Interesting .... Facts !!!

I was reading something that said there was more people alive today than everyone that has ever died ...

How would one go about disproving this .. ??

Mod Edit: All Caps – Please Review This Link.

[edit on 3/7/2007 by Mirthful Me]

Considering there may be good evidence that past civilisations have been on this planet it is a bit arrogant that statement.

But heck you will have to go through census etc to see levels of populations etc...

I think that's mathematically impossible to have more people alive than has ever died. According to wikipedia's page on world population, current population is around 6.5 billion. On the same page it also has an estimate of 45-125 billion that have ever lived on Earth. Also, looking at the WW2 death toll, there's about 2 billion there alone..

Wikipedia: World Population
Wikipedia: WW2 Casualties


Professor Glen Paige makes an assumption of when the first two people were on Earth, but other than that, his math and numbers seem to be solid. His final number falls into the large estimate given on Wikipedia's world population page.
Math on amount of people

[edit on 2-7-2007 by bluesquareapple]

Arthur C. Clark famously prefaced his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey with the line, "Behind every man stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living." That was in the 1960's. Population has risen since to over 6.5 billion. However, more than one hundred billion people have died on earth. We are still far from reaching the point where the living outnumber the dead.

Originally posted by Deus_Brandon
I was reading something that said there was more people alive today than everyone that has ever died ...

How would one go about disproving this .. ??

You can't disprove it, but for the very same reason, you also cannot prove it

Might I also suggest the thread title to include the subject matter.

Blues and Squares ... That is stating that there have only been about 6.9 billion people to ever have lived on this earth. At the rate that we Multiply ... It just might be possible ... Hmmm ... More information please you guys have been awesome !

It says .... "The total estimated human loss of life caused by World War II, irrespective of political alignment, was roughly 72 million people." Wiki ....

That is not even close to a billion .... We could have had almost 15 WWII's and that would make 1 billion people he dead ... Thank about that. The single greatest cause of death in Human Civilization. Hmmm I am not sure that this statement is not true.

current pop. 6,500,000,000 growing all the time

see geography.about.com... for some historic estimates based on growth rates.

Can anyone PROVE that more people have died that are alive right now ??

Originally posted by johnb
current pop. 6,500,000,000 growing all the time

see geography.about.com... for some historic estimates based on growth rates.

Can anyone PROVE that more people have died that are alive right now ??

Originally posted by johnb
current pop. 6,500,000,000 growing all the time

see geography.about.com... for some historic estimates based on growth rates.

Even if you could figure out all of the humans alive and that have died, where do you start counting, at what point in our past did we evolve to become the humans ?

The very fact that everyone is still debating where we came from and what species we are, is enough to say we can not currently say how many people lived.

Originally posted by R3KR
at what point in our past did we evolve to become the humans ?

According to anthropoligists, Homo Sapiens originated 200 000 years ago.

www.mnh.si.edu...

This is all very key on getting to the bottom of this Mathmatical Problem ... The only thing is do we have enough numbers or INFORMATION to fit into the Solution ?

I find this interesting because I once had a theory that each of us lives mutilple lives on a certain world through the ages to experience the rise and fall of civilizations on a timeline. For example, a person would have had maybe 5 or 10 lives on Earth through the ages, culminating in todays population explosion as we near the end of a civilization cycle. Each of us must experience various elements that these different eras bring and the result is experiencing the end or restart, hence the huge population growth. How we fared in these multiple lives dictates whether we go up or down in "world" type after experiencing one full cycle.

Just my 0.02 of random thought.

Originally posted by Deus_Brandon
It says .... "The total estimated human loss of life caused by World War II, irrespective of political alignment, was roughly 72 million people." Wiki ....

That is not even close to a billion .... We could have had almost 15 WWII's and that would make 1 billion people he dead ... Thank about that. The single greatest cause of death in Human Civilization. Hmmm I am not sure that this statement is not true.

I said the number was merely there, not that those were the amount of deaths. With an average estimated life expectancy of 78 with births starting today, we're coming up to a point in time where the majority of the people that have survived WW2 are starting to die. My failure to elaborate sufficiently, sorry.

Interesting stuff...

Human Population Through Time

Human Population Growth

World Population Since Creation

VERY INTERESTING .... So have we come to a conclusion that it is possible that there are more people living today then all that have died all together ?

Originally posted by Deus_Brandon
VERY INTERESTING .... So have we come to a conclusion that it is possible that there are more people living today then all that have died all together ?

Unless you believe that the world population at the time of the "great flood" was 9 billion. It's a thought provoker that's for sure. It's in the third link I posted above, about halfway down the page. Supposedley this was about 3600 BC or so.

[edit on 9/7/07 by Prote]

Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, duuuuuuuuummmmmmmmmbbbbbb. Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you people? Even if you just go back to the year 2,000 B.S., how could you NOT think that more than seven billion people have died on this planet? Hmm.....let's see here.....a few thousand years of people dying.....or one number taken from just one day.....are people "arguing" this topic for just the sake of an argument?

The Earth was relatively very sparsely populated until the 20th century. There world's population in 1800 was only one billion, and only 1000 years ago, the world's entire population was smaller than the current population of the United States. In 1000 BCE (3000 years ago), the population of the whole planet was the same as England's current population (50,000,000). And 10,000 years ago, less people lived on Earth than live in New York City today. So it is tempting to think that the OP could be true...but it really is just a myth.

Carl Haub, a well-respected demographer, has calculated that over 109 billion people have ever lived on the planet (since 50,000 years ago). Subtract the people alive right now, and we're still talking over 100 billion

Here are some articles. The first one is by Haub himself, showing how he came up with his number. The second article is one that dispells the myth that the OP is trying to push:

www.faculty.rsu.edu...

www.sciam.com...