Question from an actual kid, though she was eight, not five. Hopefully there’s an explanation more detailed than just “no” I can pass on to her.
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There is a Radio Lab episode about this! I thought on balance they said the total number of people who had lived was almost the same as the number of people living today, (caveat it’s been a while since I listened to it.
Here is the link: [Radio Lab – “Body Count”](https://radiolab.org/episodes/body-count)
EDIT: they were talking about *just* the USA. They say there will be more dead than alive in 2060, but for now they claim there are more alive than dead.
There is a Radio Lab episode about this! I thought on balance they said the total number of people who had lived was almost the same as the number of people living today, (caveat it’s been a while since I listened to it.
Here is the link: [Radio Lab – “Body Count”](https://radiolab.org/episodes/body-count)
EDIT: they were talking about *just* the USA. They say there will be more dead than alive in 2060, but for now they claim there are more alive than dead.
There is a Radio Lab episode about this! I thought on balance they said the total number of people who had lived was almost the same as the number of people living today, (caveat it’s been a while since I listened to it.
Here is the link: [Radio Lab – “Body Count”](https://radiolab.org/episodes/body-count)
EDIT: they were talking about *just* the USA. They say there will be more dead than alive in 2060, but for now they claim there are more alive than dead.
*Mathematically* no. It’s not like you can just keep dividing the total population by two until you get back to Adam and Eve.
But we have estimates anyway—about 117 billion, by some counts—so how do we get them?
Well first we have to define what a “human” is. Where’s the cutoff that distinguishes one population of featherless bipeds from another? And once you have that, you have a zero mark in history: all humans who have ever lived lived after the species came into existence.
Then you have to start looking at historical and archaeological data and make rough inferences about how many people there were in a given region at a given time. And then you just add it all up.
Of course, the obvious concern with that methodology is whether the estimates are reasonably accurate. If you’re off by a lot, wouldn’t it affect the final total?
The answer to that is no. Because the numbers we’re less certain about are low numbers. If we say “five million people lived in 8,000 BC” but the real number is actually twenty million, it doesn’t even register as a rounding error from the final total. The larger the human population grew, the more artifacts it left behind for us to judge how many there were. So the larger the number we see at any given time, the more accurate we are with our estimate.
And that continues on through the present day, with modern census practices giving us a very high degree of certainty that eight billion people are alive today.
[https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth](https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth)
*Mathematically* no. It’s not like you can just keep dividing the total population by two until you get back to Adam and Eve.
But we have estimates anyway—about 117 billion, by some counts—so how do we get them?
Well first we have to define what a “human” is. Where’s the cutoff that distinguishes one population of featherless bipeds from another? And once you have that, you have a zero mark in history: all humans who have ever lived lived after the species came into existence.
Then you have to start looking at historical and archaeological data and make rough inferences about how many people there were in a given region at a given time. And then you just add it all up.
Of course, the obvious concern with that methodology is whether the estimates are reasonably accurate. If you’re off by a lot, wouldn’t it affect the final total?
The answer to that is no. Because the numbers we’re less certain about are low numbers. If we say “five million people lived in 8,000 BC” but the real number is actually twenty million, it doesn’t even register as a rounding error from the final total. The larger the human population grew, the more artifacts it left behind for us to judge how many there were. So the larger the number we see at any given time, the more accurate we are with our estimate.
And that continues on through the present day, with modern census practices giving us a very high degree of certainty that eight billion people are alive today.
[https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth](https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth)
*Mathematically* no. It’s not like you can just keep dividing the total population by two until you get back to Adam and Eve.
But we have estimates anyway—about 117 billion, by some counts—so how do we get them?
Well first we have to define what a “human” is. Where’s the cutoff that distinguishes one population of featherless bipeds from another? And once you have that, you have a zero mark in history: all humans who have ever lived lived after the species came into existence.
Then you have to start looking at historical and archaeological data and make rough inferences about how many people there were in a given region at a given time. And then you just add it all up.
Of course, the obvious concern with that methodology is whether the estimates are reasonably accurate. If you’re off by a lot, wouldn’t it affect the final total?
The answer to that is no. Because the numbers we’re less certain about are low numbers. If we say “five million people lived in 8,000 BC” but the real number is actually twenty million, it doesn’t even register as a rounding error from the final total. The larger the human population grew, the more artifacts it left behind for us to judge how many there were. So the larger the number we see at any given time, the more accurate we are with our estimate.
And that continues on through the present day, with modern census practices giving us a very high degree of certainty that eight billion people are alive today.
[https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth](https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth)
Technically it’s possible to estimate just about anything. It just might not always be a good estimate.
Technically it’s possible to estimate just about anything. It just might not always be a good estimate.
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