Is the population expanding too fast? Often, people speculate that there are more people living today than have ever lived. When trying to determine whether this is an accurate assessment or not, the problem becomes how do you calculate how many ever lived? The Population Reference Bureau in Washington sheds some light on this question. They know that the starting point is about 50,000 years ago when homo sapiens first existed on earth and that the ending point is our current population figure. The time in between has to be filled in with educated guessing accounting for life expectancies and birth rates. The Bureau notes that data becomes better as taxes and written record came around, so by the 1800s, data became much more available. With the tools available to it, the Bureau estimates that around 107 billion people have ever lived. Currrently, there are seven billion people alive, which indicates that there are not more people alive today than ever lived.
See Wesley Stephenson, Do the Dead Outnumber the Living?, BBC News, Feb. 3, 2012.
