If you are just curious, the number is 117B people who was ever born on Earth. High amount of guesstimates and assumptions involved. Yadda yadda popsci article phrases.
Doing some rough back-of-the-envelope calculations, I wouldn't be shocked for any value between 100 and 200 billion.
You end up with estimates of high single billions for all humans pre-Neolithic (pre-urban settlement)--the error bars are very high, but it doesn't make a large difference in the grand scheme of things because it's the smallest component. For urban settlement essentially before good, sustained record keeping (think ~10kya to 1kya), you're looking at several tens of billions of people, with several tens of billions more in the era of modern record keeping. Right now, it takes about 6 years or so for a billion babies to be born.
(For my part, I think the estimate they give here is on the low end. I don't know the sources they're using, but I've generally observed that estimates of pre-modern demography have generally trended upwards in more recent scholarship.)
"Error bands" aren't really calculable for something like this, because a lot of it is as much definitions as anything else. As the article points out, there is a lot of uncertainty just when we say the first "modern home sapien" "counts" as a person.
Makes me wonder how many more billions will have to die before we bother to put some actual effort into ending death, but I know that's a very obscure opinion. https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon
I think there's a much more firm reason you're right - life expectancy isn't increasing how most think it is. There was an interesting study [1] that examined the life expectancy of all known individuals from Ancient Greece, excluding those with violent deaths (assassination, forced suicide, etc) and found the average male born before 100BC lived to 72 years old on average. In America in 2019 (to avoid COVID biases), the life expectancy for a male was 76.3 years.
The knee-jerk response is to imagine there was a literal survivorship bias. Yet these individuals all made their names long before their deaths. Had Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, or whomever else (in general) died at 50 - their names would still have gone down in the annals of history. However, you certainly wouldn't have heard of them had they died at 10. And that's what's really changed.
We're now able to keep infants, even those who are unhealthy, alive at a much higher rate. Something like 40% of children in Ancient Greece did not make it to their 10th birthday. But for those that did, there was a chance pretty comparable to modern times that they'd see many more decades yet. By contrast today, even for unhealthy children, mortality before age 10 is approaching 0.
Life expectancy is increasing, but longevity isn't really changing much at all. Even in a world of mortality obsessed billionaires using every technological method known to try to increase their life expectancy, they're not really getting much further than the average man. What little longevity they do gain can probably be more accurately explained from simple things like better exercise habits and lower levels of obesity, than esoteric young blood plasma treatments and the like.
I don't like to comment much anymore, but I feel like I have spent a substantial portion of my life on this topic, and consequently can direct people to some resources that can bridge the knowledge gap a bit in this regard.
>delay it by decades
Yes, but we aren't solving the problems, we are dealing with symptoms. The entire industry is currently treating old age diseases as diseases, and not as symptoms of bodily decay. This is covered extensively by the work of Dr Aubrey de Grey (yes, that one), in any case, he documents 7 different ways in which the body accrues damage over time, and is actively researching in all these fields to find methods to mitigate, and reverse said damage.
To aid in this regard, feel free to visit the SENS research foundation website at https://www.sens.org/
This approach is very different from the one currently deployed in the field afaik. The idea is that the human body, like a car, can be kept in pristine condition if these 7 sources of deterioration is reversed/addressed.
It is really quite fascinating. I would advise you to go check out the healthspan discord on https://discord.gg/sCwyPXu
There are a number of highly motivated individuals actively researching and following the SOTA as well as excellent news aggregation.
I think technically what would be desirable would be to end or pause aging, not death. I have this feeling that if I reach some crazy 3 figure age and have the body to go with it, death is going to be a welcome concept.
Yes, because I totally want to continue working to pay taxes, rent, utilities, clothing, food, etc. forever. Frankly, I am not trying to hasten my death, but I am looking forward to it. Finally a break from the eternal go go go go, just to maintain life.
Death has its advantages: for the living, it is clarifying and for the future it is clearing.
That said it’s a loonshot that will undoubtedly have spinoff benefits for increased life quality.
If death becomes a choice, then the character of prevailing culture will likely match the characteristics of those who choose not to die. What would that look like? Would that be a culture worth living in?
Why would you want to end death? Or you mean ageing so your body never deteriorates from a certain point?
Your brain's capacity to handle memory would still be a blocker for any meaningful extended survival.
