Radiolab - Body Count

Episode Date: January 24, 2020

Right now, at this very moment, all across the planet, there are 7.6 billion human beings eating, breathing, sleeping, brushing their teeth, walking their dogs, drinking coffee, walking down the street or running onto the subway or hopping in their car, maybe reading a summary of a podcast they’re about to hit play on … and the number is only going up. Everyday 386,000 babies are born (16,000 an hour). We’re adding a billion new people every 12 years. So here’s a question you’ve probably never thought about: Are there more people alive right now than have ever lived on the planet in history? Do the living outnumber the dead? Robert got obsessed with this odd question, and in this episode we bring you the answer. Or, well, answers. This episode was reported by Robert Krulwich and produced by Annie McEwen and Pat Walters, with help from Neel Dhanesha. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Music and mixing by Jeremy Bloom. Special thanks to Jeffrey Dobereiner. Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate. 

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y. Se.

See? Yeah. Okay. Ready? Yep. Hey, I'm Jeddabumrod. I'm Robert Krollwich. This is Radio Lab. As many of you know, Robert is retiring from the show at the end of the month.

I don't want to open this way This is bad We don't want to do this Okay let's go let's back up Okay Hey I'm Chad Abumran I'm Robert Krollwich This is Radio Lab

So as as many of you know Robert is retiring from the show At the end of the month This is our last month hosting the show together I know I can't I can't think about that right now

No let's run quickly past it Yes We're gonna be We're gonna be We're gonna Where? No, no, no. That kind of thing in the background.

Something triumphant maybe? Yeah, I could go either way. That's better, actually. In any case, we wanted to play a wide-ranging, very roberty in all its many flavors and forms and spirits, conversation that we had that I guess started with a question. Is that right? It did. It started with a simple, peculiar question. The question is, like, I was reading. an essay by

Annie Dillard. Annie Dillard. And in the middle of a sentence, she wonders out loud in this essay, hmm, there's so many people on the planet right now and more all the time. I wonder if there are more people alive right now than have ever been dead.

More people currently alive than have ever died in the history of humanity? That's the question. That's such a peculiar question. Of course it is. But think of it this way. Let's make two piles, okay? Let's make a pile of all the people who have ever died

And all the people alive right now Which pile is bigger? All the people that have ever died Versus all the people currently alive So yes Every single person who has died gets put onto a pile Right and everyone who's As far as we know

Except for Jesus and maybe a few others Like everybody's died Oh except for Jesus because he came back Yeah It's funny does he count? No I don't think you could count him It would be all the people have ever been alive minus one.

That's funny, but then he saved a whole bunch of people, too. But they kind of, they're still dead technically, right? They're dead. Yeah. But I mean, we're talking about a lot of dead people here. Well, no, but it's actually a reasonable question when you consider just how many people are alive on this planet right now. I was born in 1947.

There were roughly, what was say, 2.5 billion people on Earth. And what is it now, like 7.6? It's 7.6 right now, but we're adding 386,000 babies. on earth every single day. Wow. 16,000 babies an hour. So in my lifetime, the population of the earth will almost have tripled. That has never happened in human history.

So you're saying that... In just in my life. You're saying that the acceleration of baby making is such that we might be outracing all the people who have already died. Well, at least it's a reasonable question, I think, to ask. Okay. Could it be? How would you even ask the question?

Well, you have to count the dead. Well, how would you do that? Well, that turned out to be a little bit of a problem. There's like no man standing on a corner. So dead today are, I mean, there's no such person. There is one person, though, who had done a study. He was a man living in Washington, D.C., and I guess on one afternoon a long time ago, he did the, quote, math, unquote,

and came up with the answer to Annie's question. So then I said to him, like, how did you do this? And when did you begin counting? She called. I called him. And what he doesn't like is. calls from reporters about this. Did he hang up on you?

Almost because he said, I have done so much work in my life at the World Population Council. And I've gotten 750 calls from you stupid reporters asking you with this one dumb thing which I just spent an afternoon doing and it's the only thing people want

so he said, I'll just do this one more time and don't ever call me again. So he quickly and to me completely incomprehensibly described what he'd done. And then I said to Latif, I don't understand a word that man said. Also, he's hostile and doesn't want to do it again.

So that's when I found Jeffrey Doberiner. I see. I was sitting there through the glass there. So how did you get roped into this madness? So I went to one of your editorial meetings, which was delightful. We talked a lot about cephalopods, and I introduced myself. I'm a PhD archaeologist. So that's my...

