Around 1.6 billion people lived on Earth at the turn of the 20th century when they all decided to suddenly start banging like rabbits and produced generations of progeny who would do the same.
Due to their prodigious ability to reproduce, 8 billion people now inhabit the planet, a population that is only increasing against the wishes of the planet.
If you've been paying attention over the last few years, you're probably aware that humankind hasn't been doing much to ensure the long-term survival of the species.
If artificial intelligence doesn't bring the world to its knees well before then, Stephen Hawking warned that it's only a matter of time before the Earth turns into "a sizzling ball of fire" given the current state of affairs.
Let's suppose, then, that a robot rebellion decides that today is the ideal day to occur. Lately, I was wondering what the final stat line of humanity might look like because I was recently thinking this possibility (as I do much too frequently).
I was particularly curious about the number of people who have perished while urinating throughout history, but after some investigation, it doesn't seem that anyone has done a lot of in-depth study on the subject (step your game up, academia).
That inquiry, though, made me consider another: how many people have there been since people first became a thing?
Thankfully, those figures are a little more commonly known.
Who has ever lived, and how many?
The "modern" homo sapien emerged when humanity put its first points on the board around 50,000 B.C. (it is believed language was first employed during this time).
That number would gradually increase over the following millennia, but it would still be 40,000 years before "ONE MILLION" appeared as the population number on the "WELCOME TO EARTH" sign.
Although there were no census takers galloping around on woolly mammoths in 8,000 B.C., those with more information than I do have been able to estimate that by the end of that year, one billion people had at some point called the earth home.
When Jesus made his triumphal entry at a period when there were 300 million people on the planet, that number had risen to almost 47 billion. Before humanity reached a total population of one billion, it would take 1804 years to join the Tres Commas Club (over 90 billion people had walked the Earth by then).
As was previously noted, from the start of the 20th century, the population would soar, and that number would multiply at an astonishing rate until reaching the position we're at today—a point at which the globe has been home to an estimated 109 billion persons and counting.
There are a lot of dead people there.
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