this but it was on discovery channel and they are pretty smart