how many people are actually recorded living on planet earth?
The number of modern human beings (Homo sapiens) on Earth has been comparatively small until very recently. Just 10,000 years ago there might have been no more than a few million people on the planet. The one billion mark was not passed until the early 1800s; the two billion mark not until the 1920s. As it stands now, though, the world's population is over 7.3 billion.