How Many Humans Have Ever Lived, and How Many Are Alive Right Now?

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How many peo­ple have ever walked the earth? Good ques­tion, even if you’ve nev­er quite pon­dered it before. Accord­ing to the Pop­u­la­tion Ref­er­ence Bureau, a non-prof­it research orga­ni­za­tion, if you trav­el back to 8000 B.C.E., the world pop­u­la­tion stood at about 5 mil­lion. By 1 C.E., the num­ber climbs to 300 mil­lion, before grad­u­al­ly increas­ing to 500 mil­lion in 1650. Once we get beyond the plagues of the medieval peri­od, our pop­u­la­tion explodes, reach­ing the 1 bil­lion mark in 1800 and then 8 bil­lion in 2022. Tak­en togeth­er, an esti­mat­ed 117 bil­lion peo­ple have col­lec­tive­ly lived on our plan­et, and, of that total num­ber, 7% are alive right now. A strik­ing fig­ure. Using sim­i­lar data, video jour­nal­ist Cleo Abram visu­al­izes the his­tor­i­cal trend in a short, suc­cinct video above.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Buck­min­ster Fuller Cre­ates an Ani­mat­ed Visu­al­iza­tion of Human Pop­u­la­tion Growth from 1000 B.C.E. to 1965

200,000 Years of Stag­ger­ing Human Pop­u­la­tion Growth Shown in an Ani­mat­ed Map

Crowd­ed House: How the World’s Pop­u­la­tion Grew to 7 Bil­lion Peo­ple