Mona Chalabi for my increasingly favourite publication FiveThirtyEight:

This is kind of like a “guess how many jellybeans are in the jar” competition. If I’m smart about my methodology, I can get pretty close to a decent answer, but it’s still a speculative estimate. Here’s what I’ve got: Roughly 100,825,272,791 people have ever died.

Is it morbid that I felt 100 billion people was a low number?

Needless to say, in a zombie apocalypse, we’re screwed.