How many people have lived on earth?

“Modern” Homo sapiens (that is, people who were roughly like we are now) first walked the Earth about 50,000 years ago. Since then, more than 108 billion members of our species have ever been born, according to estimates by Population Reference Bureau (PRB). read more

Around 1.29 billion people (18.4% of the world population) live in extreme poverty, subsisting on less than US$1.25 per day; approximately 870 million people (12.25%) are undernourished. 83% of the world's over-15s are considered literate. read more

PRB estimates that by 2050 about 113 billion people will have ever lived on Earth. To be sure, calculating the number of people who have ever lived is part science and part art. No demographic data exist for 99 percent of the span of human existence. read more

Taking away the roughly 7.4 billion who are alive today, we get 100.8 billion who have died before us. There are almost 14x more people dead than alive! That would make for one massive army of zombies, ghosts and White Walkers. Or, if you prefer to be more optimistic, you can think that the living are about 6.8% percent of everyone who’d ever lived. read more