How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?

A Population Reference Bureau estimate of how many people have ever lived on Earth. The companion uses it as the unit of comparison in the long arc: at Bostrom's mature efficiency, 2025's data-center power would run about 10¹¹ brain-equivalents, as many as all the humans who have ever lived. Fig. 10a scales its top rungs per human ever born (C3).

Cited in

the companion paper (Companion §11, Fig. 10)

Used for

C3C3; Fig. 10a

Strand

The long arc: cosmology & far futures · Self-replicating expansion & simulated worlds

Cite

@misc{prb2022how,
  title = {How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?},
  author = {Toshiko Kaneda and Carl Haub},
  year = {2022},
  howpublished = {Population Reference Bureau},
  url = {https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/},
}