200 years ago: same Population Questions

The actual yr, eight now, is 365. 24ish days and has changed over time. Also, a day is a little not quite 24 hrs.

Aiahavezred said:

The actual yr, eight now, is 365. 24ish days and has changed over time. Also, a day is a little not quite 24 hrs.

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I am not sure I understand what this means.

Years are just a convention. As long as one is consistent, I don't think we need to debate what a "true year" is to arrive at a population estimate. I'm just not sure what is a reasonable baseline for "normal population growth." The rates in modern Africa do seem to debunk the notion that less civilization/technology = slower population growth. But again, I think that was only presumed in the first place because the entire conventional chronology depends on it. To answer this question, you have to already have a general outline of human history, whether it be "religious" or "scientific" (same thing in my opinion, at least the modern use of "science.")

To put another way, if the modern trend of " more civilized" = slower population growth was applied backwards, and we suspect the existence of a world-spanning civilization in "antiquity", what impact would that have on any projections? And that's without even assuming any major cataclysms. It's the whole known/unknown/unknowable, with most of this in the last category. Estimates are only going to get us a bell curve, when I suspect human population over time might look more like the stock market.

KorbenDallas said:

I am not sure I understand what this means.

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New phonenew auto correct. Right now 1 year is 365.24 days.
Finally ready to start. Year zero is the first one. I picked 8.4bn as the starting population. Year zero is around 10200 years before. So 8200BCE, roughly.

Matches kind of closely with the start of agriculture (~10000BCE).

Banta said:

Years are just a convention. As long as one is consistent, I don't think we need to debate what a "true year" is to arrive at a population estimate. I'm just not sure what is a reasonable baseline for "normal

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For a really good understanding of how population growth works, check out Hans Rosling on YouTube. Its his job and they're good presentations.

I just shot for something that made sense:

1. 8 people make 3 couples because more males are usually born.

2. Birthrate is high because is its not there is no growth.
3. Infant mortality fluctuates around 50% because, historically, it does.
4. Adult death rate is really high- if its too low the population gets unsustainable large very fast and for a long time, noone lived past 30.

All of this gave me a 2020 population of 851Bn, which is CRAZY high but Reasonable. Now I can go through records and enter true numbers to see what happens.
I just want to know where these 840bn people went and I love statistics.

The actual length of the measure is vital as it alone determines the unit used which is applied the numerical label of 2021 or whatever
In terms of population of humans and any attribute attached to it its all speculation. No-one has the slightest clue how many humans this world supports today let alone at any time passed when the environment when they lived in was likely different to this one.
Estimating from an unknowable starting point seems moot to me. Based on experience this world majors in abundance of all living things when man stops meddling, look at the images of Chernobyl today. I'm not saying man is mad or bad just that the population of a given location say a city is held at artificially high levels by mans methods of control. Cities are not self supporting things why there are so many ruined and decaying cities knocking about. Population figures are all produced by authorities either directly or by authority funded enterprises to further whatever narrative in play.

See what I mean about the bogus 365 calendar, 365.24 days of equal 24 hour length, indeed.

jd755 said:

The actual length of the measure is vital as it alone determines the unit used which is applied the numerical label of 2021 or whatever
In terms of population of humans and any attribute attached to it its all speculation. No-one has the slightest clue how many humans this world supports today let alone at any time passed when the environment when they lived in was likely different to this one.
Estimating from an unknowable starting point seems moot to me. Based on experience this world majors in abundance of all living things when man stops meddling, look at the images of Chernobyl today. I'm not saying man is mad or bad just that the population of a given location say a city is held at artificially high levels by mans methods of control. Cities are not self supporting things why there are so many ruined and decaying cities knocking about. Population figures are all produced by authorities either directly or by authority funded enterprises to further whatever narrative in play.

See what I mean about the bogus 365 calendar, 365.24 days of equal 24 hour length, indeed.

