Damaged or real: The number of people alive is more than the number of dead

Rumors from the 1970s suggest that the population explosion has made the entire population of the earth now larger than the total number of people ever had. Other versions confirm that 75% of all people born are still alive. That things true or false?

Researchers claim, even if four times the population of the last century, the number of people living is still just a small fraction of the total population that once existed on our planet.

In 2002, Carl Haub, a demographer at the Office of Population Certification, a non-governmental organization in Washington, DC, updated his previous prediction of the number of people who existed. To do this calculation, he studied available population data to determine the growth rate of humans in different historical periods, and used them to determine the number of people who were born.

Research shows that, in most historical periods, population growth is slow. Since Homo sapiens appeared about 50,000 years ago (this data is still controversial), very little information has been available since that period, but at the time of the Middle East agricultural revolution in 9000 At the beginning of the year, the Earth had about 5 million people.

From the middle of the agricultural period to Roman rule, the population grew very languid, at least one thousand per year, and reached about 300 million around the first year of AD. After that, humanity fell again when the pandemic broke out (" Black Death " claimed the lives of at least 75 million people in the 14th century). As a result, in 1650, the world population was only about 500 million. In 1800, thanks to improvements in agriculture and health, the figure doubled to more than 1 billion people. By 2002, when Haub made those final calculations, the planet's population had exploded, reaching 6.2 billion.

To calculate how many people have lived on earth, Haub follows the minimum approach, that is, starting with two people in 50,000 BC - Adam and Eva. Then, with his historical growth scheme, he estimated that more than 106 billion people were born.

Thus, the number of survivors currently accounts for only about 6%.

"It is almost certain that those who live today make up only a small proportion of those born," said Joel Cohen, a professor of population studies at Rockefeller University and Columbia in New York City.

Cohen estimates that with the current population growth rate, by 2050, the world population will be between 7.3 and 10.7 billion, and will be stable at 10 billion around 2200. At this rate, the number The living person never exceeds the number of dead people.

T. An