To all future earth spawn,
According to this population clock, the globe's citizenry is rapidly approaching 7 billion. WOW.
The world, of course, has never been home to so many humans in its entire history. Questions surrounding resources, sustainability, and other related topics all arise and are currently hot topics of debate between everybody and their second cousin. But when all the numbers conglomerate together, all all history is sewn into a tapestry of life, and those who have crossed the river into Hades coupled with those who have experienced the pearly white gates/reincarnation/paradise are put into a simple equation of addition, this question arises: do living people outnumber the dead?
Demographer, Carl Harb, has dedicated his studies to this very question. Mr. Harb starts his research at 50 000 years ago, time = 0 where he believes homo sapiens first appeared with Adam and Eve. From there he has used the information available surrounding various time periods (E.g. 8000 B.C. during the Middle East's agricultural revolution) and deduced approximate population numbers. In short, his studies conclude that from time zero to around 2002 the total of those human alive and dead reached 106 billion. Even with today's almost 7 billion, we comprise only just over 6%.
What about the future? A professor from Columbia University, Joel E. Cohen, highly doubts that the Earth's population will ever double its current figures. Following past and present trends, he predicts that "the world body's estimates range from 7.3 billion to 10.7 billion people" in 2050.
So the answer is fiction, the world's living will never outnumber the dead.
(Source: Scientific American article by Ciara Curtin)
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