Human Population Through Time (Updated in 2023)  

I felt like I was experiencing an extremely unsafe level of radiation exposure

I remember being a kid in the early 2000s and hearing that there were only 6 billion people on the earth. Crazy how fast it can go

I find it interesting that in only 6/7 years, the predictions for the world population during the next century have changed so much, from peaking at over 11 billion to some people predicting peaks at under 10 billion, really shows us how much things can change in the world of demographics

We humans haven't actually witnessed any large continental drift. Those timelines, distances and numbers are really hard to fully grasp. Thank you very much!

It is hard to believe that we have 8 billion individuals on Planet Earth...that is mind blowing!! 😳🤯

Human population has more than doubled in my lifetime. Crazy to think about.

When I went to primary school I was told we were 6 billion. 2 billion more humans in 30 years, counting all the ones we have lost is just an absurd number, damn.

The 20th century was insane--the population nearly *quadrupled* in a single century (from 1.6B to 6.1B). Compare that to, say, 300-1300 AD, when it took a whole millennium for the human population to double.

[Pointing at the screen when it gets to today] There I am, THERE I AM!

When I was a sophomore in college, world population topped 4 billion for the first time. I'm not all that old now (compared to your typical redwood tree). It's taken about 40 years to double to near 8 billion. Declining birth rates across Europe, Canada, US, Japan, and China are at the tipping point of an avalanche of population distribution changes. In a way it will all come down to a decades old question: "Today it's oil. Tomorrow it will be water. What lengths will a government go to to make sure it has enough?" A hint may be in the excellent 1975 film, "3 Days of the Condor". Also worth watching for the cutting edge technology in use in the film.

I cannot believe we’re actually at 8 billion by now. The last time I checked it was around 7.8 billion.

Whole of India is yellow in the last frame😂

I visualized more in this infographic than if read a whole article, new generations are lucky to have this level of sophistication.

I've been using this magnificent video in my social studies classes, and I really appreciate you've updated it. Thank you so so much!

It always occurred to me that the discovery and mass production of penicillin has to be a huge factor in the world’s growth population. About 1942. It makes more sense as a milestone than World War II. Anyhow the video it’s very nice. Thanks

It's amazing how far we've come in just a span of 200 years

It is curious how the settlement of America occurred, so far the oldest settlement found is in Chile, far to the south, it is called Monte Verde and dates from 14,000 B.C., scientists have not found an older settlement in Canada or the United States, it is now believed that possibly they first sailed along the coast to settle well south and did not enter the continent.

Great way of presenting the numbers. Some labels that could have been included are one for the Inca Empire in South America when it was at its peak, one noting the "indigenous population steep decline due to European diseases" in the Americas during the 1500s, and one noting the introduction of modern medicine.

crazy to think there are more people on the internet than have been alive for most of human history

It's really great that you updated this! I really liked the last one but the projections have changed drastically!

Well done. I would only argue the lack of population numbers in the America's in the timeline. We are constantly discovering more and more evidence of habitation throughout the millenia in the America's. I love the closing data/graphics.

I love seeing these types of videos! They're beautifully done and so educational, I'm nearly in tears, thank you for this video, and the previous one, which I also watched and loved!

Thank you so much!! I loved the old video so much i have watched it regularly a lot of times!! Cool to see an update!

In India population growth rate is declining already since last 10 years. Despite people live minimalistically due to cultural or economic reasons, resources felt limited. And the public is demanding a strict 2 child policy to control poor having more than 2 children. Don't be sad when you see a declining population. You don't know the headache of living within too much crowd. The rat race, high property prices, lower wages, cut-throat competition, less clean conditions, etc

Just curious, what apps/ software/ websites have helped you make this animations in your lovely video :)

In 1969 when NASA landed on the moon, there were 3.6 Billion people on the planet. Now roughly 8 Billion. Thats a huge exponential curve. Doesn't bode well.

Thank you so much, as a kid I watched that video over an over and seeing a second version brings me memories

Should've mentioned the average life expectancy as well. 150 years ago, we averaged like 40 years old. Now it nearly 80.

Brilliant visualization, nicely done. Thank you!

At first I thought the location of the dots related to population centres but realised there were dots to represent a million people in countries where the population was very dispersed. When the first dot in Australia was placed in Perth the concept of geographical representation lost any credibility.

Bravo! That's a well made video, thank you for posting it! 👏👏

OH MY GOD THE OLD VIDEO I WATCHED MANY MANY TIMES AND IS VERY NOSTALGIC FOR ME TO SEE A NEW ONE RELEASE IS SURREAL.

Excellent presentation. Thanks for this very important information.

1900:1.8b 2023:8b ☻️👍🏻very fast

such a fascinating video. thanks for putting it together and for sharing it with us.

