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One of the biggest headlines of this year is something that you probably haven't heard about yet.
The world population recently just surpassed 7.5 billion people. There are more human beings alive on this planet
right now than at any other point in our planets history.
But a strange question that you may have never thought about is this one;
How many Humans have ever existed through the thousands of years of our history?
And what would happen if somehow, every single one of these humans who had ever
existed was brought back to life at the same age and in the same geographical location that they were in when they died?
First, it is estimated that ever since the year 50,000 BC,
which is a good starting date for the emergence of truly modern humans, there have been a total of
108.2 billion human beings who have ever been born.
Since the current global population is 7.5 billion that means that a shocking 7% of all humans who have ever existed are currently alive right now.
What's perhaps even more interesting, though, is how that ratio of the living to the dead will increase in the future. The global population in
2050 for example is expected to reach 9.7 billion people,
which means that at that point the amount of living humans will represent 8.6% of all humans who have ever existed.
But even still by then, the number of dead humans will outnumber the living by eleven to one,
so what would happen if every single human who has ever died suddenly all reappeared back to life right now in 2017?
Firstly, that would mean that 100.7 billion people would be added to the global population.
In a previous video I explained that if you took the
7.5 or so billion people currently alive and put them into an area as crowded as the Kowloon Walled City then the entire world population
would fit into an area roughly the same size of the state of Palestine.
If you took the 100.7 billion dead people and fit them into the same
population density than they would all fit into an area roughly the same size of Austria.
Maybe if we wanted something a little more comfortable and fit everybody into the same population density of downtown Manhattan,
then the living would fit into an area the size of Ecuador while the dead would fit into an area the size of Argentina.
But what would the 100.7 billion dead people actually look like?
Well, they would probably be mostly very young. For most of human history, life expectancy was very low and child mortality rates were very high.
Life expectancy until the end of the Neolithic Era, for example, is believed to have been just 33 years.
But life expectancy is believed to have actually decreased to just 26 years during the Bronze and Iron ages.
Life expectancy in classical Greece was just 28 years and in classical rome it was between 20 and 30 years.
Much of this is due to the fact that most children during this time period would die before the age of 10.
In the Roman Empire, for example, if a child survived until 10 then their life expectancy
dramatically increased from 20 to 30 years at birth, up to 47.5 years.
Pre-Colombian American life expectancy was between 25 and 30 years.
And perhaps the highest life expectancy anywhere in the world before the industrial revolution was within the medieval Islamic Caliphate,
where the average person, at birth, was expected to survive past the age of 35.
For comparison the lowest life expectancy anywhere in the world, currently, is in Sierra Leone, where it is 50.1 years.
Wealthy, Noble or educated dead people, however, would be much older.
Scholars in the medieval Caliphate had much higher life expectancies than the average person,
approaching 69 to 75 years old and English aristocrats in the year 1500 had life expectancies as high as 71 Years,
which, interestingly, is the same life expectancy as the global average today,
meaning that the average Human born anywhere in the world today, will likely live to be as old as an elite member of the English nobility did 500 years ago.
With all of this data, it is therefore probably safe to assume that a majority of the dead brought back to life would be much
younger than the current world population is.
Perhaps even a majority of them would be children or infants and certainly most would be under the age of 33.
The only other two things that we can probably know with a reasonable amount of certainty is that there would probably be more males than females,
since in the Modern world the amount of babies born are about 51% male and 49% female.
If that's always been true, then it's probable that a majority of the dead are male.
Finally most of the dead would appear in rural areas of the world, since historically, most of the world's population has lived in the country.
As recently as 1950, only 29% of the world's population lived in cities.
So yeah, there would be an overwhelming amount of country folk in the dead population.
Obviously, such a massive and sudden influx of population would put an incredible strain on global resources.
There are estimates that our planet may be able to support a population of 10 billion humans,
so if 100.7 billion people suddenly popped back into existence the results would be catastrophic.
It would be impossible to feed everybody since we literally would not have enough
farmland in the entire world to produce enough food for that large of a population increase.
We already use a land area larger than all of Asia globally to produce enough food for 7.5 billion people.
So we would simply run out of space very quickly.
It's likely that around 90% of the world population with combined living and previously dead would die from starvation within two months of the event happening.
A huge majority of the people brought back to life would return to their graves very shortly as a result of this.
More than likely, after the initial shock of a hundred billion people returning to the planet was over,
a massive global war would follow over the control of scarce food, water and other resources.
The end result would be most people perishing and the world would likely stabilize around a population of 10 billion a couple of months later,
meaning that maybe around 2.5 billion of the previously dead humans, or a little over 2%, would survive the apocalypse and coexist with the currently living humans afterwards.
Regardless of how totally ludicrous and impossible of a situation this actually is,
it's still interesting to think that right now you can get to know 7% of the amount of humans who have ever existed.
And you'll never get to know the other 93% of Humans who existed before your time.
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