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I largely agree with all of this. To clarify my position about years, it just seems as long as we are consistent, that doesn't have to be an issue when trying to project population backwards. Like in the same way you said "the numerical label of 2021." Ultimately what year it is now is completely subjective, but we need to agree on terms for it to have any meaning. So, basically, debating about whether the current, arguably sloppy metric of 365.24 days = 1 year is not really necessary in this context (but is an absolutely valid topic on its own).

jd755 said:

In terms of population of humans and any attribute attached to it its all speculation. No-one has the slightest clue how many humans this world supports today let alone at any time passed when the environment when they lived in was likely different to this one.

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Exactly. I wish it wasn't the case, but I don't see any rational way to even start this inquiry.

jd755 said:

Estimating from an unknowable starting point seems moot to me

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True, but what about working backwards? Even if we accept the current world population as being at least somewhat accurate (though you really don't have to), we would still have to then presume some sort of "average population growth rate." And I have no earthly idea how you do that. The only thing that seems obvious is that it seems highly, highly unlikely that over 100,000+ years that we would only reach 8 billion people once and that it took until the final .0001% of the time for the vast majority of the growth to happen. In fact, what that logically implies to me is that if growth can happen that quickly then it's reasonable to assume that spikes of population growth would have occurred multiple times over 100k years (not that I think there is any credible evidence at all to suggest humanity has or has not been around that long.)

I imagine this is how the conversation about this topic has always developed, because the next thought I have is "well then, if population spiked, where did all the people go?" And obviously, it's much easier to say "well, they must have never existed" (and it's compatible with the rest of mainstream chronology) than come up with a mechanism for getting rid of billions of people. Probably something to be said of it psychologically too, as most explanations would be very ghoulish (if you believe there's no other land to emigrate to anyway). No one really wants to consider that the human race could be reduced by like 99%... yet that's what various mythology seems to imply has happened.

The thing really is a movable feast.
Counting backwards from where we are now can of course be done using a plain measure of 365 day year and applying it to any discoveries of population estimates in whatever reason or form they appear. This would give some idea of numbers at specific time but in the between times its anyone's guess.
I honestly don;t think there is such a thing as an average population. Like everything else here population is a dynamic thing never still always moving upwards and downward. The big problem with it for me is who produces the numbers. I specifically use the word produces as there is no way to actually back or indeed check any population figure even for relatively small towns.
Same goes for the growth rate. It seems from reading various topics unrelated to actual human population estimates but more in the field of horticulture and agriculture and the impact of movements of people off of the land into cities and military's the human population of a given area seems to be able to adjust itself to either raise or lower the live birth rate depending on the circumstance within the area. Sometimes its more male and fewer females, other times its the other way. Numbers of offspring vary widely and seems to part of the same mechanism.
Not quite 'filling the hole' in as an analogy but pretty close.

Why current state of mind on this topic is its likely the population of any living thing has this innate ability to adjust itself accordingly. Perhaps sometimes the numbers get so low the mechanism breaks down and this could be where extinction come in. I'm not sure what if anything is to be gained from trying to figure out numbers of people in this century or that. Knowing that *** billion or million were alive when *** was on the throne or walking the earth has no context to it.

I do however think population figures can actually reveal something of worth in regards the logistics and infrastructure of cities. Today there are cities probably more than we know of in decline. Detroit for example is slowly collapsing of the media stories are to be believed so in effect it is now over infrastructured (so too speak) in terms of the population it is serving. So with a study of the population figures from the same source, say the census returns for example, will reveal the logistical aspect of what is required for a growing city population and should provide a marker or two where peak population/logistics/infrastructure is being one and the point at which it goes beyond and becomes unsutainalble.
The only fly in the ointment is that it only applies to cities where we are sure commerce was in operation. Prior to the written word on paper appearing I doubt, highly doubt commerce existed.

The exercise is to figure out the puzzle of where everybody went. Math and statistics are usually fairly good at figuring things out. But no one has nailed this one; they merely say " this us how many we have, here is my guess about how that happened".

As for knowing the population. They absolutely have to know how many people are here, roughly. If countries didn't, they would know how big to make the military.