PhD archaeologist. There's no math in archaeology, sir. Whoa, whoa. Them's fighting words. No, well... He's insulting without even realizing. Isn't archaeology being out in the dirt digging? Yeah, but then someone's got to count all the things you dig up and then make broad statistical generalizations about them.

Really? Oh, yeah. I didn't know that math and archaeology were buddies. It's pretty mathy. Also, carbon date stuff, super, super duper mathy. Okay, sure. So it's a lot of Excel, honestly. So do you spend your time in front of a computer more than on your hands and knees in the dirt?

I would say there's about three days in front of the computer for every day in the field. I did my dissertation on the border between Mexico and Guatemala on the ancient Maya. Oh, wow. Okay. Did you find any cool things? Oh, yeah. I found a lost city. That was good. By the way, I didn't know that. It was embargoed. The article just came out. Wow.

What's it like to find a lost city? Does it look like a city or does it look like, oh, there's a shard, but I know so much about what I do that this shard tells me it's an entire city. Well, this is the key. So first, there's kind of a sort of colonial imperialist mindset, where we often call cities lost when indigenous people still know where they are, or they're not actually lost. I see. Did someone say, oh, it's over there? More or less.

So it's a problematic phrase. But what's interesting about this one in particular is that there are Maya hieroglyphs. They had a fully-boggles. We talked about lost cities for like 40 minutes, maybe. But eventually we did come back around to the question at hand, which was, are there more dead people than alive people? Okay, so step one was that Robert and I got together once he heard that out with an archaeologist, and one of the first things we landed on is when do humans actually exist? Are we talking like upright bipedal humans?

Are we talking about— That's the rub? That was one of the questions. I said to Jeffrey, well, what do we do? Do we go back to the beginning of humans? And when is that? Yeah, when is that? Like 100,000 years or something?

Well, if it's humans who, like, paint and make jewelry and talk and make music, if it's modern humans that would resume. but also be identical to us. Yeah. That's 50,000 years ago. So have more humans died in 50,000? No, no. We decided to go, what the hell? We've got to go back all the way 200,000 years

where you get the first grunting group of, you know, cave people who are standing up and running across a savannah. So we went all the way back. Wow. So last musical, but still on two feet. Yeah. That's Soren Wheeler, who is our managing editor. Some people's metric is if they're sitting in the subway with you,

would you blink? and would you look at them twice? Oh, that's an interesting metric. So by that metric, it's probably around 200,000 years ago. That's a very simple test. Send your 200,000-year-old homo sapien to Bloomingdale's, put him in a tie in a jacket, stick him in a subway. Do you blink?

There you go. If he looks like he fits in the subway, then he is a homo sapian. Okay. So we're going to play. 200,000? So past 200,000, you would blink on the subway? We would because they wouldn't be, what would be, what would they be different as? Well, in reality, they would.

probably totally naked and holding it. This is the most interesting blend of high order math and like pull it out of your ass. So can I restate the question to you and tell me if this is right? Have more humans died in the past 200,000 years than are currently alive? Then that's the question. Okay. So Robert had already seen this hob, talked with this hob fellow and looked at the math. And Hobb had a number 108 billion plus or minus, being the total number of people who have

lived. So he'd already done that math. This is the dead pile. Kind of. That's the total number of people who have ever lived. So actually, to get to the dead pile, you subtract the door still alive. And when you adjust all the numbers, it comes out to roughly 100 billion dead people in the history of our species. A hundred billion people have died versus the 7.7, whatever it is that are alive today. That feels lopsided. The dead seem to have just won a staggering victory.

If you do it in abstract terms, that means every person on earth today who is alive, hovering about them are roughly 13.15 ghosts of previous people. One five ghosts. It's a mathematical fraction of a ghost. Just like a hand of a ghost. A ghost's a couple of ghost fingers and maybe a toe. But you know what else just died here, Robert, is your premise. Well, I guess I could say goodbye now. It's been about nine minutes.

We've been chatting. No, no, I don't like this. I can't get out while I'm behind. So, no, let me take up the same question a little bit differently. Okay. One might call this cheating, but I call it simply reframing the question. If you look instead of at the whole Earth, if you think to yourself, is there some place on our planet where the number of people who are alive is almost are actually equal to the number of debt? maybe there is still such a place somewhere.

