World Population

I have to warn you that there is no real point to this blog other than as a source of imagination...  And I realize I'm talking theoretical  numbers.

I was watching a historical documentary about Greek History (which I have another unpublished blog about as well) and it referenced that about 50,000 people died in a war around the sixth century BC.   That's a huge number obviously - but then it occurred to me that the population of the world then would make that number even larger a footprint.

So - I looked up the world historical population:

http://www.worldhistorysite.com/population.html

In 1999 AD 50k people would be less than a .0008% of the world's population.

In 600 BC .025% - of the entire world's population

For some reason this led me to think about how incredibly unpopulated the world was at one point in time.... Today the population of Los Angeles is 28 million.    In the year 2000 BC in theory the population of the world was about the same as today's population in Los Angeles.

What's even more remarkable is the speed at which the population is increasing.   The difference in population between 1999 and 2008 is about the same number as the entire earth's population in the year 1850.

In 2002 it is estimated that the number of humans who have ever lived is 106 billion.  This would mean that in 2002 six percent of the people who had ever lived were currently alive. source

So - what do you think about when you imagine the world being less populated?

I think about all the world yet to be discovered.  Every now and then when I'm driving across the state I will look at some of the vast hills and wonder what it must have been like for the people who were first to walk into these areas. 

But I know for certain I've never been to an area that no one else has ever been before me.  A strange thought.   There are very few pockets on the planet left that no human has ever been.  It is no wonder people start looking to the depths of space for their discoveries - even if the individual has not discovered that part of the planet, a human has and somehow that can mark that area as being discovered.  And this might be one of the few indications to me that despite everything, if we can have the emotional sensation as though something has been discovered even though we have not been there ourselves, that there is a sort of universal connection between all of us.