Any decent scifi novel would name many of the very simple problems it would cause at an individual and societal level, not to speak of every other biological ramification of the body.
I'd like to substitute your picture for a more plausible one: imagine a world full of incredibly wealthy robber barons, using their fortunes to ensure that "colored" workers stick to their designated bathrooms, putting lead into everything because dying is something that only happens to the poor, and refusing jobs to workers with the wrong skull shape.
And if you think owning a home is hard, just wait until every property in your city is owned by a group of immortal British lords who insist on women dressing modestly and "No Irish need apply" signs everywhere. This may not be too far away from what your actual town looks like right now, but at least we currently have the hope that those people will die and be replaced by slightly-saner ones.
“The silent majority” was originally a euphemism referring to the dead, who outnumber the living. It only got its political meaning in the 19th century.
Same thing -- I know I came across that at some point in the past few years, and it seemed reasonable enough given exponential growth that I just accepted it as true without researching it further.
Turns out it's one of those totally wrong "factoids" that nevertheless keeps getting repeated (like the only man-made structure you can see from space being the Great Wall, etc.), and which dates as far back as the 1970's according to Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...
This is worth a read for those unfamiliar with this argument. Essentially, it’s a way to make a probabilistic guess for when humans will go extinct based on the number of humans that have been born. There are several variants and as far as I know, the argument’s premise has never been conclusively refuted.
I think the biggest problem with this utter nonsense is this:
> In other words, one can assume with 95% certainty that any individual human would be within the last 95% of all the humans ever to be born
"any individual human" really means "a human chosen at random" from all humans who will ever live. Then they go on to assume that this is representative of the humans who have already lived. But clearly there's a problem there. They find a statistic that is true of all past-and-future humans and then assumed it must be equally true of all past humans as well. In fact we've exactly chosen the subset (past humans) as those that are least likely for this statistic to apply. It'd be like deriving some statistic about being 95% sure any given human can run a mile within 10 minutes, and then applying that statistic specifically to those humans with no legs. It's that dumb -- clearly past humans are fundamentally different from past-and-future humans in exactly the property they're sampling.
You can easily see this problem by simply going back in time and applying the same argument at any point in history. At some point, the total number of humans who had ever been born was 1 billion. At that point, we would have been 95% sure that the total number of humans would never exceed 20 billion. Oops! In fact, we would have been 99% sure that the total number of humans would never exceed 100 billion. Double oops!
Go back to when the total number of humans who had ever been born was 1 million. We would have been 99.999% sure the total number of humans would never exceed 100 billion. Triple oops!
There are a number of counter arguments that I don’t see represented in this article. For instance:
1) this argument makes the implicit assumption that the “number of years before a species goes extinct” is anti-correlated with “the present population of the species” meaning that the greater the present population in comparison to the historical population, the less time we should expect the species to survive for. This is already a contradiction because in reality it is the opposite. Species abundance is directly correlated with species longevity. Necessarily so! In order for a species to go extinct all members must die!
2) there’s no particular reason you should take the emergence of anatomically modern humans as the start point. We represent a continuous lineage of related animals going back to the last universal common ancestor of all life. By naive copernican principal, you may expect our lineage to go on for another 4 billion years! This is not to say that this is likely, just that the copernican principal is entirely subject to what you consider the starting point to be. If you say you care about “homo sapiens and their direct descendants” rather than “homo sapiens” you get a very different answer.
Even more remarkable is that by the estimate in Table 1, the percentage is increasing over time.
If this trend continues over the centuries it is conceivable that >=50% of all human beings to ever exist could be extantly alive. Either growth rate exploded or death rate arrested.
It recalls to mind Fyodor the one-time teacher of Tsiolkovsky of the rocket equation, who conceived a kind of akashic immortality project he called the Common Task. So like maybe this Kaneda-Haub statistic asymptotically approaches 100%.
Supposing a starting population of 2 we can call Adam and Eve divided by 0 dead ancestors do note it started at infinity before dropping precipitously near 0 for a 202k year exponential climb to today's ~7%. Fwiw I consider such plot affirmative evidence assuming the demographic inputs are not wildly inaccurate.
I've never heard most, but I think back the population of earth was only about 6 billion there were people claiming that about 1/5 of people who have ever lived are alive right now.
I've read that at the smallest bottleneck our species had fewer than 10,000 individuals, although I don't think that sad state lasted long.
