Exactly what the title says. Was there a year/day/week/month whatever where no person was born on Earth? Please answer my question, it is driving me NUTS.
Sure. There were billions of them, before the evolution of the human species.
I doubt it. no event has ever occured that prevented all of humanity from procreating for a specific period of time. Select pockets maybe but not all of them.
Plus you have to consider that people had alot more kids up until lately. nine or ten wasn’t uncommon. But only 3 or 4 would survive.
So no probably not.
I have it on the best authority that no people were born in the year 0 (between 1 BC and 1 AD)
Gosh. I am so confused. Shall we ask Uncle Cecil?
What’s so confusing? What makes you think there might be a year when no one was born. That would require a year when no one had sex, now that’s hardly likely is it?
IIRC, birth rates are something like “1 every n seconds” where n is about 3 or 4. So it would be highly doubtful. I suppose, due to sheer coincidence, it should happen every so often. But then “so often” would probably be way WAY longer than the entire time that humanity has existed.
Just because they had sex doesn’t mean the girl got pregnant now does it? I take it back. It isn’t confusing, it is hard to find out.
It is hard to find out because it hasn’t happened.
It’s a bit like trying to find out if there’s ever been a year where it hasn’t rained in the Amazon.
Think about how many birth announcements there are in your local newspaper today.
Think about how many there have been in the past year.
Realize that that number is only for one small area of one country.
Now try to imagine how many people are born every year ALL OVER THE WORLD.
That’s a lot of people, isn’t it?
In order for NONE of those people to be born, something pretty big would have to happen. An amazing coincidence, or some sort of natural catastrophe that made it impossible to birth babies.
Such a thing may happen in the future, but there’s never been such a year in recorded history, and the odds are against there having been such a year in pre-recorded history, either.
Only if you want him to ridicule you.
Yes there were a few dates no one was born in those countries that converted from the Julian to Gregorian calendar when the Pope decreed it. October 4, 1582 was immediately followed by October 15. Other countries converted later at various times, so it was a real mess.
I’d say that the longest birth-less interval might be a minute or two, likely during the pre-Industrial era.
This might have happened (in fact, presumably did happen) at a time when the entire human population of the planet was very small, i.e. shortly after the evolution of homo sapiens. But that was in remote prehistory, well before any year that we can identify. By the time of any dateable event in human history, the population of the planet would have been so large that there could have been no realistic possibility of an entire year passing without a human birth anywhere on the planet.
Obviously, this is the only reasonable answer to such a question. It’s safe to assume that there were no humans born in the year 100,000,000 BC.
Why would you think this could possibly happen? No, of course not. The human race does need to make new ones to replace the ones that die off, you know. Sure, depending how tightly you define the human race, it’s possible that back when there were about eight or ten of us, none were born for a year. But that’s kind of meaningless and impossible to establish anyway.
Well, this seems to me to lead to a more interesting way of phrasing the OP, to wit:
What is the minimum number of humans that have existed at any one point in history, and what was their birthrate? Seems unlikely that as few as eight or ten would be a viable population, and I’m sure that the definition of “humans” and the process of speciation would come into play, and the answer would be something of a guesstimate anyway… but how about it?
Okay, flamingbananas, maybe this will help clear up your confusion –
According to the Population Reference Bureau’s article “How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?”:
So, assuming that 10,000 years ago there was a population of 5 million with a growth rate of 0.0512 percent a year gives you 256,000 births a year, which is abut 700 births a day or one birth every two minutes or so.
So at least as far back as 10,000 years ago there was no year, month, week, or day in which no person was born.
Wow. Well that cleared up my confusion, without any back-sass. So pretty much, even when the human race first started out there were still no days without new births?
That question was JUST ANSWERED!