Oh, I see. So if we go, if we, if we zoom in rather than the whole earth, we say, I don't know, Australia or something. Yeah. Australia comes immediately to mind. But it turns out that when Jeff and I just scanned the globe, for some peculiar reason when we look to see whether there would be more living people in any place on earth than dead people, as it could easily be possible, we found that we were sitting in such a place, at least possibly. You mean, like New York? No, no, it can be bigger than that. Like, the lower 48 states of the United States of America, as beautiful as we think we are, for some reason, didn't attract a lot of ancient people.

Well, we've had native populations in America for thousands of years. But when you count them, there are many, many more people elsewhere. Like, we... Oh, you mean, like, statistically, like, the population sizes have been much smaller here than elsewhere? Not many people chose to live here, and therefore not many people died here. That's just a fact. Wow, why not? Well, in the effort to try to figure out what is it about the United States of America, lower 48, that has made it so different from the others.

Just quickly, we came up with five things. Some are more startling than others, but they are pretty. We came up with five. Real brief. If you don't want five, that's too much for you. I can't do it in three. First, number one, humans did not arrive in North America until very, very, very, very. very recently, almost like the day before yesterday.

So the earth has humans living in it in Africa for a long, long, long, long time. Right. And in the Middle East for a long, long time, and in Europe and Asia for a long time. And in America, like, there was nobody here until fairly recently. Really? Yes. Yeah. It was just snakes and bears and birds.

We're sure about that when we say it? Yeah. We have never seen any evidence of human habitation of any sort of. sort anywhere in North or South America until fairly recently. Okay. In terms of... And that's a lot of land. Like, that's a huge.

No, people are pretty confident about the peopling of the Americas. Any scientists you ask, any archaeologist you ask, will say, yeah, it's around 15,000 years ago. Okay, so we've settled that we've come here very recently. Yes. So that's good because they're going to be more living. There's less dead ones. Dead pal is going to be small.

Second... Wait, wait, before we get to this number two, why did it take us so long to arrive in North America? Well, that's such an interesting question. All of us have heard the story that you imagine these Asians parked at the very, very edge of Siberia, gazing across what we now called the Bering Strait and looking for the first time at North America. And you think, okay, it's just, you know, get on that little land bridge that they supposedly took. You imagine this little narrow column and there's snow on the north side and snow on the south side and they're shivering and they run and they say,

oh, here we are in this new place, and now we'll go and discover it. And it all happened in an afternoon or something. But the truth is so spectacularly different. What is it? Okay. What happened is there was an, as you know, there was an ice age at the time.

Yeah. And what happens then is ice freezes and the sea sort of gives up water for the ice. So the sea, at that point, dropped roughly 400 and some feet. That's a lot less ocean. And the North Pacific, as it happens, is a fairly shallow place. So what happened was, as the water went down, land that had been near the surface dried,

and rather quickly became a rather large subcontinent. If you look at the Bering Strait today, what you now have to imagine is back then, there was a big landmass that went a thousand miles down. Wait, can I just so I can visualize this? You're saying that the water receded to a reveal, like, a, just a whole mountain range of things. Well, low-lying but nevertheless dry space. The illusion chain was sort of up on the north end,

and then a lot of the North Pacific wasn't there anymore. Instead, there was land, and on that land, because it was at the top of a Pacific Ocean that had equatorial waters coming from the center above the earth, warming that southern side. In the summertime, that land bridge was covered with flowers. Lupin's coming up all around you, So these deep, beautiful purples and fireweed.

This is writer Craig Childs. Plains of step-like grasses and herds of Pleistocene horses, muscox. It would have been a pretty lush place. And what happened was the people stepped out into this enormous landmass. It was beautiful. So they just stayed on this place. Because when you were trying to get further east, North America was still frozen and getting colder all the time.

So there's this middle place, which they now call Beringia. I've never heard of it before, which sat between Asia and North America. Asia got cold and they couldn't go back. America was cold and they couldn't go forward. So they stayed for 15,000 years. That's 15,000 extra years just because.

Wow. Okay, so this is reason number one of three for what makes North America so different. other places and why you guys decided to focus on it because I guess it was emptier for longer there was less people dying here. Is that right? That's correct. And by the way, if these people paused in Beringia for so long because it was so nice there, why did they ultimately decide to come into North America? Why did they decide to come? Oh, they left because it began to get warm. The ice age begins to change and you get a warming period and now the ocean starts to rise. So there

you are on Beringia, and every few years, and certainly every generation, there's a little less of Beringia as the ocean creeps in and then in further and then further still. And slowly but surely Beringia is beginning to disappear. So you've got to go somewhere. Okay. Interesting. But now where do you go to? North America had been all this time this wall of white, forbidding, frozen desert-like ice field.

