6 1/2 Billion
February 25,2006. The world's population is scheduled to hit 6,500,000,000 today.
It reached 3 billion the year I was born. That means, the population growth rate has averaged 1.75% every year for the past 45 years.
If the wacko fundamentalists who actually believe what the Bible says is true are right, then the earth was created as recently as 4004 B.C.
That means the flood would have occurred in 2349 B.C. and it was dry enough to leave the ark in 2348 B.C.
So, assuming a starting population of six (not counting Noah and his wife, since nothing is said of them having any more children) the growth rate would have to be only an average of 0.479% (or 3.65 times less than the current rate) to reach 6.5 billion by now.
But if Homo Sapiens made his appearance 190,000 years ago, and say the growth rate was 100 times less, or 0.0175%, the population would now be 556 trillion (556,290,685,112,816)! That's 85,583 times 6.5 billion! If a more reasonable rate is used, the numbers are truly astronomical. So, where are all the people, or if you say they didn't survive, where are all the bones?
It reached 3 billion the year I was born. That means, the population growth rate has averaged 1.75% every year for the past 45 years.
If the wacko fundamentalists who actually believe what the Bible says is true are right, then the earth was created as recently as 4004 B.C.
That means the flood would have occurred in 2349 B.C. and it was dry enough to leave the ark in 2348 B.C.
So, assuming a starting population of six (not counting Noah and his wife, since nothing is said of them having any more children) the growth rate would have to be only an average of 0.479% (or 3.65 times less than the current rate) to reach 6.5 billion by now.
But if Homo Sapiens made his appearance 190,000 years ago, and say the growth rate was 100 times less, or 0.0175%, the population would now be 556 trillion (556,290,685,112,816)! That's 85,583 times 6.5 billion! If a more reasonable rate is used, the numbers are truly astronomical. So, where are all the people, or if you say they didn't survive, where are all the bones?
posted by Jim at 11:41 PM
4 Comments:
Eaten by carniverous gophers?
Then where are all the mounds of gopher poop? Huh?!
You're joking right? Look at it this way: lots of creatures reproduce very quickly under good conditions. I'm sure cockroaches, fruit flies, and bacteria have some astronomical growth rates. But, their populations are limited by resources. (BTW, I'm sure if you calculated backwards for a number of species based on their present reproduction rates, you'd quickly discover that the earth is less than 100 years old, because if the earth were truely 6,000 years old we'd be buried in a thick soup of bacteria a mile deep.) That's the thing: humans have much lower mortality rates than we used to. We have sanitation and medicine now. We can cope with famine, drought, and disease much better than we used to. We've managed to alter the "ceiling" of how many humans the environment can maintain.
Also, if you were to start your model in 2350 BC (the supposed date of the global flood), you'd find that the ancient world (Egyptian, Roamn, Greek, Babylonian) would be unbelievably underpopulated.
You're also not the first one to come up with this argument:
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB620.html
I should also add something odd about your calculation. If we use your numbers: 6*( 1.00479^4350 ) to arrive at the present population of 6.4 billion. What happens when we use your same calculation to calculate the world population in, say, 1250 B.C. - when King Tut lived? 6*( 1.00479^1000 ) = 713 people on earth. Obviously, there were more than 713 people on earth in 1250 B.C. But, if there were more than 713 people on earth in 1250 BC, and there are only 6.4 billion people now, it means that the growth rate must've been far lower than 0.479% per year. I think this counts as empirical evidence that the human population growth rate over the last 3200 years has been substantially less than 0.479% per year. Obviously, population growth rates are varible, and at various times in history, it might very well have been negative (just like you see with animal populations in the wild).
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