Current population of Earth is 7.8 billion people. Since about 50,000 years ago, when modern Homo sapiens first appeared, the number of people who have lived is 109 billion, which naturally leads to the other number that gives me pause. Since the origin of modern humans, 101 billion people have died.

101 billion stories of suffering, of triumph, of death in infancy, of living beyond 100 years old, of wars, of hatred, of love, and beauty. The data sources, estimates, and projections for this video are from the United Nations and the Population Reference Bureau. So the natural question I had when looking at these numbers is what are the next milestones?

When will the 110th, the 150th, the 200 billionth person be born? And of course, let me say that predicting the future of anything beyond 10 to 20 years is very difficult. So this is more of an exercise of building intuition about the prospects of human civilization. This is the plot of the world population on the Y-axis in billions from zero to 12, on the X-axis from the 1500s to 2100.

We'll reach eight billion people in 2022 and 10 billion people in 2056. Based on your own projections, the population of Earth should level out by 2100 at about 11 billion people. By the way, there are a lot of estimates of Earth's carrying capacity, the median of those estimates being around 10 billion people.

So there's a lot of debates on whether we'll eventually exceed the human carrying capacity of Earth. It should also be noted that since we're living in the times of COVID, the estimates for excess deaths in 2020 should be anywhere from zero to 20%. In several studies of the topic, the estimate rests at about 20% excess deaths.

So 20% more deaths than otherwise would be expected for a non-pandemic year. But when we look at 2020 as a whole, it's very possible it levels out to much closer to 0% excess deaths, given the effects of lockdown on the patterns of human behavior. Now, we can take these projections of the world population and the birth rates estimated by the United Nations and talk about the number of people who have ever lived projected out into the future.

Now, we hit the 50 billion person born mark just about a century and a half after the common era began. And we hit the 100 billionth mark just before 1950. The 110th billion person will be born in 2028. The 120th billion in 2102. The 150th billion about three centuries from now in 2340.

And the 200 billionth person will be born in 2736, which is about seven centuries from now. Unless, as described in the Global Catastrophic Risk Survey about existential risk, that estimates the probability of the destruction of human civilization in a century at a terrifying 19%. And if we take that out to 2736, the probability that the 200 billionth person will never be born, at least on Earth, at a terrifying 77%.

Of course, it's possible that the 200 billionth person will be born on Mars, or maybe even Proxima B, the closest Earth-like planet outside of our solar system that we currently know. Hope you enjoy these little videos. They're easy and fun to make. Give me a chance to talk about some cool ideas.

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