But with the warmest. you now get a little bit of North America that becomes a little bit more available to you. So they enter. And once they arrive in North America, that's where we meet problem number two. Because it was getting warmer, there are pools of ice water that are gathering above the glaciers.

The meltwater on top grows into ponds and then into lakes, but there are lakes on top of the ice. The size of the state of Georgia. And so... Really? Yeah. Marine geologist, Shannon Klotzko. So you, yeah, you start to have your ice melt.

These ponds of water get deeper and finally break the ice that has cradled them. And there are explosions, floods on a magnitude that you couldn't imagine. People have correlated the floodwaters from Glacial Lake, Missoula, to the force of 60 Amazon rivers. Oh, my God. And that can then cause another lake to fail. Oh, no. So you can potentially have... Potentially.

And Shannon says, as these lakes combine and then flow into one another, they just keep growing and growing and growing until they are bigger than Lake Superior plus Lake Huron, plus Lake Erie. You see a mile of water, 150 feet high, roaring all across Idaho. It's knocking down whole forests. Very large animals like... megafauna are tumbling in the waves of it. Oh, my God.

And then it's so forceful that it literally scours the ground. So there's nothing left to eat. There's nothing left to protect you. Nothing can survive. I always conceived of North America as this big bread basket. Yeah, so did I. It sounds like a death basket now. For a little while, it was like, so what happens is there's so much water coming off of the ice,

cold, fresh water, and the warm salt water from the equator is to sit and they go, Oh, hello, the little thing in like Hawaiian song. And then this freezing water comes in, and the Ice Age turns back on. Oh, no. For another, I don't know, some thousand years or whatever we find. So pause number two is basically the water pause. The third one is Jeff's, which is we don't actually notice any big cities in the lower 48. There are huge ancient cities in Peru.

Just think about, like, I'm going to ask you, how. many famous ancient cities are there between Maine and El Paso. Pretty close to zero. Curiously, for some reason, or there's no cities here where there are right south of us, Central America, Andes America, Machu Picchu, there's big roads and everything just south of us, but we're kind of empty. That's interesting. That's really good for our math, because that means that there aren't a lot of going to be

as many dead people here because there weren't a lot of people who used to live here for some reason. I am suddenly interested to know why people didn't settle more densely in North America sooner. Well, the answer, Jeff says, is corn. Corn? The children of the corn, yes. So every city on earth basically needs a grain to give it some energy surplus. If all you had was farmers farming, they wouldn't be a city. You need some extra energy to support what you'd find in a city, which would be a king and some soldiers and some

priests. So you can't just have a city unless you have some extra energy. So every city that he found from ancient times seems to have a barley or a wheat or a potato. In Central America, which is doing great, they had corn. But it took up a while. We went and interviewed the corn guys. Jeffrey Rossi Barra. I'm a professor of evolutionary genetics at University of California, Davis. And the first corn, the first corn was like this miserable. little plant with like seven kernels on it? Eight kernels instead of 800. It was like just a sad-ass piece of coin.

And you couldn't afford a dog on this corn, let alone a city. But... It's a shi-chorn. That's a terrible coin. So when you do is you take the corn that has eight kernels and you plant it until the coin, then you get one old by some crazy news that has 11 kernels, and you gradually breed the corn so that it has more and more energy on it. This takes hundreds of years.

But finally, the Mexicans are what people who live in what we now call Mexico, produce an 800 kernel bit of corn with an 800 kernel thing, a plant. Like, you can now, you're now eating enough energy to have a soldier or to have a general. Interesting. Interesting. So you're seeing the Mexicans are the ones to do this first. And now they suddenly, they have like a 50,000 people. They're 100,000 people. Corn makes people possible gathering in large numbers. I said, well, what the fuck?

I mean, the Mississippi Valley is still there. the amber the grain, amber waves of grain, like, what's our problem here? Why didn't we do the corn? So, we didn't borrow, we never borrow the corn from the next? Well, I said,

here's a simple thing. I said, like, let's just imagine a farmer in what we now call Mexico, but it's 10,000 years ago, and he gives his son an ear a corn with 206 kernels on and say, go north, you know, open up a new farm.

Yeah. And it turns out that corn freaks out. Like, corn, when it grows on the side of a mountain in Mexico, is used to a 12-hour day and a 12-hour night and a certain temperature cycle. If you give the corn to your kid

and he takes a seat off and passes to the grill. The corn goes, no! Don't call me! So the corn was doing great in Mexico, but it didn't travel. We then clocked.

