When I was a young warthog, theories of doom and gloom were all the rage, and the predictions for the future involved famine, shortages, death and destruction (some things don’t change), but one of the arresting “truths” promulgated in those dark days of the 1970’s was the notion that most of the world’s population from the beginning of time is alive today. Now, I don’t know where that idea originated, but even a cursory examination of such an assertion by your ordinary ignoramus (say a high school student with a paper and pencil) would have to bring such a high-flying falsehood crashing to the earth. I did a little bit of thinking about it myself, quite some time ago, and concluded that it just couldn’t possibly be so.
Today in the Art Museum in Forest Park, I collected faces. Some of them familiar, some of them not, but all of them faces of those who, by any reckoning of human history, are related to us who are alive today, however distant that kinship may be. Some of them were good, some bad, and some ugly, just like our planet’s current population, but all of them were real. Some of their names have come through time with their images, some have not, but all of them had names. All of them lived, breathed, laughed, cried, loved and died, just as the rest of us will some day be living only in the memories of those we leave behind.
So here they are, certainly not representative of humanity as a whole, but in fact representative of the collections on display in the Saint Louis Art Museum. I think we’re related. Oh, and as to how many humans have been born into this wonderful world of ours (cue Louis Armstrong) the most reliable current estimate is about 108 billion (or maybe more) from the Population Reference Bureau. https://www.prb.org/howmanypeoplehaveeverlivedonearth/
That’s a lot of people!
#ForestPark365 #SLAM #SaintLouisArtMuseum #FujifilmCamera
In the Saint Louis Art Museum. Click on image for more photos.