Homo sapiens have probably always instinctively worried about the survival of their kind. And since the beginning of recorded history, civilized peoples have been considering the future of human numbers intellectually. In the book of Genesis, the Lord tells Abraham that his descendants shall be as numerous as the stars in the sky and the grains of sand on the seashore — very good news, of course, but a sum beyond reckoning at the time. Since then, mortal man has been busy developing quantitative techniques to enumerate populations he cares about, and to calculate the hypothetical world population of humans — their quantity, their geographic distribution, and their profile — far into the future.
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