They said, how long is it take corn to travel north and not freak out? When we came up, we had a number. That's hilarious. It's thousands of years, yeah. It takes a long time. So if you want to get the corn,

corn to the Thanksgiving festival in 1621 with the pilgrim and you're starting in Mexico, you have to wait thousands of years for the corn to do it. Like that takes, so you're on corn time. Wow. So the reason why North America doesn't have a lot of people in it is because the corn wouldn't go quick. Can't rush the corn. Can't rush the corn. Can't rush the corn.

Can't rush the corn. Yeah. That's funny. That plus a big. Is this number three? That's three. And we're pretty much. Okay, wow.

So if you add it all up, you've got the beringia pause. Okay. The flood pause. You got flood. And corn time. Corn time. And you add those three, and you've got an explanation for why we're peculiar. I see.

I see. Okay. So I guess this brings us back to your original question. It seems like throughout history there was less people living here than other places. Could it be the case that in North America there are more people alive currently than have ever died? An arithmatical question. All we have to do now is. count the dead. We know the living. We will do the dead count

in just a second, right after the break, and we will find out the answer to that question. We'll be right back. Hi, this is Diodre from the Long Beach Peninsula, Washington. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.

More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Chad. Robert. Radio Lab. So before the break, Robert, you explain that when you look at North America, across its long history, you see it sort of uniquely underpopulated. So it's possible in this place the number of living people now might actually outnumber the debt. Right. Possible, but true. That's the question. Before we begin our count, remember that the number of people in the United States right now is roughly 330 million. alive people, that's the number the dead have to be. So, do

some dead people math? Dead people in North America math? Yeah, so the game we played is we took the math that Pab figured out already. Don't call me! We took Mr. Don't Call Me's math. And we played the same game with North America, specifically using benchmarks that we can infer in the past

at different points in time. So in particular, there's something called the Handbook of the American Indian where a bunch of very smart archaeologists got together in the 70s and 80s, and made this 14-volume set, and one of the articles in it that many of the eggheads worked on together is trying to estimate population at 1492, and then sort of in the centuries afterwards of indigenous peoples. So we used Columbus onward kind of. Exactly. So we used sort of an Adam and Eve, two people as our initial benchmark, although if you shift that number.

You use an Adam and Eve two people, starting when? He's a foundation population. At 15,000 years ago. 15,000 years ago. Okay. The first two humans to step foot onto North America. Precisely that. And then we took the $2 million as our end point at 1492. I see? And then we ran this well-known demographic population growth formula to sort of interpolate population through time with this gentle exponential growth rate.

Okay, wait, just so I understand... No one understood anything you just. No, no, I say I got about 62% of that. Okay. All right. Why $2 million is an endpoint? So that's what the eggheads had decided. So they're all archaeologists.

Each one was sort of a specialist in a different region of North America. And so they put all their heads together to kind of try to come up with the best guess estimate of how many people were here in 1492. And then going forward. So you have a reasonable population estimate snapshot at 1492. Exactly. And you know that 15,000 years before that there were two. And so you're just sort of trying to fill in was it two, then four, then 12? than a thousand and two and you fill in if you can fill that in and say how much were there at all these different times then you can know since everybody dies then you know how many people die i see okay so we're trying to establish the size and girth of the death pile exactly okay uh the key other tweak beyond just getting the population at each uh moment is that it's it's a small one although it's mathematically confusing sounding but um there's a lot of infant mortality uh and so the

the population at each year at those benchmarks doesn't necessarily capture all the people who die at various points, especially people who die under being one, right? So do you like estimate the rate of infant mortality at various times in history? So what you do is you use an estimated actual birth rate. You say, for a given population of people, what is the likely number of babies that were born that year? And those babies will all die. So instead of counting the people who are alive in any given year, you count all the babies that were born to them in each year

based on this ratio of a hybrid. Banking on the fact that they're going to die eventually. Exactly. So you're not, you're counting their babies assuming they'll die each year. And then you just do that integrate through to 1492. So, okay, so what did you find out? So, well, that only got us to 1492 and then the indigenous population a little beyond.

How much, how many people died up until 1492 out of curiosity? Geez, I can tell you I haven't on this laptop, but I don't know if that's inelegant. Wait, what do you mean? To open a laptop? Yeah. Will you allow it? Open it up.

