The Ghosts of 107 Billion

The Dead Will Outnumber the Living. Image © seriykotik1970 on Flickr.

I09 reports that the theory that the living now outnumber the dead is bunk. For every one living person now on Earth, they assume there are 70 ghosts of those who have gone before.  And more than 107 billion people have ever walked this planet:

There's a popular claim that the seven billion people alive today outnumber all other humans who have ever lived. It's meant as a stark reminder of humanity's population explosion over the last 200 years...but is it true, or total crap? ...

BBC News spoke to the Population Reference Bureau in Washington DC, and they estimate that about 107 billion people have been born since humanity first emerged, which they set 50,000 years ago. (That sounds like an underestimate, considering the current scientific consensus favors a date more around 200,000 years ago, but the tiny population means that even an extra 150,000 years would only tack on another few million or so.)

All this probably means that the living will never outnumber the dead, unless humanity's population explodes by several orders of magnitude beyond what we've already experienced. For what it's worth, one path to this might involve this estimate from the UN Population Division, which notes that, should 1995 fertility rates hold constant, the world population in 2150 would be 256 billion.

See another discussion on this topic here.