There's a version of this that may actually be correct if you restrict it to the number of humans ever older than 60 years old, but I admit I never followed up on that one. The roughly 100 billion ever claim I recall more readily as it's an interesting remark to give to people who think they see ghosts to see what they think of it and the related question of where they all are.
Why are the ghosts usually wearing clothes from the last few hundred years? Where are the Bronze Age ghosts? Or do ghosts dissipate after a period of time? Has anyone ever asked these questions of ghost believers?
It’s a catchy structure/fact that people use for many true things that reenforce misremembering false things. For example there have been many articles recently that more scientists are alive now than in all of history, which is probably true.
I think it's precisely this. We see exponential population growth of population, so we naturally assume most humans are alive now. What this intuition fails to grasp is quite how long humans have been around: eventually that adds up.
Arthur C Clarke https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/212808-behind-every-man-now... "Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth."
no they don't. Here is the beginning of the Scientific Amercian article:
The human population has swelled so much that people alive today outnumber all those who have ever lived, says a factoid whose roots stretch back to the 1970s. Some versions of this widely circulating rumor claim that 75 percent of all people ever born are currently alive. Yet, despite a quadrupling of the population in the past century, the number of people alive today is still dwarfed by the number of people who have ever lived.
In 2002 Carl Haub, a demographer at the Population Reference Bureau, a nongovernmental organization in Washington, D.C., updated his earlier estimate of the number of people that have ever existed. To calculate this, he studied the available population data to determine the human population growth rates during different historical periods, and used them to determine the number of people who have ever been born.
For most of history, the population grew slowly, if at all. According to the United Nations' Determinants and Consequences of Population Trends, the first Homo sapiens appeared around 50,000 years ago, though this figure is debatable. Little is known about this distant past and how many of us there might have been, but by the time of the agricultural revolution in the Middle East in 9000 B.C., Earth held an estimated five million people.
Between the rise of farming and the height of Roman rule,population growth was sluggish; at less than a tenth of a percent per year, it crawled to about 300 million by A.D. 1. Then the total fell as plagues wiped out large swathes of people. (The "black death" in the 14th century wiped out at least 75 million.) As a result, by 1650 the world population had only increased to about 500 million. By 1800, though, thanks to improved agriculture and sanitation, it doubled to more than one billion. And, in 2002 when Haub last made these calculations, the planet's population had exploded, reaching 6.2 billion.
To calculate how many people have ever lived, Haub followed a minimalist approach, beginning with two people in 50000 B.C.—his Adam and Eve. Then, using his historical growth rates and population benchmarks, he estimated that slightly over 106 billion people had ever been born. Of those, people alive today comprise only 6 percent, nowhere near 75 percent. "[It is] almost surely true people alive today are some small fraction of [all] people," says Joel Cohen, a professor of populations at the Rockefeller and Columbia Universities in New York City.
I wonder if there were old estimates based on religious teaching that Earth is only 6000 years old. We have only recently known the age of humanity and prehistoric population.
Or maybe it was saying that wasn’t based on estimate.
This article starts 190 000 years back. Our species, Homo Sapien, goes back anywhere from then, up to 300 000 years ago. The genus Homo around two million years.
I think it's a very interesting question, what does human mean? It's easy to think early humans were intrinsically different, merely because not much physical evidence survives. But given Neanderthals were doing cave art 64 000 years ago, maybe even they weren't that different.
Evolution occurs through birth and death. If humans stopped dying, then presumably they would also stop having kids, because why keep having them, and thus we'd get stuck on that last generation. Then, with no new generations, we would also stop evolving, as a species.
Readit News
There have been people born on planes, for example.
Deleted Comment
You end up with estimates of high single billions for all humans pre-Neolithic (pre-urban settlement)--the error bars are very high, but it doesn't make a large difference in the grand scheme of things because it's the smallest component. For urban settlement essentially before good, sustained record keeping (think ~10kya to 1kya), you're looking at several tens of billions of people, with several tens of billions more in the era of modern record keeping. Right now, it takes about 6 years or so for a billion babies to be born.
(For my part, I think the estimate they give here is on the low end. I don't know the sources they're using, but I've generally observed that estimates of pre-modern demography have generally trended upwards in more recent scholarship.)
It's part of life that it ends, it seems. No way of getting around that no matter how many sci-fi solutions Bostrom proposes as realistic.