I'm going to do it. Wait, so now, so the number you're looking up is the number of people who were ever alive from 15,000 years ago when there was nobody on the continent till 1492. That's exactly right. So we're looking at 206 million. 206 million people. So then subtracting the two million people who are alive in 1492, then there's 204 million in the dead pile by the time Columbus shows up. That's precisely right. That's not many.

It's not many. The population was 2 million. Yeah. So the dead are kicking ass at that point. Yeah, but... That's right. But then maybe we catch up? That's the dream.

This actually seems impossible to me. If you have 204 million dead and 2 million alive, there's no way that the living can catch up. Is there? Well, the next step is to interpolate. for the indigenous population after 1492. So those guys in that book did that. Okay.

And then to start to collect colonial records, and then eventually American CDC and census records, and tabulate all of the dead at various eras based on that. Okay. So when you put it all together in one big, shiny pile, unfortunately, it comes out to $489 million. What does? The total pile of dead.

The dead pile is 489 million. By what? And we have 330 million people alive in North America at the moment. We do, yeah. So our ratio, it's not quite a win. But did we ever, were we did we ever in our, in our, in our, in our, in our, in our, population explosion ever overtake the dead? No. No.

Okay. But I asked you to consider this. Okay. If the world average. This is rescue number two. Yes. That's rescue number two. Okay.

If the world. I was just going to be like, let's narrow it down to Arkansas. Let's see what happens. To Bridgemore County in Arkansas. Here's what it strikes me is really interesting. If the global average is 13 ghosts for every living earthling, the American average, it turns out, is 1.5 ghosts for every living America. Interesting.

So we do have a special situation here. We don't have the dead pile being smaller than the living pile, but we're really peculiarly close. And that struck me as interesting. We're in an almost situation. That's it. That is interesting. There is a – I think that there is a good balance somewhere. 1.5 ghosts to one earthling feels like too little ghosts to me, frankly.

Why? I don't know. It's just a feeling I have. 10 ghosts to every 15 ghosts to every one person Feels like too many ghosts I think there should be like six No no why because here's what here's another way to think about it It's a connection all the people who ever live jad

15% of them are alive right now I think it's seven seven percent for seven percent for the world Seven percent for the world yeah that's one to fifteen Can you restate his sentence with actual Of all the people who have ever lived in the world seven percent are alive for right now. Okay.

And what about America? In America, of all the people who have ever lived in the lower 48 of America, 70%. Really? That's interesting. Right now. A tenfold. Yes. Wow.

Okay. If all the people who have ever lived, 70% are alive. So that means the dead pile is 30% bigger than the life pile. Yeah. Maybe I need to. That's not bad, though. Because it's not, of all the people who've ever lived 70% are alive. Is that, that's not right?

It's like, our living pile is 70% of the size of the dead pile. Right, right, right. Yeah, okay. Yeah. I like the other sentence better. It has more oomful. I don't understand the difference. Maybe I could say something like 70% of the number of people who have ever died here are alive today.

Wow. I think that's true. I know, but it doesn't, it's just, it mixes, it's too many, it's, it's, who have ever died here are alive. It's like a Mobeus strip or something. You can't be alive after you die that. And so take our word for us, this is Radio Lab. Thank you very much.

That's really, like I have to say, I'm sad. Maybe I want the threshold or I want to have. It's like I keep thinking about that point in your life which I have not reached where more of the people that you have known and loved are gone. And I, if that feels to me as a person like a sad moment, When your personal dead pile is larger than you're a personal. Yeah, and it feels like even if not sad, it feels like a moment of transition in terms of who you are and what you are. And it feels like if at some point humans went through, but maybe they, I don't know, that's what I'm thinking about.

Well, I think in mood, you're hitting the right note. If you're in stage, I guess, of your cycle where most of the people you've ever met are alive and well, and there are a few dead ones. That's a different state. Yeah, it feels vibrant and full of like your beginning. You're on the up. But once most of your people are gone. Yeah.

Yeah. But see, I think this is where my number six comes in. I might need to adjust it. If you don't have any dead in your pile, you're like a snot-nosed young person who hasn't lived. Do you know what I mean? Well, you have no heritage. Just trade off between vibrancy and wisdom.

There you go. There you go. Well, I think the higher the deadpile, theoretically, the moral wisdom you have. The good news for you, Soren, is that our, the fifth or sixth way that we save this story actually gets us to... To very much your exercise. To very much your exercise. How did you do this? Well, it's July 4th, 1776, the day America was born.

