do the math on 6000 years.?

Question

start with the current population. and subtract the yearly increase at its rate for each year past. and see what the population was 6000 years ago.

all you billion year people might be surpised.

yearly increase rate for each year. not the same every year. gee

without wars and so on the numbers will still be close enough to open some eyes.

say people have been here for only 50,000 years. at current rate population is x2 every 40 years. for wars and so on lets say every 150 years. start with 2 , 6000 years ago. dont cop out evolutionest. do some math.

Answer 1

That's a good point.

Answer 2

What is the long-term growth rate? I was trying to figure out what it would have to be to go from 2 to 6.5 billion, given a 30 year generation (200 generations), but my math is a bit rusty...

Hmm, reading some other answers here, I'd say that despite the impossibility of the calculation you proposed, the evidence points to the fact that population growth isn't the issue limiting the 6,000 year old world theory. If I take a very modest growth rate, say 2.5 children per generation, and apply it consistently over 200 generations, I go from 2 people to 38,558,717,841,646,200,000. Obviously this growth rate isn't accurate, but is shows just how quickly population can grow over a relatively short period of time.

Answer 3

E. coli double in 20 minutes. In theory, if you grew them for a week, they'd weigh more than the Earth. If you look at human population growth, food has been the limiting factor (Malthusian Law). If you work backwards you find that the human population was highly restricted by the Ice Age 10,000 years ago. The history of population fluctuations shows that smooth growth curves are just Creationist fiction, and that the data do not fit the curve.

Answer 4

Why? What would it change now? It won't change anyones mind no matter what your so-called "math" showed. The new-Earth people will still believe what they want as well as the billion year old Earth people. It won't make any difference. Besides nothing ever remains constant including the human growth rate. Your "math" would be severely flawed.

Answer 5

I agree. When I do the math, I find that there were less than 2 people here 20 billion years ago. What does that prove again?

Answer 6

are your seriously suggesting that the rate of population increase stayed constant through the mini-ice age of of the 600s, the bumper harvests of the twelfth century, and the black death of the thirteenth?

you actually think that europe can lose 1/3 of its population in about a decade (late 1340s) and this does not affect the rate of population growth?

i am constantly amazed at american innumeracy here, but your calculation is sadly memorable even in context.

[edit]

current world population is a little under 7 bn and has doubled since 1975.

so 1975 : 3.5 bn (about correct, but this is where we started from)

1945 : 1.7 bn (not too bad, but a significant underestimate)

1915 : 0.8 bn (out by just under 100%, not good)

1885 : 0.4 bn (out by just under 200%, and it gets worse)

Answer 7

ummm...do you have some actual #'s for us to run or are you taking the result as a matter of faith?

i have no idea what the average global population increase is annually NOW...but i do know that it has been steadily rising for nearly 100 years...how do you account for the annual changes in population growth for you little calculation?

Answer 8

Yes. Right. How long have records been kept? All over the world? Considering they probably aren't even accurate in a lot of it at the moment? Factor in diseases, wars, epidemics, etc.

Answer 9

Imagine that you are standing at some distance east of a tall building. A fence prevents you from getting closer to the building but does not impede your view. Suppose that you want to know the height of the building. What can you do?

Well, first suppose that you see three people standing close to the building in the distance. You can't see them absolutely clearly, but it looks like one is an adult man, one an adult woman, and one a child. You hold up a pencil, marking with your thumbnail the apparent height of the man. Then you carefully move your pencil up the building, one "man-height" at a time, counting the number of "man-heights" tall the building is. You find that it is 53 "man-heights" tall. You assume that the man is 5'10" tall, and multiplying, you estimate that the building is 309 feet high. You repeat the process with the woman, assuming her height to be 5'4". You find the building to be 54 "woman-heights" high, or 288 feet. Repeating the process once again with the child, you find the building to be 77 "child-heights" high. Estimating the child's height at 4'0", you estimate the building's height to be 308 feet. Based on the data gathered so far, you are justified in estimating the building to be between 288 and 309 feet high, or somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 feet.

Now suppose that you notice a man at the top of the building who is periodically dropping what look like bowling balls off the building. Deferring speculation on why he might be dropping the bowling balls, you time how long they take to fall and find that on average they take 4.4 seconds to fall from the top of the building to the ground. Knowing that the distance travelled by objects falling in the earth's gravitational field in a vacuum conforms to the simple equation,

Distance = 16t2

you calculate that the building is about 310 feet high, your calculation disregarding the effects of air resistance. This makes your estimate slightly inflated, though for bowling balls the effect is very minor. In any case, this is consistent with your earlier estimates and provides independent corroboration for them.

Furthermore, by measuring the time interval between when each bowling ball hits the ground and when you hear the noise of its impact to be a bit less than 1 sec., and knowing that sound travels at about 1,100 feet per second at sea level, you estimate that you are standing about 1000' away from the building.

Now the sun is setting behind the building, and just as the building's shadow approaches you, you whip out a foot ruler, hold it upright on the ground, and mark the ruler's shadow length. Measuring from the base of the ruler to your mark, you find the ruler's shadow to be 37" long. Based on the estimate of your distance from the building obtained earlier, simple algebra shows that a 1000' foot long shadow would be cast by a building that is 324 feet tall at that angle of the sun.

At this point you have three quite different and independent methods of estimating the building's height, and they agree that it is in the neighborhood of 300 feet tall, perhaps a bit more but certainly not substantially less. Now a man walks up to you and says, "Your estimates are all wrong! My book says that the building is really only about 1/200 of an inch (0.005 inch) high. All of your measuring methods are terribly flawed and your estimates cannot be believed. The building is actually less than a hundredth of an inch tall! You must ignore your measurements and discard the physics which underlies them." What would you say to him?

This is exactly what the creationists argue. They deny that the several independent methods of estimating the age of geological features are reliable, and argue that they are in fact as much in (coordinated) error as the man denying your estimate of the height of the building. The creationist "young earth" hypothesis says that the estimates of the age of the earth that show it to be on the order of 4.5 billion years old are wildly mistaken, and that the earth is really only about 6,000 or 10,000 or 20,000 years old. In other words, they argue that the best scientific estimates of the age of the earth are off by as much as a factor of 750,000! This is equivalent to arguing that the building you estimated to be 300 feet tall is really only about five-thousandths of an inch tall. Yet they offer absolutely no valid evidence to substantiate this extraordinary claim but only criticize your measurements by saying things like, 'Well, those people may be midgets, and they aren't really standing near the building, and your stopwatch is wildly unreliable, and sound doesn't necessarily travel at 1100 feet per second in the air near the building, and gravity is different near the building, so your measurements are wrong by a factor of 750,000.' This is the precise character of the argument offered by "scientific" creationists. Is it any wonder that most scientists don't waste time and energy refuting creationist claims?

Answer 10

You can't do this...too many unknowns. I'll list just a few.

Factors that could slow growth
Plague
Drought


Factors that could speed growth
Society structure
Wealth of society
Technology Advances

Factors that could either slow or speed...no way of telling which:
Wars
Geographical Region


It just can't be done.

Answer 11

you're ignoring plagues, wars, average lifespan and discontinued growth of the population