Monday, November 29, 2010

Putting the Historical Population Into Perspective

It is estimated that 271 million people lived in the world prior to the time of Christ. Since the coming of Jesus, 635 billion have been born and died.* To put this into perspective, I created this graph to accurately represent the ratio in visible form:


I'm not even sure you can see the blue section that represents the world population, B.C. but it is the thin blue sliver in the top of the chart. So in all of history, it is estimated that roughly 635.3 billion people have walked the earth, and of that number, only 0.3 billion lived prior to the sacrifice of Christ and the ingrafting of the Gentiles into the seed of Abraham.

I'm sure that this data has apologetic significance. Especially for those who think it was cruel of God to wait thousands of years into human history before sending the Savior to redeem the world.

*I got this data from Wikipedia, so if Dave in Cincinatti decides to revise the world population, then this chart will have to be modified, as well.

5 comments:

  1. Daniel HoffmanNovember 30, 2010 at 8:02 PM

    That is incredible.
    Do you have any idea how they go about estimating this?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Adam ParkerNovember 30, 2010 at 9:21 PM

    No idea. Some guy in Wyoming probably just makes it up.

    ReplyDelete
  3. ChuJanuary 13, 2011 at 12:33 PM

    Source, please. Is that based on a 6000yo world theory or what the archaeological/fossil evidence presents?

    ReplyDelete
  4. ChuJanuary 13, 2011 at 12:50 PM

    I looked at Wikipedia and from 10,000 BC to 1AD and added up the number of people estimated to be alive at each thousand-year interval which gave a number of 446m people. Then, following the same path from 1,000AD to 2000AD there were 6,380m people. That would put the percentage at about 7%, which should be a viewable block on the pie graph. If you include the number of people alive at 1AD on both, you get 6,580 people alive after, which puts the percentage still pretty close to 7%.

    This is, of course, only counting the people estimated to be alive at specific chunks of time. And of course there have been more people alive since 1AD than before as technological and medical sciences progressed. But as far as I can tell, the numbers on your graph are wrong and seem arbitrary. Love truth, treasure truth, it's a virtue to admit when one was misinformed.

    Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#Number_of_humans_who_have_ever_lived

    ReplyDelete
  5. Adam ParkerJanuary 13, 2011 at 9:31 PM

    Did you see my self-effacing comments on the reliability of these numbers?

    ReplyDelete

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