Fri, March 6, 2026 at 7:19 PM UTC
How Do You Lose Track of a Billion People? © Marco Bottigelli – Getty Images
It’s generally understood that Earth’s population is somewhere around 8.2 billion people. That’s the baseline we use to plan everything from food supply to vaccines to climate policy.
But what if that number is wrong? Actually, what if it’s way wrong?
That’s the premise behind one of Pop Mech’s most eye-popping recent stories, “Oops, Scientists May Have Severely Miscalculated How Many Humans Are on Earth.” A study suggests global population datasets may be dramatically undercounting people living in rural regions—by as much as 53 to 84 percent in some areas.
Watch Pop Mech editors Andrew Daniels and John Gilpatrick talk about how researchers arrived at the stat by examining records from hundreds of dam construction projects around the world. Why dams? Because when a dam floods an area, every resident who lives there must be counted and compensated before relocation. That creates a rare dataset of precise population tallies, especially in remote places with fuzzy census data.
Andrew and John break down how modern population models actually work, why those techniques might miss people in isolated communities, and whether the global population could really be off by billions.
Watch the full episode above now, and find more installments of “The Astounding Pop Mech Show” on PopularMechanics.com.
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