Aiahavezred said:

Math and statistics are usually fairly good at figuring things out

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This completely depends on the specificity of the question being asked and the quality of the data being input.

Aiahavezred said:

They absolutely have to know how many people are here, roughly. If countries didn't, they would know how big to make the military

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Governments/corporations/people want to know lots of things, doesn't mean they do. It's a complex topic, some countries obviously have a better infrastructure to assess this, but that still it doesn't mean that they're getting it right. In the US, there was a big back and forth for the current census on whether to count illegal immigrants. It was decided that they will. Doesn't that mean that some double counting will be going on, unless all countries do this uniformly? Plus, it's still very much a self-identify sort of system... they have an idea, but they still rely on volunteers to collaborate.

The most accurate source, according to Census Bureau research, is information that people give about themselves when they complete their census forms. A good sign is that the 2020 census self-response rate – 67.0% – is slightly higher than 2010’s 66.5%

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So a whole third of "expected citizens" doesn't even participate! Obviously then the government has things like SSN, birth certificates, death certificates, but how vigorously this is audited probably depends on employee work ethic. I certainly don't believe crap like this:

How accurate will the 2020 U.S. census be?

I don't even care to guess what they're measuring their success against, because it can't be the only thing that matters: the true population count! It's not like you take a guess and then God tells you whether you were right or wrong.

And again, this is kinda the best we can do. Then you have examples like Somalia, where official records haven't even existed since the 70s.

I like how this guy puts it in 2011:

“Realistically, the uncertainty is at least 2 percent and that’s for the 75 percent of the world for which we have recent official counts or estimates," Joel E. Cohen, head of the Laboratory of Populations at Rockefeller University and Columbia University, said Monday. “Now, world population is estimated to be growing by about 1.1 percent per year. Hence each percent uncertainty in total count translates into almost one year uncertainty in the date by which the population grows past a given threshold. Bottom line: world population passes seven billion sometime in the last year or two or the next year or two, most likely.”

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U.N. Says 7 Billion Now Share the World (Published 2011)

Count the qualifiers in there! We have a margin of error of "at least" 2% but we're missing a quarter of the dataset! Earth reached 7 billion humans sometime between 2009 and 2013... unless it didn't.

Aiahavezred said:

The exercise is to figure out the puzzle of where everybody went.

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May be it's not that hard to figure out. "Mislabeling" can do miracles. Some of them are literally under our feet, imo.

• Catacombs of Paris, Mud Flood Victims and Unidentified Dead. Reset?
• Clueless Historians in Castor, UK: Roman this, Roman that...

It looks like my number fall in line with a lot of other estimates. I was looking for the missing 1000yrs by trying to find where the official numbers varied from mine.

Check out the link and look at 1AD to 1000AD. 0 population growth for 1000yrs is impossible. Linky.
I was able to mimic the experts for the estimates here. increasing adult death by 2% for 1c, and setting infant morality rate(anyone that doesn’t live long enough to breed) at 55% instead of fluctuating it for pop. Increase. The current 2020 population dropped to 1.5bn and recovered to 8.4Bn by 2500ce.

Now it gets interesting. I plugged in the known birth and death rates from census data, going back I far as I could. The 2020 population came out bang on to todays population, taking into account all the death by recorded war/disease/famines.

Thoughts on all of this:

1. Some “experts” came up with, almost exactly, the same basic speadsheet that I made and guessed on everything(that’s what I did).
2. Fomenko’s missing 1000 yrs is definitely plausible- a population of 205M not increasing, at all, for 750 yrs, and then start right back up like nothing happened, is impossible(the math I used was deliberate and life is anything but). I was surprised to see this shown so clearly by experts
3. Something definitely must have wiped out the population 10,000 to 12,000 yrs ago( this is becoming more and more apparent across a few different fields of study).
4. Or, for at least 50,000 years ?something? wiped almost all of us out on a fairly regular basis. I will play with this next and report if I see anything worth mentioning.

