Is it true that there are more people in the world today than all who have died?
Were you a little confused by the above question? So let us rephrase for you to understand better what we are talking about: is the current world population larger than the total number of people who have ever lived on the face of the earth throughout human history? By the way, had you seen this information before?
Because, according to Debra Kelly of KnowledgeNuts, someone turns and moves this post - that is, that there are more people alive today than anyone who has ever lived on the planet - as a fact when, in reality, this talk It is nothing but bullshit. A balinho that emerged in the 70's, to be more exact.
Myth
According to Debra, when this story about the number of people in the world began to circulate, the information claimed that 75% of humans that had ever existed on the planet were still alive at the time - alluding to the fact that the world's population is living longer. time than ever before. How this turned into myth, no one knows for sure.
Well, according to Debra, in 2011, the people of the Population Reference Bureau, a nonprofit organization dedicated to studies of the world's population, decided to estimate how many people have ever been on the earth. It is worth remembering that for this they had to make a number of considerations and statistical surveys, as there is a huge diversity of variables that can affect the outcome.
To give you an idea, it was only around the 19th century that countries and governments began to organize and conduct population censuses and thus keep more or less reliable records for reference. Therefore, the people of the organization had to think a lot about how to raise the numbers they needed.
Thus they had to ponder, for example, as to when humans first appeared on the planet as a species to begin their calculations. After all, there are records that some of the oldest ancestors of Homo sapiens began to appear more than 700, 000 years ago, while modern humans only emerged about 50, 000 years ago.
In addition, it is difficult to determine how many people existed at that time, but studies show that there were close to 5 million individuals when agriculture began to be developed.
Researchers also included aspects such as plagues, natural disasters and other calamities in their estimates and had to resort to the good old "chute" when calculating how many people were in the turn between BC and AD. simple, right?
Results
Researchers at the Population Reference Bureau decided to do their calculations from 50, 000 years onwards, ie, since the rise of modern humans, and considered estimates of population sizes, birth rates, mortality, and so on. They also included in the accounts the variables we mentioned earlier and, after doing a lot of counting, came to the conclusion that approximately 107 billion people have lived in the world.
Well, thinking that in 2011 - the year the calculation was made - the world population was 6.987 billion people, this means that living individuals represented (approximately and never exactly!) 6.5% of all individuals who have ever have existed throughout the history of mankind. So the myth was ... demystified, and if you come across this information someday, you already know it's not true.
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