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How can anyone possibly ever answer that question? People have been disputing how many people have ever lived on the earth for decades. Some anthropologists ha
by chrisacky 15y ago
How can anyone possibly ever answer that question?
People have been disputing how many people have ever lived on the earth for decades. Some anthropologists have thrown out numbers as high as 70billion-120billion, although other scientists have admittedly said the number is probably around 7-10B.
How many people to calculate how many people have ever lived?
That's just a log2( X ) number of bits would be needed.
As the author of the blog says, 6000 billion people could be written in just 43 bits.
- fooandbarify 15y agoAccording to Wikipedia [1], numbers around 100 billion have been bandied about quite seriously, and much lower estimates have been "debunked as unscientific". An interesting debate, regardless. I had no idea it could be so hard to calculate. At any rate, as you say, 43 bits would have humanity covered for a long, long time. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#Number_of_humans_who_have_ever_lived http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#Number_of_huma...