I’ve often (only half) joked that there are billions of people alive who have never died, so why should we consider it inevitable?
Well, someone has actually worked out the ratio. Hey, 7% odds of survival beats zero.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Speaking of which Peter Thiel seems to finally be getting serious about longevity, not only funding non-profit research, but actually investing in companies pursuing it.
I recall when I went to see “2001” during its initial theatrical release, the local theatre had some kind of promotional decorations for the movie dramatizing that for “every living person there are ’30 ghosts'” or pre-deceased ancestors or dead persons or whatever term was used.
I suppose that was supposed to make the move more profound or that factoid was suppose to may the movie goer more informed about what this “I don’t understand it!” movie was supposed to be about.
Never did figure out what that was supposed to mean apart from a big chunk of the world’s population in 1969, even more today, is alive today?
I wonder where that 108 billion number comes from…seems way too big to me. World population didn’t pass 1 billion until 1804
My question also. Seems a little high.
The number seems inherently arbitrary. You can’t draw any line in the past and say “before this they weren’t human, afterwards they were”. Evolution is gradual.
They may mean H. Sap. (including both sapiens and neandertalensis).
Other members of the Homo genus controlled fire, used stone tools, lived in hunter-gatherer societies…. … maybe they should count.
But if you’re quibbling over definitions, I would think the definition of “personhood” in terms of gestation would be biggest stumbling block when trying to come up with an agreed-upon number. Whatever the population of prehistoric man was, it is dwarfed by the number of miscarriages that occurred throughout human history.
Is a fertizilized human egg a person? If, unlike me, your answer is yes, then consider that somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of all pregnancies end in miscarriage, even though the woman often doesn’t realize she is pregnant (http://www.marchofdimes.org/loss/miscarriage.aspx)
And even if you want to only count loss of preganancy past a certain number of weeks, the numbers are still going to significant.
On an unrelated note, Malaria may have killed half of all people who ever lived: See http://rdparasites.blogspot.com/2014/04/malaria-killed-half-people-who-have.html
Since death from Malaria is preventable, your odds of not dying just went way up! 🙂
The line between H. Sap and predecessors is also arbitrary. At each point, the living members could interbreed with each other, and so formed a biological species. Where do you say they became a different species?
Well, yes, all you can do is arbitrarily say “Since time X.”
Nope, the study only went back to 50,000BC.
http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2011/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx
I once read the poetic claim (might have been Asimov) that the number of people who have ever lived is about the same as the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, so for each person who has lived a star now shines.
In other words, the claim “All men are mortal.” is no longer established to within a 95% confidence interval.