Andrew Sage

Most of which suck.

Oh boy.

Yeah.

I mean, every single one of us humans is a product of billions of years of reproduction.

But for most of that reproduction, population growth was pretty slow.

You know, the world's population is estimated at around 5 million in the year 8000 BC.

So 5 million is like...

The population of New Zealand right now, or Costa Rica, or Ireland or Norway, but spread across the entire planet.

Can you guess how many people were alive in the year 1 CE though?

30 million?

That's actually an underestimate.

It's 188 million.

Jeez.

Right.

So that's between the current population of Bangladesh and the current population of Brazil, which are at 169 million and 230 million respectively.

But that's spread across the entire planet.

So, I mean, imagine that, you know, a whole world of people so spread out.

I mean, they were concentrated in certain areas, of course, but you had all this vast forest land and plains and entire continents that barely had people compared to today.

And the reason the population grew so slowly was really because, I mean, humans have always been doing the do, you know, but death was kind of a very present phenomenon.

You know, you had famines, you had plagues, you had the occasional war, and you especially had a lot of infant mortality.