I enter my birth date, and below are my numbers. Feel free to enter yours as well.
Now, if I’ve understood this correctly, then I was approximately the 3 billionth human being in the world, at the time I was born.
Obviously every time a baby is born, he or she adds to the population. Therefore a newborn is always at the leading edge of population growth. That’s quite a heady thought, I’d say. So at some point in time, we were each that leading baby, if only for a second. Remember, several other babies are being born at any given stretch of time.
Of course I’m super curious as to how this figure was arrived at. Well, the results above conveniently offer a link to ‘How did we calculate that?’ This is the brief explanation:
I was also approximately the 77 billionth to have ever been born, since the beginning of humankind. That beginning was in 50,000 BC, as Carl Haub with the Population Reference Bureau estimates in How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth. There have been about 108 billion human beings born since that time.
PRB informs people around the world about population, health and the environment, and empowers them to use that information to advance the well-being of current and future generations. Find out more about PRB at our website www.prb.org.Two points, as we step back from this and weigh the meanings and implications:
The question of how many people have ever lived on Earth is a perennial one among information calls to PRB. One reason the question keeps coming up is that somewhere, at some time back in the 1970s, a now-forgotten writer made the statement that 75 percent of the people who had ever been born were alive at that moment. This factoid has had a long shelf life, even though a bit of reflection would show how unlikely it is. For this "estimate" to be true would mean either that births in the 20th century far, far outnumbered those in the past or that there were an extraordinary number of extremely old people living in the 1970s. But if we judge the idea that three-fourths of people who ever lived are alive today to be a ridiculous statement, have demographers come up with a better estimate? What might be a reasonable estimate of the actual percentage? In this video, PRB senior visiting scholar Carl Haub, with some speculation concerning prehistoric populations, approaches a guesstimate of this elusive number.
First, while it’s really cool to get such particular numbers, we have to remember that this is all extrapolation from available data. We simply don’t have population figures for much of the 52,011 years that we human beings have been around. What would’ve been better actually is to have had an error range, from the lowest reasonable to the highest reasonable figures for each statistic. But this is the sort thing only analytic types like me would ask for. No doubt, the vast majority of people prefer ‘clean’ figures, so as to harbor perhaps the illusion of accuracy in an imprecise, uncertain world.
Second, with a background in political science and demography, Haub cautioned us about this in his article and he openly detailed the steps he took to do this. As all true scientists ought to do, he admitted to the possibility of being wrong and invited other scientists to offer alternative methods for such population extrapolation. I cannot emphasize enough how commendable and critical this is. Media as a whole has done a great job of bringing scientific findings to the public, instead of keeping these cloistered in the hallowed halls of academia or research labs. But as I’ve tried to argue here, such findings always have a degree of error to them and this degree may be large in some cases. Unfortunately, media often reinforces that illusion of accuracy by failing to include the caution that Haub offers. So it was good of BBC News, the source of that first link I followed, to have provided reference links that explain more of how these figures were arrived at.
Note: I wrote this article on October 27th 2011 for an old Media & Tech blog.
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