The knee-jerk response is to imagine there was a literal survivorship bias. Yet these individuals all made their names long before their deaths. Had Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, or whomever else (in general) died at 50 - their names would still have gone down in the annals of history. However, you certainly wouldn't have heard of them had they died at 10. And that's what's really changed.
We're now able to keep infants, even those who are unhealthy, alive at a much higher rate. Something like 40% of children in Ancient Greece did not make it to their 10th birthday. But for those that did, there was a chance pretty comparable to modern times that they'd see many more decades yet. By contrast today, even for unhealthy children, mortality before age 10 is approaching 0.
Life expectancy is increasing, but longevity isn't really changing much at all. Even in a world of mortality obsessed billionaires using every technological method known to try to increase their life expectancy, they're not really getting much further than the average man. What little longevity they do gain can probably be more accurately explained from simple things like better exercise habits and lower levels of obesity, than esoteric young blood plasma treatments and the like.
[1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1294277/pdf/jrs...
>delay it by decades
Yes, but we aren't solving the problems, we are dealing with symptoms. The entire industry is currently treating old age diseases as diseases, and not as symptoms of bodily decay. This is covered extensively by the work of Dr Aubrey de Grey (yes, that one), in any case, he documents 7 different ways in which the body accrues damage over time, and is actively researching in all these fields to find methods to mitigate, and reverse said damage.
To aid in this regard, feel free to visit the SENS research foundation website at https://www.sens.org/
This approach is very different from the one currently deployed in the field afaik. The idea is that the human body, like a car, can be kept in pristine condition if these 7 sources of deterioration is reversed/addressed.
It is really quite fascinating. I would advise you to go check out the healthspan discord on https://discord.gg/sCwyPXu
There are a number of highly motivated individuals actively researching and following the SOTA as well as excellent news aggregation.
This is the initial reason I got interested in this in the first place: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvWtSUdOWVI
One of Dr de Grey's quotes that I find quite compelling is:
"There is no difference between saving lives and extending lives, because in both cases we are giving people the chance of more life."
That's not a general truth. The Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish is biological immortal.
That said it’s a loonshot that will undoubtedly have spinoff benefits for increased life quality.
If death becomes a choice, then the character of prevailing culture will likely match the characteristics of those who choose not to die. What would that look like? Would that be a culture worth living in?
Your brain's capacity to handle memory would still be a blocker for any meaningful extended survival.
Any decent scifi novel would name many of the very simple problems it would cause at an individual and societal level, not to speak of every other biological ramification of the body.
And if you think owning a home is hard, just wait until every property in your city is owned by a group of immortal British lords who insist on women dressing modestly and "No Irish need apply" signs everywhere. This may not be too far away from what your actual town looks like right now, but at least we currently have the hope that those people will die and be replaced by slightly-saner ones.
Turns out it's one of those totally wrong "factoids" that nevertheless keeps getting repeated (like the only man-made structure you can see from space being the Great Wall, etc.), and which dates as far back as the 1970's according to Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...
Dead Comment
This is worth a read for those unfamiliar with this argument. Essentially, it’s a way to make a probabilistic guess for when humans will go extinct based on the number of humans that have been born. There are several variants and as far as I know, the argument’s premise has never been conclusively refuted.
> In other words, one can assume with 95% certainty that any individual human would be within the last 95% of all the humans ever to be born
"any individual human" really means "a human chosen at random" from all humans who will ever live. Then they go on to assume that this is representative of the humans who have already lived. But clearly there's a problem there. They find a statistic that is true of all past-and-future humans and then assumed it must be equally true of all past humans as well. In fact we've exactly chosen the subset (past humans) as those that are least likely for this statistic to apply. It'd be like deriving some statistic about being 95% sure any given human can run a mile within 10 minutes, and then applying that statistic specifically to those humans with no legs. It's that dumb -- clearly past humans are fundamentally different from past-and-future humans in exactly the property they're sampling.
You can easily see this problem by simply going back in time and applying the same argument at any point in history. At some point, the total number of humans who had ever been born was 1 billion. At that point, we would have been 95% sure that the total number of humans would never exceed 20 billion. Oops! In fact, we would have been 99% sure that the total number of humans would never exceed 100 billion. Double oops!
Go back to when the total number of humans who had ever been born was 1 million. We would have been 99.999% sure the total number of humans would never exceed 100 billion. Triple oops!
It's a nonsense argument.
