Wendy Baldwin
speaker
33 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2012
last heard Feb 2012
Wendy Baldwin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
If you look at the data we published...
There are 7 billion people today.
We estimate that overall there have been 107.
So that would be a ratio of 1 to 15, which makes it look like Arthur C. Clarke was wrong, but that's not actually the case because he was making his statement in 1968.
And when he made that statement, there were maybe three and a half billion people currently living on Earth.
So if you use our method, that would be one living person to 29 dead.
He said 30.
I'd say that's a draw.
Yes, it is a little bit.
In the 1970s, there was a lot of interest in this because some people were saying that 75% of all the people ever born were on the planet today in the 70s.
And our demographer, Carl Hobb, looked at that and said, I wonder if that's really true.
But it's not so straightforward to figure out what a good number is.
First of all, you have to figure out
When are you starting from?
I would say that there's probably fair agreement that humans have been occupying the Earth for about 50,000 years B.C.
They weren't Homo sapiens.
They were ancestors, but we're not going to try to count back further than that.
And then you have to have the current figure, and certainly since we've hit 7 billion years,
there's good agreement there.
So you've got a starting date and you've got an ending number.
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