Okay. So we decided, let's just count from there instead of all that stuff in the past. Wouldn't that be better? No, but this is fair. This is fair because we had decided zero on on the lower 48, but politically, the lower 48 only existed as of 1776. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, if we're doing America, okay, I can get on this train.

So we just invented the idea that we'll start the count at America's birthday and see what happens. This is the intervention you've decided to make. Yes. Well, it's America. Because it allows you to play almost like a quiz program. All right. Because we're going to look at the odometer and say, okay, if we start in 1776 at midnight,

and let's say at 3 o'clock in the morning, Solomon Wright, a silversmith in New Hampshire, drops dead. So he's the first dead American under our count. Like we start counting at midnight on the 4th of July 1776. So you start with a certain number of living people. How do we know how to do it? Because so really what you're doing is you're giving a living a head start. Right.

But all the people that are alive in 1776 are going to die before we get to now. So they still end up counting. I mean, like, that's true. Everybody alive on the 4th of July will be dead at some point. I have an estimate. I don't know what you've got, Jeffrey, but the internet tells me that the estimates are that there is about 2.5 million people living in the United States in 1776. Yeah, that's the number we used.

Okay, 2.5 million. 2. 2.5 million versus one. One silversmith. That's exactly right. So we're winning. Okay. So, two and a half million.

Right. So you got two and a half million on your alive pile. And so far, one dead person. Silver Smith, Samuel Wright, may he rest in peace. Okay. But then again, if you look at the sweep of American history, there's lots of death also. So you go into any graveyard,

and you'll find lots of little boys and girls dying at one and two. who there are populations that, you know, get hit by cholera and malaria and flu. You have the wars. You have lynchings and race riots and labor violence. You have a lot of violence. And so there's lots of death in American history, big spurts of it from time to time. Yeah. Yet at the very same time, when you get to the late, you know, late 19th century, you get millions upon millions of immigrants pouring into the United States.

That's true. Waves of immigration, exactly. And then having big families. We do have a spike at this point. So there's all kinds of new living people as well. Right. Death is there and life is still there too, coming on strong. But then doesn't that work against you on some level?

Because all those people who have come in in that span of time are now dead. And so if our question here is, are there more people alive in the U.S. that have ever died? Well, then all that matters is how many people are alive right now. And all those new living people from the time of the immigration are dead now. They're in the dead pile. Yeah. So you kind of, I'm getting confused every time you seem to win, you're actually losing. I think you've lost.

I think you've lost. I think that's what's happened. All right, Jeffrey Dobermaner, tell the man what the numbers actually say. Our total deadpile from 1776 to today in the United States of America is $251 million. Hey. Hey. In the U.S. popular people are feeling spry. Living in one.

And $251 million is greater or less. lesser than the current population of the United States. Less. Wow. So if you put about 14 asteris onto the question, you do get the living win, the living to win in the city.

Just to pump it up a little bit, like a quiz show might. Jeffrey Dolberliner, how often since July 4th, 1776, has there ever been a moment, even a second, where the number of people who are dead outnumbered the number of people alive

at that moment. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Jesus, this is a tough one. Never? Never. So, you do have these spurts of death, which you think would basically push the dead over the living, but the numbers tell you that the living win.

And this is the amazing drama, I think, of America as an example of something special. We live in a country where huge numbers of people came here. They had large families. Those large families, our grandparents, had large. your family still, and now we are still in the echo of that enormous immigration. And that has made us really, I think, unusual in the world. Okay.

That's all right. That's nice. So now the question becomes... Is there another one? This is the last question of the whole essay. Okay. Now, Jeffrey Dobryon, take this seriously. Okay.

I'll try. Surely when the baby boom generation, after World War II, and humongous number of people, starting in 1946 and go to 1963, let's say. So that's the, it's an enormous number of people. Now, soon, and I can include myself in the group, we will all be dead. I'm kind of hoping that since the baby boomers have never for even a day thought of themselves

as anything other than important, is it possible that the baby boomers will be the group that pushes the United States in our fictionalist version into the death column? When we die, there will be more of us than our kids and their eldenance survivors. Are we the odometer moment? You say this because it is yet one more way in which you baby boomers are important. Exactly.

Or does it confound the importance? Do you say that as a self-hating baby boomer? No, no, no, no. Or as a proud baby boomer. As an eventful baby, like, we are always the main event. And we will continue to be that. Rock and Roll and Woodstock and now dying. Okay.

