According to a group called the Population Reference Bureau, "about 117 billion births have taken place since 190,000 BCE, far outnumbering the 8 billion people who are alive today."
117 billion. That is a lot of people and a lot of incarnated souls.
So how did PRB arrive at this conclusion?
Well, it "used population estimates from various points in history and prehistory and applied an assumed birth rate (which got lower over time, to reflect the declining birth rate). The method gave a rough estimate of the number of births . . ."
Moreover, PRB claims that 117 billion may be a gross underestimation, and if they were to revisit and revise their figures, they would likely increase the 117 billion to, well, who knows?
PRB’s methods sound like they come straight from “the science,” and the organization is all about helping to "build climate resilience", so color me skeptical when it comes to the 117+ billion figure.
Still, the notion that the people who have ever lived on earth since 190,000 B.C. outnumbers our current population of eight billion makes sense to me.
Granted, the vast majority of those people did not make it past the age of five, but they were born, and they did live, so they do count.
I don’t think we can ever truly know how many people lived and died in the world in the past 200,000 years, but I think we can safely say that number easily surpasses eight billion, which means this world of ours has hosted a lot of souls through the ages.
And if you believe in God and Creation, as I do, then each one of those souls came into the world for a specific spiritual purpose. Anyway you estimate it, that’s a lot of souls and a lot of specific spiritual purposes.