"Half the people who ever lived are alive today"

[Alan Bostick]

With the tenacity of relentlessly sagging glass, some people in
newsgroup alt.polyamory are claiming that "half the people who ever
lived are alive today." (See the thread running currently there
entitled "Poly Insurance".)

I say that even allowing for fudging what is meant by "people" (are
we counting all members of genus Homo, all Homo sapiens, or just H.
sap. sapiens?), and even accepting that the world was made by the hand
of God in 4004 BC, it is plainly and obviously not true.

Arthur C. Clarke wrote, in the foreword to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY in
1968, "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."

(It is unclear where he got that number, but it is not inconsistent with
[motto!] the estimated carrying capacity of the paleolithic ecosystem
in the 3 million years that paleontologists say genus Homo has been
around.)

By my rough calculations, even if all humanity sprung from Eve's loins
shortly after the date Bishop Ussher gives for Creation, something like
25 billion people have been born since then.

Yet the stalwart defenders of the claim say that only about ten billion
people have ever lived. They don't give cites for this claim of course.

Where does this canard that "half the people who have ever lived are
alive today" come from? What are the best estimates of the actual
number of people who ever lived? What in particular makes the canard so
readily believable? Enquiring Minds Want To Know.

Alan "all souls' Eve" Bostick

--
Alan Bostick | To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height
mailto:abos...@netcom.com | of elegance.
news:alt.grelb | Jean Genet
http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~abostick