What percentage of all human beings ever born are alive today?

iamtheotaku

This question is impossible with our current technology to find the answer. Dec 28 05, 7:55 PM

ripper1

I believe it's approximately 10%. Dec 28 05, 9:48 PM

gmackematix

So to estimate this, all we need is a rough date for the start of the human species that we can all agree on and human population figures from that date... Dec 29 05, 10:10 AM

Shadowmyst2004

It is impossible to determine, due to the fact that there are no birth records dating back even to the year 1, let alone any years BC. Dec 29 05, 6:44 PM

loveuforever57

technology wouldn't help us anyways. i think that if we knew exactly when humans were first created, how many people are alive today which would be kind of hard because there are so many births everyday, and how many people there were born each year approximately. That'd be pretty hard don't ya think? Dec 29 05, 6:47 PM

helenasykes

Sorry ripper1, but I highly doubt that. Are you telling me that a tenth of all humans ever are alive now? I would have said it would have been 0. then an awful lot more 0's before any other number! Jan 01 06, 5:25 PM

OneManShow

In 1900, the world population was only 1.5 billion, so projecting backwards it would seem that the world had pretty few homo sapiens in the past so probably quite a large percentage of humans alive now May 03 07, 11:48 AM

McGruff

This is an interesting article. I have pulled only the paragraph containing the answer of 6%. Please read it in its entirety to see how that figure was determined. March 01, 2007 Fact or Fiction?: Living People Outnumber the Dead To calculate how many people have ever lived, Haub (Carl Haub, a demographer at the Population Reference Bureau, a nongovernmental organization in Washington, D.C.) followed a minimalist approach, beginning with two people in 50000 B.C. — his Adam and Eve. Then, using his historical growth rates and population benchmarks, he estimated that slightly over 106 billion people had ever been born. Of those, people alive today comprise only 6 percent, nowhere near 75 percent." [It is] almost surely true people alive today are some small fraction of [all] people," says Joel Cohen, a professor of populations at the Rockefeller and Columbia Universities in New York City. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=09E07C6F-E7F2-99DF-3AD087F0DA77D94F May 03 07, 12:34 PM

Baloo55th

So if Dead Rights takes off, we'll be outvoted..... May 03 07, 1:38 PM

McGruff

Only if people keep digging them up. May 03 07, 1:47 PM