***I say 50,000 because beyond that really doesn’t matter; we’ve already proved how humans advance and grow over a few thousand.
***also, if you look at how other higher primates behave now, its totally possible that we were the same for at least 150, 000yrs; keeping small population stable with little interbreeding with other human groups.

One thing is for certain. Something smells of BS.

I did some more playing with the spreadsheet today. I'm not sure if you can, but please feel free to download and play around with it. My goals at the top and the findings at the bottom.

Aiahavezred said:

I did some more playing with the spreadsheet today. I'm not sure if you can, but please feel free to download and play around with it.

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This is like the most advanced spreadsheet on the matter I've seen so far.

I don't think until recent times that the populations were all that large with the only exception being the star fort civilization with its waterworks, canals, ports, star forts, agricultural mini canals, great stone "churches", etc. which may be the civilized Eden culture. There were many resets hundreds of years apart that kept the population quite low. The periodic ice ages were a severe population reducer along with the transitional failure of the biosphere for a time after. There were at least 14 major ice ages and minor disasters that kept the population at a relatively low number compared to our present number. The Eden ages were periodic after the ice age retreated and the population would grow rapidly but in many hundreds of years or a few thousand(?) another ice age reset would happen culling the population to a very low number. So you had ice age and then Eden then ice age and then Eden temperatures etc. There was a population before the Eden and ice age cycles and that may have been the longest Eden period of time before the ice age cycle and may have had the longest growth of population on the timeline.

KorbenDallas said:

This is like the most advanced spreadsheet on the matter I've seen so far.

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Thanks. Try playing with the numbers in the first few generations. It's pretty easy for a population to fail.

Saw this article today and I really think it really underscores the issue with trying to project population levels going backwards.

Like an avalanche, the demographic forces — pushing toward more deaths than births — seem to be expanding and accelerating. Although some countries continue to see their populations grow, especially in Africa, fertility rates are falling nearly everywhere else. Demographers now predict that by the latter half of the century or possibly earlier, the global population will enter a sustained decline for the first time.

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"First time we have a record of," is more accurate, I think.

The 20th century presented a very different challenge. The global population saw its greatest increase in known history, from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000, as life spans lengthened and infant mortality declined. In some countries — representing about one-third of the world’s people — those growth dynamics are still in play. By the end of the century, Nigeria could surpass China in population; across sub-Saharan Africa, families are still having four or five children.

But nearly everywhere else, the era of high fertility is ending. As women have gained more access to education and contraception and as the anxieties associated with having children intensify, more parents are delaying pregnancy, and fewer babies are being born. Even in countries long associated with rapid growth, such as India and Mexico, birthrates are falling toward or are already below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per family.

The change may take decades, but once it starts, decline (just like growth) spirals exponentially. With fewer births, fewer girls grow up to have children, and if they have smaller families than their parents did — which is happening in dozens of countries — the drop starts to look like a rock thrown off a cliff....

...Birth projections often shift based on how governments and families respond, but according to projections by an international team of scientists published last year in The Lancet, 183 countries and territories — out of 195 — will have fertility rates below replacement level by 2100.

Their model shows an especially sharp decline for China, with its population expected to fall from 1.41 billion now to about 730 million in 2100. If that happens, the population pyramid would essentially flip. Instead of a base of young workers supporting a narrower band of retirees, China would have as many 85-year-olds as 18-year-olds.

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• Long Slide Looms for World Population, With Sweeping Ramifications

I guess it will remain to be seen if we reach the levels of decline that many are now projecting, but it seems clear to me that human population levels can vary wildly (and seemingly inversely with growth of technology), without even considering a worldwide cataclysm.

I think what the 20th century and beyond shows us though is that populations can quickly spike and also then reach a sort of wall, where the trend reverses almost as swiftly. It seems likely then that if human beings have existed for tens of thousands of years (which is another large presumption), it's nearly inconceivable that the world population hasn't seesawed up and down on many occasions. So basically, the common cited graphs, like posted in the OP, are likely either wrong by the shape of the distribution or by the time scale. But you know the motto of scientism: "if you can't know for sure, it's best to make something up!"