Today, our planet is inhabited by 7.8 billion people. Never before in history have so many members of the Homo sapiens species walked the Earth, nor has they had such a long lifespan. Today's population, in fact, represents more than seven percent of all people who have ever lived. It is estimated, namely, that from the first members of our species, 50,000 years ago, until 2018, a total of about 108.8 billion people lived on the planet Earth. That means that every fourteenth man who ever existed is alive today.
However, how did this assessment come about? The number of people is obviously growing rapidly, but the rate of demographic growth has changed with the epochs - with climate, epidemics, wars - reliable data on this are not known, so this task cannot be unambiguously solved. However, an estimate of the number of people who have ever lived can still be made, but with two previous assumptions - how long our species has existed and what the average size of the human population was in which period. Based on that, with few accounts, it turned out that 108,470,690,115 people lived on Earth.
Historical and archaeological findings indicate that about 8,000 years before the new era, with the beginning of the agricultural revolution, the domestication of the first cereals and animals, the human population multiplied and that about 5 million people lived on the planet. It is believed that in this era, the infant mortality rate was 500 per 1,000 births, which is why the population grew visibly faster, but still extremely slow.
At the beginning of our era, at the zenith of the Roman Empire, there were probably about 300 million people in the world (about 45 million in the Roman Empire itself), while around 1650, on the eve of the new century, there were not much more than 500 million people in the world. , and such a small increase is a consequence of terrible epidemics during the Middle Ages. But with the development of medicine, living conditions and technology, human numbers are growing rapidly.
The number of people will thus reach the first billion in the middle of the 19th century, in the middle of the industrial revolution, and a century later, all seven billion people. Assuming that the number of births per 1,000 people gradually decreased with all these epochs and a few more statistics, it is estimated that a total of 108.8 billion people lived in the world.
If you think a little about this gigantic number, you may feel how many human creatures have crossed the same path from birth, first touches, words, movements to knowledge of the world, love of life, defeat and victory, pain and happiness. And finally, inevitably, death.
Most of the people live below the poverty line. And they lead their life by hand to mouth. Agriculture is their main occupation.