The myth

There are more people alive on Earth today than have ever died. In some versions, 75 per cent of all humans who’ve ever lived are alive right now.

The “truth”

No one’s entirely sure when this belief first became common currency (unless you can tell us, of course), but it appears to have become an uncritically accepted fact sometime in the 1970s. It’s especially popular with those who believe overpopulation to be the world’s greatest problem; with US creationists; and with right-wing opponents of welfarism. Obviously, it can never be answered definitively, because we don’t know for sure how long humans have existed, or how many of them have existed. But there does seem to be a consensus amongst secular demographers that the global population in 40,000 BC was about 500,000, and reached one billion by AD 1800.

That would mean (according to widely accepted methods of working out average death rates) that the number of deaths during those centuries alone would be around 60 billion; the current population is around six billion. If these estimates are even vaguely right, then not only do we not yet outnumber the dead, but it’s unlikely that we ever will.

Sources

www.peopleandplanet.net/doc.php?id=1820; www.newscientist.com/backpage.ns?id=lw208