The Staggering Growth of the Human Population

We went to the Alamo on Saturday, and as it always seems to be with such things, historic recollections were awoken, and new bits jumped out. We remember Goliad again, now. We learned San Antonio’s long been a major crossroads, just as it is in the Interstate era.

One of those things that jumped out was how few people fought in the battles of the Texas Revolution. Estimates say fewer than two thousand died between the two sides combined. Estimates say fewer than nine thousand fought. And this wasn’t because it was unpopular to take up arms, or any explanation of that nature. It was because there simply weren’t that many people in Texas. In 1836, the year Texas lost at the Alamo and was massacred at Goliad and won its independence by capturing Santa Anna at San Jacinto, the total population of Texas, including enslaved people and Native Americans, stood around just 50,000. Today, seventy separate cities in Texas have individual populations larger than that number.

It’s not just Texas, though the then-republic was on the North American frontier at the time. Throughout history, our understanding of the past is beset by this odd reality that there were so, so many fewer people around back when the history was happening. Five or six years after the birth of Christ, the point at which our calendar makes its flip from B.C. to A.D., consensus holds that the population of the entire globe was smaller than the current population of the United States. Even at the end of World War II, the global population was somewhere around a third of what it is today. Over the last 87 years, our species’ population has tripled.

There are a few things to make of this, but one is that in a very important sense, the human race is thriving. Wars and genocides and a pandemic rage on, but our population remains enormous relative to its former numbers. Were we to apply this analysis to any other species, we would be struck by that species’ health. The human race has become adept at survival, and while there’s no guarantee of this growth continuing, it’s staggering just how adept at survival we currently are. With medicine what it is and economic production what it is, our kind is succeeding at the eternal evolutionary test. We may well be living in Homo sapiens’s golden age.