Are there more people on the planet now than have ever lived?

Question

Read an article recently where someone argues this to be true - although my first reaction was that it could not possibly be so.

However, the more you think about it in terms of expanding population and how many new humans each of us "makes" it starts to make a weird kind of sense.

That and it melts your brain!
Enjoy!

Answer 1

Nope. There are about 6.5 billion people alive today. Probably more than ten times this number have lived and died in the last million years or so. This number is arrived at by drawing a graph of the world population, using a few reasonable assumptions, guesstimating the average duration of a generation (about 22 years, and it hasn't changed much over human history)and adding up the populations of all the generations. Even with the maximum possible errors the world's present population is much less than the sum total of all the previous generations. The good news is, indications are that there will never be more people alive than have lived and died. The runaway growth of human population which threatened to wreck the planet seems to have died out. Only a few very poor countries now have runaway population growth, and even there it's inevitably going to slow down.

Answer 2

Due to the question being put like it is, the answer is no. However, if asked instead are there more people alive on the planet than have ever died, the answer would be yes. Nobody has left the planet except a few who are currently in orbit. The ones in orbit are not on this planet and therefore there are less people on this planet than have ever lived. Doesn't anyone pay any attention to the wording of the questions.

Answer 3

Right now there are more than six billion human beings on Earth. In 1900, there were less than two billion people, and less than one billion prior to the Industrial Revolution.

Human populations increase arithmetically with a reliable food source, so the number of people born since 1950 *is* more than all those born beforehand.

Answer 4

Of course its true,for many reasons.The basic pyramid theory and a thing like vaccinations from stuff that killed many and a thing called Penicillin.

Answer 5

Nope. Rough estimates show that in the 6,000 years since Adam and Eve were created by God, that there have been in the vicinity of 30,000,000 humans who have lived.

Answer 6

Im sure there are more now than before, especially with science and medicine nowadays.

Answer 7

I think now is more people then had ever

Answer 8

common sense says "yes"