1) this argument makes the implicit assumption that the “number of years before a species goes extinct” is anti-correlated with “the present population of the species” meaning that the greater the present population in comparison to the historical population, the less time we should expect the species to survive for. This is already a contradiction because in reality it is the opposite. Species abundance is directly correlated with species longevity. Necessarily so! In order for a species to go extinct all members must die!
2) there’s no particular reason you should take the emergence of anatomically modern humans as the start point. We represent a continuous lineage of related animals going back to the last universal common ancestor of all life. By naive copernican principal, you may expect our lineage to go on for another 4 billion years! This is not to say that this is likely, just that the copernican principal is entirely subject to what you consider the starting point to be. If you say you care about “homo sapiens and their direct descendants” rather than “homo sapiens” you get a very different answer.
By reading this, you have confirmed your membership in the Five Percenters Club. Welcome.
If this trend continues over the centuries it is conceivable that >=50% of all human beings to ever exist could be extantly alive. Either growth rate exploded or death rate arrested.
It recalls to mind Fyodor the one-time teacher of Tsiolkovsky of the rocket equation, who conceived a kind of akashic immortality project he called the Common Task. So like maybe this Kaneda-Haub statistic asymptotically approaches 100%.
Supposing a starting population of 2 we can call Adam and Eve divided by 0 dead ancestors do note it started at infinity before dropping precipitously near 0 for a 202k year exponential climb to today's ~7%. Fwiw I consider such plot affirmative evidence assuming the demographic inputs are not wildly inaccurate.
I've read that at the smallest bottleneck our species had fewer than 10,000 individuals, although I don't think that sad state lasted long.
https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol36/54/36-54....
According to that, it's between 5.5 and 9.5% for age 65, nowhere close to 50+%.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...
Arthur C Clarke https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/212808-behind-every-man-now... "Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth."
also Snopes (updated 2007) https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/recount-your-dead/
no they don't. Here is the beginning of the Scientific Amercian article:
The human population has swelled so much that people alive today outnumber all those who have ever lived, says a factoid whose roots stretch back to the 1970s. Some versions of this widely circulating rumor claim that 75 percent of all people ever born are currently alive. Yet, despite a quadrupling of the population in the past century, the number of people alive today is still dwarfed by the number of people who have ever lived.
In 2002 Carl Haub, a demographer at the Population Reference Bureau, a nongovernmental organization in Washington, D.C., updated his earlier estimate of the number of people that have ever existed. To calculate this, he studied the available population data to determine the human population growth rates during different historical periods, and used them to determine the number of people who have ever been born.
For most of history, the population grew slowly, if at all. According to the United Nations' Determinants and Consequences of Population Trends, the first Homo sapiens appeared around 50,000 years ago, though this figure is debatable. Little is known about this distant past and how many of us there might have been, but by the time of the agricultural revolution in the Middle East in 9000 B.C., Earth held an estimated five million people.
Between the rise of farming and the height of Roman rule,population growth was sluggish; at less than a tenth of a percent per year, it crawled to about 300 million by A.D. 1. Then the total fell as plagues wiped out large swathes of people. (The "black death" in the 14th century wiped out at least 75 million.) As a result, by 1650 the world population had only increased to about 500 million. By 1800, though, thanks to improved agriculture and sanitation, it doubled to more than one billion. And, in 2002 when Haub last made these calculations, the planet's population had exploded, reaching 6.2 billion.
To calculate how many people have ever lived, Haub followed a minimalist approach, beginning with two people in 50000 B.C.—his Adam and Eve. Then, using his historical growth rates and population benchmarks, he estimated that slightly over 106 billion people had ever been born. Of those, people alive today comprise only 6 percent, nowhere near 75 percent. "[It is] almost surely true people alive today are some small fraction of [all] people," says Joel Cohen, a professor of populations at the Rockefeller and Columbia Universities in New York City.
... more at above link https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...
Or maybe it was saying that wasn’t based on estimate.
This article starts 190 000 years back. Our species, Homo Sapien, goes back anywhere from then, up to 300 000 years ago. The genus Homo around two million years.
I think it's a very interesting question, what does human mean? It's easy to think early humans were intrinsically different, merely because not much physical evidence survives. But given Neanderthals were doing cave art 64 000 years ago, maybe even they weren't that different.
We might evolve through in-situ genetic editing / body modifications.