How many people have ever lived?
The Population Reference Bureau puts the number of Homo sapiens ever born at roughly 117 billion, counting from about 190,000 BC. The living 8.2 billion are therefore about 7% of everyone who has ever existed. The popular claim that the living outnumber the dead has never been true and is not close. The estimate is sensitive to infant mortality assumptions: for most of human history close to half of all children died before age five, and those short lives dominate the count.
How the figure is arrived at
Pick a start date and a starting population, then step forward through history applying an assumed birth rate to an assumed population at each stage. The birth rate matters far more than the population does — a hunter-gatherer world of a few million people with a birth rate of 80 per thousand contributes an enormous number of births over 150,000 years.
How confident it is
- Low estimate
- 100,000,000,000
- High estimate
- 130,000,000,000
- Spread
- 1.3× between the bounds
Other living things and the natural world counts
- How many people are there in the world? about 8.2 billion
- How many grains of sand are there on Earth? roughly 7.5 quintillion on the world's beaches
- How many ants are there in the world? about 20 quadrillion
- How many trees are there in the world? about 3 trillion
- How many insects are there? about 10 quintillion
- How many species are there? about 8.7 million
- How many drops of water are there in the ocean? about 27 septillion
- How many fish are there in the sea? somewhere between 3 trillion and 100 trillion — nobody knows
- How many species are endangered? more than 45,000 assessed as threatened
- How many bees are there in the world? roughly 2 trillion managed honey bees
- How many birds are there in the world? about 50 billion wild birds
- How many bacteria are there on Earth? about 5 nonillion
- How many earthquakes are there each year? about 20,000 located a year — around 55 a day
- How many chickens are there in the world? about 26 billion alive at any moment
Common questions
- How many people have ever lived?
- about 117 billion
- How is that estimated?
- Pick a start date and a starting population, then step forward through history applying an assumed birth rate to an assumed population at each stage. The birth rate matters far more than the population does — a hunter-gatherer world of a few million people with a birth rate of 80 per thousand contributes an enormous number of births over 150,000 years.
Related pages
- How many people are there in the world? about 8.2 billion
- How many grains of sand are there on Earth? roughly 7.5 quintillion on the world's beaches
- How many ants are there in the world? about 20 quadrillion
- How many trees are there in the world? about 3 trillion
- How many insects are there? about 10 quintillion
- How many species are there? about 8.7 million
- How many drops of water are there in the ocean? about 27 septillion
- How many fish are there in the sea? somewhere between 3 trillion and 100 trillion — nobody knows
- How many stars are there in the universe? Space and the universe
- How many countries are there in the world? Things people built
- How many bones are in the human body? The human body
- How many stars are there in the Milky Way? Space and the universe
- How many atoms are there in the universe? Space and the universe
- How many galaxies are there? Space and the universe
Sources
- Typical range compiled from manufacturer specifications — At One Place