Glad you did an updated version for 2023 since our global population has achieved 8 billion! ;)

Loved 1st part uploaded in 2015 peaking at 11 billion and now this one 8 years later at 10.5 billion. That's the only difference. Apt background music, awesome effects and visuals and that mountain after year 1950 remains same 🤣

Not sure about other regions, but those dots representing a million people are wildly inaccurate in regards to Australia. Perth was not the first population to have a million people (Sydney was) and didn't have a million people until 1984. Albany (WA) has never had even close to a million people (current pop. 35,000), even all of WA excluding Perth does not have a million people.

I think I understand why you posted this. What you're saying is that I need to move to Australia if I want to find surf breaks that are not so crowded. Thanks for the advice, dude!

"Eliminate the talking carbon. Problem solved." - Talking carbon

I remember watching a video like this a year ago. It was with my grandfather, while he was sick and he had just gotten back from the hospital. He was fine. 2 weeks later, he was dead. I miss you so much, PopPop.

Very interesting video, thank you!

Wonderfully done, thank you.

Really well made video! Interesting to see all the events and baby boom!

Oh my litlle beloved India

That video was so well-made !

very cool video!! just pure factual information condensed within a 6 minute video.

I was a bit disappointed that there was not more detail regarding the period of about 20,000 years ago to 2,000 years ago. Is it that the information is not available? My understanding is that there were a number of great civilizations that rose and fell during this time period, and I was particularly interested in how these eras affected population growth/decline.

You guys are awesome! Wish I could meet you

Nicely presented. The Silk Road button lingers on too long and the static sound made for each million in population becomes too noisy (predictably) - both create big distribution.

What a brilliant presentation!

The Geiger Counter sounded like it was going mad near the end of the timeline.😂

it's really scary to think how fertility rates are dropping. we really need to do something about this or from 1920 to 2020 are population grew more then 3 times but in another hundred years we will only gain (2.5B) thats hard to belive.

As an Indian I am ashamed of my country's birth rate. I hope that we take measures to lower it. This is getting out of hand, more people who sit on the roads and not do anything useful. Only about 20% of the Indian population is actually productive to society and the rest are unneccessary.

What a great video! Love it!

I remember when it reached 4, 5, 6, and 7 Billion. It was only 3.27 Billion when I was born.

My parents born in 1960 in their lifetime we went from 3b to 8billion. Crazy

Very well made, thanks!

The peopling of the Americas is strange because people spread throughout both continents in a very short time frame. The oldest confirmed sites in the Americas are around 16,000 years old. By 14,000 years ago, people were living in places as distant from Beringia as South Carolina and Chile.

It is crazy that our growth is barely a curve, it's almost two perpendicular lines with a little curve joining them

I'm 69 years old. When I was in grade school, there were 3 billion people. In one lifetime, we have nearly trippled. But I learned about the populaton explosion and global warming in the 60s. Never had kids. People never understood my choice. Oh, well. My children will not watch the planet die. The planet will survive, and refresh in a few million years. We won't.

Well done, accurate, and the the four points of action at the end appear -- in my estimation -- perfect: 1. Family planning (population size); 2. Reduced Consumption (critical and inevitable); 3. Pollution controls (all our waste streams, including CO2, toxins, etc., and 4. Habitat protection (which will help slow the biodiversity collapse). Our growth theories are natural and once had some survival value, but these traits and instincts are now maladaptive. This video is a good reminder: We live on a finite planet.

I went to this museum when I was 5 with my parents. Fun times.

Can't wait for a population video of Mars.

Now more than 8 billion... All needing fresh water, food, wood and other ressources every day plus polluting the environment with plastics, poop and chemicals... The madness is real...

Ooh you updated it cool

this was one of my favorite population growth videos back then, good thing they remastered it The curve went like an L ngl💀

I personally believe human population has already reached it’s peak.

Absolutely loved the older version of this video, glad to see it updated!

I really want to know the stories behind 1 million people centers in Ancient Africa and America. Like that 1 million people dot near Vancouver at the start of the video, I want to know more about it!

finally the updated version!

Is it just weird that the population counter noise is a Geiger counter?

THE MOST IMPORTANT VIDEO OF THE WORLD!

I appreciate the exact same design of the video compared to the old one. Only data has to be updated.

Why do I find this video terrifying, but in a good way. And of course very fascinating. Thank you for posting!

i think it will peak around 2045-50 given there's no medical life extension miracle. then the economy, pension, elderely care, taxation, real estate, and everything will collapse catatropically.

Industrialization is one hell of a drug!

I’m glad this got an update as I occasionally come back to this video lol

After that exponential looking graph I am a bit skeptical of the leveling off prediction. Suddenly the you are the carbon they want to reduce stuff intruded my head.

Well done, showing the Irish population decline during the Irish Famine in the mid to late 1800's and never getting back to what it was. I can only assume that everything portrayed is correct . Brilliant as always.

