Ever wondered how many shit have been produced in all human life?
I have. So I asked claude.
He says it’s a good bar question. Lol.
Anyways, that’s the result.
About 1.1 × 10¹⁵ poops — roughly 1,086 trillion.
Freaking impressive!
I guess one more doesn’t make any difference, but I deployed it nevertheless!
We’re so useless!!
If anybody’s interested, here’s the math:
The math
Started from the Population Reference Bureau’s estimate that about 117 billion members of our species have ever been born on Earth .
But births alone aren’t enough — someone who died at age 2 pooped far less than someone who lived to 80. So I converted to person-years lived, distributing those 117 billion births across historical epochs and multiplying by the life expectancy of each period. The key fact: life expectancy at birth probably averaged only about 10 years for most of human history . We died young for millennia.
Result: ~3 × 10¹² person-years lived in total. Multiply by 365 poops/year → 1.09 × 10¹⁵ poops.
Scale comparisons
• Per person alive today: 132,000 poops each if distributed evenly — 363 years of daily pooping per person.
• Total weight (150g each): ~163 billion tonnes.
• Total volume: ~154 km³ — about 3 times Lake Garda in pure poop.
• Today’s global daily output (8.2 billion poops) is just 0.00075% of the historical total. A drop in the lake.
Honest caveeats
The wobbliest number is the Paleolithic — no demographic data exist for more than 99% of the span of human existence , and even for year 1 CE estimates range from 170M to 300M people. Uncertainty is easily ±30%. I also assumed 1 poop/day; newborns do 4-6, the constipated do one every three days, high-fibre pre-industrial diets probably produced more.
The order of magnitude — 10¹⁵, a quadrillion — is solid.
