

Do the dead outnumber the living? - soitgoes
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16870579

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malay
I always find this statistic about the number of people who ever lived to be
incredible. It means that 6.5% of everyone who ever lived is alive right now.
For me, that fact helps explain the incredible pace of change observable in
every facet of civilization. There is an awesome amount of our humanity's
intelligence on display at this very moment.

Then, when you consider how a lot of the 6.5% live (i.e. with extreme poverty
and hunger), we are not even remotely reaching our collective capacity. The
pace is going to get even faster as we achieve the Millenium Development
Goals.

~~~
tomjen3
What really blows my mind about it has always been that there are properly
more people alive today who can read Sumerian Cuneiform than there have ever
been -- including back when there was something called Sumeria and they were
using Cuneiform.

~~~
nitrogen
OT grammar question: I've noticed some comments from various posters use
"properly" where I would have used "probably." Is this an alternate use of the
word "properly" of which I have heretofore been unaware?

~~~
smilliken
I believe grand-parent was using the term "properly" like it is used in math,
i.e. "strictly greater than".

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abcd_f
> _Do the dead outnumber the living?_

Yes, by a factor of 15 or so (from the article).

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beloch
There is considerable debate over when the first Homo sapiens sapiens
appeared, but the consensus is that it was much longer ago than 50 000 years.
200 000 would be considered a fairly conservative number these days. This
obviously skews the math a little.

~~~
malay
200,000 years ago is the approximate consensus for the arrival of Homo sapien;
however the commonly held belief is that behavioral modernity occurred
approximately 50,000 years ago.

Most of that doesn't really end up mattering because the last 10,000 years
(marked at the origin of agriculture, 8000 BCE in the BBC table) have
contributed disproportionately to the 107B figure. An extra 150,000 years at a
baseline 1M population wouldn't throw the figure off more than 10-15%.

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alok-g
They used to tell children that people turn into stars when they die. Isn't it
interesting then that the number of dead people is of the same order as the
number of stars in a galaxy! :-)

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pak
"Out of all the people that ever were, almost all of them are dead. There are
_way_ more dead people. ... You're just dead people that didn't die yet."

It's a bit from a Louis CK routine, and the numbers appear to back him up.

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maeon3
Given the average lifespan of a human on earth today (around 67), and the
average population growth rate (somewhere between 1 and 2%), it causes an
acceleration in the number of humans living and being born.

The notion that this growth is unsustainable is scare mongering. 1.5% growth
per year is sustainable indefinitely to colonize the galaxy, if we can just
keep the resources needed to support that growth flowing. At some point we
will need to create a Dyson sphere around the sun to capture most of its
energy, and harvest the raw materials in the asteroid belt between mars and
Jupiter. As for living space, it will be superstructures orbiting the sun in
the habitable zone.

~~~
drcube
>The notion that this growth is unsustainable is scare mongering.

Exponential growth makes this statement as wrong as it can be. It may be
scaremongering to say it is unsustainable in the short term, but eventually
that growth will have to stop, either due to voluntary decision-making on the
part of humans everywhere, or due to a scarcity of resources. Or in fact both,
given that the scarcity of resources will cause people to decide on
reproducing less.

Growth in general is simply not sustainable in the long term. Isaac Asimov
once estimated that at "today's" rate of growth (circa 1970), Earth would
become a ball of human flesh expanding at the speed of light by 5000AD. Of
course its a ridiculous prediction, but it illustrates that between now and
then, something must change.

Look at this chart:
[http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/File:2nd_Order_Damping_Ratios.s...](http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/File:2nd_Order_Damping_Ratios.svg)

Assuming 1 here refers to the maximum "sustainable" population, we'll either
oscillate around it, overshoot and come back, or asymptotically approach zero
percent growth. There is no such thing as a system with no feedback, which is
allowed to grow without bound. It may seem like there are no constraints
currently, but they're out there, and eventually we'll hit them.

~~~
a-priori
The world population is not experiencing exponential growth. It's experiencing
logistical growth (i.e, following a logistical function rather than an
exponential function). We've just been seeing the first half of the curve,
which does approximate exponential growth.

But we're starting to see it turn around. In the most developed countries,
fertility has dropped to replacement or lower. As the remaining countries
develop, their fertility rates are also dropping. It's reasonable to
extrapolate from this that at some point in the future, the global fertility
rate will be at or below replacement.

The constraints are microeconomic. It's expensive to raise children,
especially when you factor in opportunity costs (this part is key to why world
population won't stabilize at starvation levels). When you give people birth
control, people seem to make a rational economic decision about how many
children to have. That provides the feedback mechanism you mentioned.

~~~
beloch
The developing world has birth control but, in large parts of it (e.g. most of
africa), most people aren't using it. This is for economic reasons. In these
economies children are your pension fund. There's no RRSP funds or old age
security payments. Just children who (hopefully) look after you in your old
age. If you have only one or two you will either be an unreasonable burden
upon them or simply be abandoned to starve.

The economic support system for seniors in the developed world is currently
under a lot of strain too. In countries where pension funds are funded from
current taxes the baby-boomer retirement is going to be a tremendous drain on
society. The baby-boomer generation _should_ have tucked away a nice huge fund
to pay them in retirement as well as support the greater demand on the medical
system. Instead, they racked up huge amounts of public debt. Massive amounts
of immigration and raising the retirement age have been the stop-gap measure
of choice so far, but the developed world's support for senior citizens could
easily revert to that of the developing world's without much warning!

So, yes, children are expensive, but for most of history and in large parts of
the world today they are a necessary investment for retirement. In only the
developed world of the past century have financial pressures favored fewer
children, and that could easily change.

~~~
DilipJ
fertility rates are dropping worldwide. At some point in the next 30 years, it
is expected to fall below replacement level.

Check out this graph comparing fertility rates. China and Iran (!) now have
fertility rates below that of the U.S.

[http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&#...</a>

~~~
6ren
Curiously, rates for Italy and Germany are separated from other developed
countries by about .5%
[http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&#...</a>

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adam_freidin
1\. read article

2\. * dead baby joke *

3\. ...

4\. Profit?

