Population and Reincarnation : Something to wonder about

[Twain Shakespeare]

In the seventies I heard an estimate that only 36 billion humans had ever lived, which would mean one out of every six human beings who had ever lived would be alive now. I checked Wikipedia to find current estimates, and read the following....

“An accurate estimate of the number of humans who have ever lived is difficult to produce for numerous reasons. Firstly, the set of specific characteristics that define a "human" is a matter of definition, and it is open to debate which members of early Homo sapiens and earlier or related species of Homo to include in the estimate (see also Sorites paradox). Even if the scientific community reached a broad consensus regarding which characteristics distinguished human beings, it would be nearly impossible to pinpoint the time of their first appearance to even the nearest millennium, due to the scarcity of fossil evidence.
“An estimate of the total number of people who have ever lived was prepared by Carl Haub of the nonprofit Population Reference Bureau in 1995, and subsequently updated in 2002; the updated figure totalled approximately 106 billion. Haub characterized this figure as an estimate that required "selecting population sizes for different points from antiquity to the present and applying assumed birth rates to each period". Given an estimated global population of 6.2 billion in 2002, it could be inferred that about 6% of all people who had ever existed were alive in 2002. Various estimates published in the first decade of the 21st century give figures ranging from approximately 100 billion to 115 billion. In the 1970s, claims emerged alleging that 75% of all the people who had ever lived were alive at that time. This view was eventually debunked as unscientific.”

Given the caveats in the first para the following is spec in the dark. The second shows it is good to keep track of what data we have, as my previous estimate had been less than half that number. While the situation may not be as dire as I thought, it is still “something to think about.”

If, in round figures, 100 billion humans have lived, and 10 billion live now, then, according to the theory of reincarnation, the maximum number of human incarnations each of us could have had is ten, which roughly doubles the number I had used before I wikied.

By my previous estimate, we ahad already reached the point where every soul is currently incarnated. Now, my estimate is we may have twice as many souls available as currently lived, and population dynamics may be sufficient to keep the population ensouled.

But the question remains, is there a maximum number of souls available? If so, what happens if we run out?

Given these premises, I see three possibilities

1) Karma is about to engineer a die-off, after which incarnation will be a priviledge worth fighting for, instead of, as it is now, a levee en mass.
2) Humans will be incarnated without souls. I will leave that one at that, as consequences could well be the same as in ...
3) As biomass shifts from megafauna in general to humans, the “atmans” of billions of buffalo, elephants, dodoes, as well as lions, tigers, and bears, become available for upgrades. Perhaps this accounts for the stupidity of many humans, who were still chewing cud in their last lives and have not developed their thought processes beyond ruminating as they chew predigested thoughts. Perhaps it also accounts for serial killers and war-mongers, who were previously predators (serial killers would be, I suspect, the reincarnations of man eaters.)
It makes for interesting speculation about what we were in our past lives.

At which point my mind reels. What kind of karma creates a kleptocrat? Was George Bush really a warthog that ate its young? Does that account for Dubya's Oedipal resentment, or was he repeatedly slaughtered for the table? And how does an oyster like Obama rate being in such a position of power?

[Arouet]

[Twain Shakespeare]

[Twain Shakespeare]

[Craig Browning]

I don't have time to address this now, but I hope to get back to it soon. . . for now let's just say that there is an explanation for it and I believe I've already posted it here in the not so distant past.

[Randi McSheldrake]

A very interesting paper on this subject, by Professor David Bishai of the Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, is to be found here:
http://www.scientificexploration.org/jo ... bishai.pdf