At the time of writing, there were an estimated 8,123,518,311 living humans on Earth – roughly the most there has ever been. But as fertility and birth rates continue to freefall, the numerical peak of humanity is quickly approaching.
We've crunched some numbers from the UN Population Division's World Population Prospects 2024 report – which looks at historical population estimates and provides a range of forward projections based on currently available information.
As you can see by the image below, birth rates across all major continents have been dropping sharply since the 1960s.
Researchers point to the following as contributing factors:
- Access to contraceptives and abortions
- Higher levels of female education
- Changing social structures and religious beliefs
- Economic prosperity and increased lifestyle choices
- Urbanization
- High cost of raising children
Either way, fertility rates have already fallen well below replacement levels in many affluent nations, including the USA, UK, Germany, China and India – here charted alongside the countries with the highest (Niger, 6.06 live births per woman) and lowest (South Korea, 0.72 live births per woman) current birth rates on file. Africa as a continent, incidentally, dominates the global birth rate and fertility charts.
So what do the coming decades look like? Well, on the global scale, the UN estimates that Earth's current population of 8.1 billion will continue to rise for several more decades, rolling off to a peak population of approximately 10.29 billion people around the year 2084.
The population, as a whole, is going to look a lot older as a result; we used to call the kind of diagram below a "population pyramid," and that was certainly accurate up until around 1990. Moving toward the year 2100, it starts looking a lot more like a population bolus.
It's hard to know how accurate these predictions might be, given that we're living in an age of massive technological change on so many fronts. Medical science and anti-aging technology promise to extend both the lifespan and health span of (affluent) human life. There are many who believe the first thousand-year-old human has already been born, and that as a species we may well outpace death itself in the coming decades.
AI, humanoids and other intelligent robotics projects promise nigh-on unlimited cheap labor, along with superhuman intelligence and self-optimizing systems; the economy, according to folk like Elon Musk, can continue to grow even as the population and the labor force shrink. Smart robots will tend to the old and infirm when there are not enough youngsters around to do the job, and the rest of us can lead lives of leisure.
That might mean more babies; on the other hand, we'll soon be able to have sex with those intelligent robots, too, and they promise to be the most persuasive, attentive, responsive and agreeable partners mankind has ever seen, with zero chance of pregnancy.
All these technological fronts and many others are advancing at rapidly accelerating rates, so future predictions have probably never been less reliable than they are today. But it's certainly interesting to step back and see the size and spread of our species from a global perspective.
Source: United Nations
