Tag: Demographics

Back in the early days of the Internet I said the living outnumber the dead. I think it was on LiveJournal. You’d have thought I was stomping on kittens. Or maybe I too sensitive. Anyway it must have scarred me because now I can’t see anything about this topic without wanting to come out swinging.

I was arguing there aren’t enough lives to go around to give everyone alive today a bunch of past lives. Unless, of course, you want to drag in other planets.

Back then, I couldn’t remember where I got such an idea. Somewhere respectable, I’m sure.

Other people said, Oh no. That’s not at all true. The people living now are just a small part of humanity. This is a myth designed to scare people about population growth. Very Malthusian. Surprised you fell for it.

Someone suggested I go back and re-read Arthur C. Clarke. He said, “Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living” (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968).

Okay, my bad. And I did remember reading that (and thinking it would be a great reincarnation quote). I just didn’t stick with it. I was persuaded the other way. Some day I might find or remember where that was. Was it Annie Dillard? Seems like. Maybe.

In the years since then, I’ve found a fairly consistent answer. It depends on modern experts making educated guesses about the number of people who have ever lived. There’s a fairly wide range of opinion here but one thing seems certain. There must have been a lot of people in the past who died young or didn’t reproduce for one reason or another. There has to have been really a lot in each generation in order for the population to grow.

Here’s an article that says, “In fact, there are 15 dead people for every person living.” I’ll go with that. For now.

• Wesley Stephenson, “Do the dead outnumber the living?“, Feb. 4, 2012 at BBC News.

Back in the 1970s, an unknown writer said that most of the people who had ever lived were alive then [1]. The idea persists, even though it’s not true.

From what I can find, estimates of the number of people ever born range from 50 to 120 billion, with 6 billion now living.

The number intrigues me on two fronts. First, if people are reincarnated, everyone now alive might have had somewhere between 9 and 20 past lives. That’s a useful number to throw out when gong the rounds with believers.

Second, and more interesting for me, this is a fundamental concept when trying to understand “pedigree collapse” — go back far enough and each of us has more theoretical ancestors than there were people living at the time. Therefore, we must, each of us, descend many thousands and millions of times from the same relatively small number of people. We are each our own cousin many times over.

I was pleased to find an article by Carl Haub at the Population Reference Bureau, How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth? He thinks the number must be about 106 billion, with 6.2 billion living in 2002.

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1. Some reports say it was Annie Dillard. Some reports say the number was 50%, some say it was 75%.