I once saw this chart that showed If The World Were 200 People, 123 (61.5%) would come from The Middle East & Asia, 35 (17.5%) would come from Africa, 15 (7.5%) would come from Europe, 15 (7.5%) would come from North & Central America, 11 (5.5%) would come from South America, & 1 (0.5%) would come from Oceania.

now we reached almost 9 billion, the 10 billion mark is estimated that we reach it in around 10 years from now on, around 2035 - 2045.

What's hard to imagine is since my birth the population increased by over 5 billion people. That's an awful lot of CO2 and methane. The 1973 movie Solent Green comes to mind. Soylent Green's timeline was 2022 ironically.

2:19 “Small pox in Japan” I mean, really? The small pox arriving in Japan in the 8th century is an event of the historic calibre on par with the other events of world history highlighted on this same timeline? When Weeaboos are fawning over anime and manga, it’s one thing, but a completely another when they are surreptitiously polluting what should be a study and presentation of a serious subject matter by doing things through their biased glasses. That, or perhaps the video is not meant to be taken all that seriously.

That's the most important video of the world.

Should have used a log scale for population. This would show things more clearly.

This video captures how humans multiply like an infections disease so aptly. What might be even more telling is to see wilderness depletion, other animal species mass extinction, or carbon pollution rates simultaneously.

Cool video! I didn’t realize China and India grew their populations so early.

How to make the Earth a better place to live in: Step 1: be single

An excellent presentation that conveys the big picture of human population growth & dispersion very clearly. Well done! Why you would make sharing this subject to obtaining permission is mind-boggling. Do you want to educate humanity or do you want to hang on to copyrights? (Here we are on the verge of massive climate change and a 6th mass extinction and our museums are more worried about copyrights than urgent public education.) Just release this as a creative commons free for public use presentation. Teach by sharing freely...

Very good... Incredible!

What a well made video concise and well put together and I liked the way the video ended too, not lecturing us to "save the planet" but to be cautious to save ourselves and our fellow life on this planet....

I honestly strongly doubt we'll have so many people in 2100. Currently, not a single European country has a fertility rate of 2.1, which is the minimum for sustainability. This is even worse in South Korea, where the city of Seoul has a fertility rate of 0.69. The only reason why the world population is increasing is because a few countries, mostly in Africa, have ferrility rates of 5 and beyond. As we've seen with China, however, once these countries develop, the fertility rate will get lower. One of these countries is Nigeria, whoss fertility rate is still above 5 but it is slowly going down. China used to have a problem with overpopulation and now that they have developed, they are begging citizens to have kids. This trend is wild to think about. 10 years ago, when I was a kid, I used to get told that the world was having an overpopulation crisis. Nowadays, couples are widely encouraged to have children, on the other hand. All of this in just 10 years

aw, tbh I wish this video was more in depth in the -300.000 I know a lot about AD times, but barely anything about the super old times. nice video anyways!

It’s amazing how the shoreline never changed at the end of the ice age and no cities went underwater

Well done! thank you!

It sounds like the world is becoming more and more radioactive.

For a minute I was afraid it was all gonna be facts, and we weren’t going to get the lecture at the end.

It took all of history to have this animation of history.

The farther back in time you go, the less certain you can be. there's the historic record of artifacts, which we know basically all deteriorate over time. in 10,000 years almost NO objects and remains survive various types of deterioration including sinking in the dirt. what we see of the fossil and non-fossil( human) record is a small fractionth of a fractionth of what existed. this is , without question, one of the major difficulties of interpreting history based on something that is beyond 'incomplete'. then there is the genetic record, which , it is not entirely clear that it provides whole certainty about some questions such as the size and growth curves of populations. we are still learning how to interpret genetics, a living , changing, record of the past, existing in the present. much of this story told above in the video, over 15,000 generations of human beings, is totally bogus, and yet, the LITTLE we do seem to know and have accurate is extremely enlightening. it is a paradox and dilemma of knowing and not knowing of being curious and diligent while always creating this meal of self understanding and knowledge with great modesty and humility. perhaps even in a video covering 100 or so generations over 2000 years, there is MUCH inaccuracy as far as actual numbers. population growth was no likely even close to a straight line. there were likely explosions and die offs through out the period that will never be known of. after, all, we expect to be selecting embryos as the primary means of directing our evolution for the next few centuries, and direct editing of genetic sequences ( engineering ) , may soon even become a thing ( though not likely so soon as promised ) . so what is our past supposed to tell us about how we direct our present , towards our future? if malthusian logic carried the day for 300,000 years, let alone the 2 million years going back to primitive hominids, we would have never made it this far. Lamarck was correct, group selection exists, and one should be very cautious in self - directing it. that is called culture. and we are at the precipice of culture merging with an understanding of genetics that goes deeper than mere bloodline heritage.