True or False: There are more people alive today than have ever died

Factual Questions
1

This tidbit is brought up sometimes in conversations about reincarnation - e.g. “We can’t all be reincarnated souls because there aren’t enough souls to go around.”

Leaving aside the truth or falsity of reincarnation (not interested in starting a philosophical discussion in GQ), is there a way to determine if the statement in the title is (or could be) true?

It seems to me it must be a simple math problem, but I’m not sure where to start. I can find estimates of world population per millenium, but how do I translate that to, say, number of people alive in a generation?

2

False. At least according to Cecil, and who am I to argue with him?

How many people have lived on earth since the dawn of time?

3

Studies linked to from this page indicate that there have been between 96 and 106 billion humans to date.

The current population of about 6 billion amounts to about 5% of all humans who have wandered the planet.

4

It would require, I think, a pretty big single-generation spike in population, but was there ever a time when this could have been said to be true?

5

I bow to your incredible google-fu. I have tried and failed to find a discussion like this.

6

Here is a link to a thread that we had about this back in March 2004.

7

Yes, depending on how you define human, the first human would have lived in this situation.

8

Actually, assuming a population that bred rapidly, this could be true for several generations. In theory, if every person had two offspring (each: so a couple would have four offspring (three would work, too)), then died, this state would continue indefinitely.

Of course infant mortality, limited resources, occasional infertility, and the like would put an end to it pretty quick. And even in an environment that encouraged lots of births (which early humans probably were), infant mortality would be very high.

9

You know, even with the 100 billion number, at least six percent of the world’s souls are currently on active duty. The elder half of those are serving longer lives than at any time in the past, and more than the usual number of souls are being reborn on Earth today than ever before. Given that dynamic, and someone good at math, we can determine such things as how rapid reincarnation has to be to keep up, and how many souls are waiting to be reborn at any time, given a specific number of on the shelf souls altogether.

So, if there are three hundred billion souls, no one currently on earth has ever been here before. In that case reincarnation is a potential, not a reality. If there are fifty billion souls, about one in four of us have been here once or twice before and a far smaller number more that twice. If there are ten billion souls, we are less than 100 years from the newborn undead, a generation of zombies. Hmmm, how many souls would it take, if that was happening now? No population implosion, just soulless humans in ever greater numbers. Hell on Earth, in fact. Just plain old arithmetic has spiritual consequences for the concept, whatever the actual numbers are.

I find it funny that among my reincarnationist friends, their absolute assurance that they “know that they have been here before”, is somehow more convincing than the equally strong feeling I have that I have not. It’s all new to me, and I am very sure that I have not been here before; or been anywhere else, for that matter.

Tris