Are there more people alive right now then people that have ever died?  What’s your first thought?  I want to say that there are more dead people, but I’m not sure how to figure this out, or the best possible way to make an educated guess.

According to census.gov, there are 6,812,935,148 people alive today.  So if we assume an average of 2 people (parents) for every person alive today, then we’d only have to go through 1 generation of dead people to tip the scale to the dead people.  If the most common family dynamic is 2 kids per 2 family, then we’re almost at a stand still.  Thoughts?

Here’s a visual aid:

I don’t want it to be sad.  I’d hope that friends and family that know me well would throw up gang signs in jest at my funeral.  Maybe even going as far as pouring out some champagne on the floor.  If I died in an accident, I’d hope that someone would do an impression of me saying, “what the crap” or “that was ballz.”  Death hath no sting.  I wouldn’t want to be remembered for being a boring “stand up citizen” or a “good person.”  I’d want to be known as the guy who just wanted to have a good time, love people, explore, and be creative.  I’ve said a few times before, I’d love to be buried viking style; body set on a raft and then set on fire and pushed out to sea.  I’d be screwed if we could feel pain after death…but whatever.

Taking the thoughts of this old post (talks about keeping buried bodies from decomposing naturally and feeding new growth) a little bit further, I was thinking about the space that bodies and graveyards are consuming.  Certainly with huge population growths, cemeteries have to be filling up, and you don’t build up, you build out.  So, if there is a constant growth of cemeteries, wouldn’t they be the most prominent acreage holder eventually?  Is there a growth in land dedicated to the dead documented anywhere?  Will there be a day when Arlington Cemetery can no longer hold bodies?  What happens then?

If talking about the dead is too morbid, a different but similar question is metals being used in construction.  With the size of our buildings increasing to crazy limits like we’re seeing in Shanghai and Dubai, where is all this metal coming from?  We just keep on creating new stuff, and certainly recycling has helped in recovering metals and such from other items, but i’d be willing to bet our consumption and use of metals far outweighs our cultivated supply.  So, are we digging big holes in the earth, or shearing away layers and creating big spikes in the form of sky scrapers and airplanes?