How many pilots, ever?

Jay Honeck wrote in news:552fff1f-c400-4a6d-ad11-
:

Why? It will be far more meaningful to him if he discovers it himself,
a few years down the road.

Time will give him that perspective. What I want to know (and I think
would be cool to know, just for ****s and giggles) is:

- How many pilots have ever been certificated

- How many billions of humans have *ever* lived.

Since man has longed to fly since time immemorial, and only a
miniscule percentage of humans have ever achieved it, I think this
would be a very cool statistic to know. Your mileage may vary.

Sadly, I haven't found a very good way to measure either number.

I'm not sure you can get how many billions of humans have ever lived, but
you should be able to get annual new birth record counts since 1903 when
Orville & Wilber started this whole thing in the US... It might be equally
as interesting to compare to the number of humans who had the opportunity
to learn to fly... You might want to go back to 1884 or something (kids
born in 1889 would have been 17 in 1903)...

I can't tell you where to get those records, but I know I have seen
statistics of total new births "this year" in news stories etc... The
numbers must be out there in some census recording or something...

I'm not sure you can get how many billions of humans have ever lived, but
you should be able to get annual new birth record counts since 1903 when
Orville & Wilber started this whole thing in the US... It might be equally
as interesting to compare to the number of humans who had the opportunity
to learn to fly... You might want to go back to 1884 or something (kids
born in 1889 would have been 17 in 1903)...

Ha -- found it! Ain't the internet grand?

See:
http://www.prb.org/Articles/2002/How...edonEarth.aspx

Looks like (using these numbers, through 2002) the best estimate is
that 106 billion humans have ever lived on this planet.

If we use Jim Macklin's (unverified) estimate of 5 million pilots who
have ever lived, we can see that the number of people in history to
have achieved the ability to fly is something around .0047%, or 1 in
21,200 people...

Humans tried to fly for over 50,000 years, only figuring it out 104
years ago. In other words, for 99.8% of our history, we tried -- and
failed -- to fly. The knowledge is now available to anyone on the
planet for the cost of a used Chevy Lumina.

That, my friends, is what we call "progress"...

;-)
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"