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   Sheril Kirshenbaum (sheril@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 16-Jul-2023 01:12:25 JST Sheril Kirshenbaum

   About 109 billion people have lived & died. Each grain of sand represents 10 million.

   This stunning data visualization of human life by Max Roser was published in 2022.

   Today there would be 805 green grains representing 8.05 billion people living on Earth. #science #art

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     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Sunday, 16-Jul-2023 11:04:33 JST clacke

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     • Esslar2

     @flyhigh @Sheril en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimate… starts at 50 k years ago and gets to a similar figure, 100+ G people.

     It also says at 200 k years ago there were about 200 k humans. If they gave birth to 10x as many kids as an affluent country today, that would be 40 k people born each year.

     If we pretend that was stable from 300 k years ago to 50 k years ago that's 4 G people every 100 k years, so that's the difference if you move between 100 k years ago, 200 k years ago etc as the cutoff. Speciation is said to have been 100 k – 300 k years ago.

     I believe at some point there was a bottleneck when humans almost went extinct and were down to 2 k people, so the handwaving above should be a high estimate.

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     Esslar2 (flyhigh@universeodon.com)'s status on Sunday, 16-Jul-2023 11:04:34 JST Esslar2

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     @Sheril Oh, this is so good! I've always wondered about this, how many people have lived but the trouble is, what year, century, or millennia does h. sapiens become h. sapiens?

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     Esslar2 (flyhigh@universeodon.com)'s status on Sunday, 16-Jul-2023 16:57:48 JST Esslar2

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     • clacke

     @clacke @Sheril This is very good and I will look into it further. 300k years ago seems to be a reasonable start point. I've heard about the bottleneck you bring up and will also get into this some more. I was unaware it may have been such a tiny population. Thanks!

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     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Sunday, 16-Jul-2023 16:57:48 JST clacke

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     • Royalish
     @Royalish @Sheril six feet underground, decomposing after a while, or burnt, or if the family didn't have burial traditions, left for the predators and vultures?
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     Royalish (royalish@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 16-Jul-2023 16:57:51 JST Royalish

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     @Sheril I don't want to be morbid, but where did all the bodies go?

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     Jonathan Hill (jonathancr@sunny.garden)'s status on Sunday, 16-Jul-2023 22:42:26 JST Jonathan Hill

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     @Sheril The accompanying article says that they’re only taking Homo sapiens into account, and beginning 200,000 years ago. But H. sapiens aren’t the only human species.

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     Peter Principle (jobsboils@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jul-2023 13:12:05 JST Peter Principle

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     @Sheril "As sands through the hourglass, so too, are the days of our lives..."

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