And so... Your hunch is yes. Well, I don't know. I said Jeffrey Dobariner, you can do the math. You have the answer. Oh, yeah, I wouldn't leave you hanging like that. What is the answer? Well, conveniently enough, the CDC estimates future populations of the United States and deaths each year going up to 2060.

So... Really? Yeah, I don't know why. Whose job is that? I... He has a spear and he wears all black and it's a sight. I get it. Yeah.

Edgar Reber, can you deliver your report, please? He works somewhere in the U.S. I would have met that person. No, you don't. No, it's true. It's the last person you'll ever meet. So the answer is it's actually in 2060. 2060.

2060, that happens. What is happening? The odometer count flips. There are more Americans since 1776 dead than alive in 2016. There are more Americans dead or alive in 20s. So you're right. Dead than alive, yeah. So your baby boomers are going to tip us over.

The boomers will all be gone before that. See, Robert insists, despite hearing these numbers, that it is the baby boomers every time. But it would be a 97-year-old baby boomer that would have to turn the clock. No, that's more likely to be Gen X. That's going to be me. What? I'm going to get there. I've just got to get to 86, 86 years old.

And then I am going to tip the scales. Well, it's true that there'll be fewer baby boomers to die every year starting... That's true. But the Gen Xers are a very small generation. Yeah, but we're going to tip the scales. The boomers are going to take it. They're going to take us right. They're going to put the ball on the tea.

Do you know when precisely this person will die, at least according to the abstract measure? Yeah, so if we just divide our CDC numbers into days of the year, it's December 29th, 2016, 6.57 p.m. and 36 seconds. Oh, my God. Well, wait, let me How confident can I be? Who was which If you take Sorin's claim that it's probably a Gen Xer who will be going. Like, let's see.

If I were to live to 2006, oh God, I'd have to be 113 or something. Yeah. Whereas I'll be 86. Pride dying time for me. I'm just a week. Chad will be 87. I'll be 86. Both of us ready to die.

Ready to tip the scales. Oh. As proud Gen Xers. I don't really know what you have to be so proud about. So that all said... Wow. Okay. What a journey. There we are. What a journey.

It was fun. I think you could even just run that brain off. It's really a good brain now. Yes. A quick addendum, because before I thank the people I want to thank, this particular radio lab was more literally than almost any, I can remember, in actual conversation, sort of loosely done. So, of course, mid-conversations, certain things came out of my mouth, which weren't quite right,

and I wanted to take a chance to correct myself right here. I mentioned that Mr. Hobbs worked at the World Population Council, which seemed like a very good name at the time, but in fact, he worked at the Population Reference Bureau, so I'm sorry about that. And when we were mentioning the Handbook of North American Indians and said it was 15 volumes, the actual number of volumes was 14. I want to say special thank you to Jeffrey Dobarine, an archaeologist and math guru who kept digging me out of mathematical holes. Thanks also to Shane Doyle of Native Nexus and Montana State University

and to Matthew Bennett of Bournemouth University, to Shannon Clotsko, the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, Jeffrey Ross Ibarra, the University of California Davis, David Meltzer of Southern Methodist University, and Craig Childs, whose book Atlas of a Lost World was one of the inspirations for this study. And then, of course, the one who inspired it all. Ann Dillard, her essay, by the way,

where I bumped into this question, is called In the Wreck of Time. What I'd forgotten is that she actually posited an answer. She said, probably the dead do outlaw a number of the living. She didn't ask nearly as many follow-up questions as we did for go into history or any of that. But she was the one who sort of gave this a little goose, and I thank you for that.

And again, the essay is called In the Wreck of Time. Thanks to Jeremy Bloom for mixing and Neil Dinesha for doing a lot of the work to get this going. Okay, we will be back next week with... With what? With a tribute to you, Bobby Kay. We're going to celebrate you a little bit. It's going to be very embarrassing for you. Yeah.

Or hopefully not embarrassing. Fun. I hope fun. Okay. Well, anyhow. Thanks for listening. Bye. Hi, this is Wild Rose Hamilton, calling from Swans Landing in Bellevue, Colorado. Radio Lab is created by Jad Ebenrod with Robert Krollwich and produced by Soren Wheeler.

Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Susie Lechtemberg is our executive producer. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, David Geppel Hapty, Tracy Hunt, Matt Kilty, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Sarah Kari, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. From Shima Oliai, W. Harry Fortuna, Sarah Sandbach, Melissa O'Donnell, Tad Davis, and Russell Gragg. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris.