In 100 years everyone in the world will be dead

Recent research conducted by scientists has led to the discovery that, even with 353,000 babies being born today (UNICEF’s estimated daily average), 99.9% of the world’s population will be dead 100 years from right now. That is, the population of the world will be completely different a century from now. Miraculously, the next population will do pretty much exactly the same things as the previous population. This sobering, yet somehow inspiring discovery, has sent shock waves across the scientific community, with some scientists wondering what the point of it all is, and others figuring it’s actually quite exciting, and a great opportunity to fuck up the world as much as possible until the next lot come along. The current population of the planet is just over 7 billion; there will be a lot more when the next batch comes along, in 100 years time. So far, 108 billion people have existed on planet earth; presumably, most of them have died at some point in the last 200,000 years.

This comes hot off the heels of scientists declaring – somewhat late in the day – a new geological epoch, the Anthoprocene, which they want to backdate to the 1950s. So for the past sixty-odd years we've all been happily existing in the Holocene epoch (or ‘recent’ – it began 9,700 years BCE), oblivious to the fact that we’ve actually been living in the Anthropocene epoch, or ‘new age of man’.

Previously on Barnflakes:
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