While my television is never actually turned off, I'm rarely paying any attention to it. But I finally caught the actual opening to the Dawn of the Dead advert, in which the claim is made that, since the evolution of homosapiens, thirty-seven billion people have died.
     How arbitrary is this number? I've never seen any really supported estimation of death totals to date--especially factoring that we really only know, factually, that homosapiens have been around for fifty thousand years [based on the genetic backtrace] with estmiates from two hundred thousand up to three million or more.
     I remember a film a few years ago--possibly some zombie or vampire thing--in which someone mentioned that, as of then, twice as many people had died as were currently alive; but I have no idea what that was anymore. Thirty-seven billion sounds more likely than thirteen billion [doubling today's figure of about 6.45billion people alive], but I still question its validity.
     Does anyone have any provable data on this? I've never really seen any.
--Gremlin

Follow Ups:

• Re: 37 billion posted by MondoHebe [198.81.26.45 - cache-ntc-ab08.proxy.aol.com] on 21 March 2004 at 14.01.42 ZuluTime (0)