This is a tricky question, Nanner-

The easy part is to look at the world and estimate that we have about 3.5E9 people hanging onto the planet by their toenails. "All the rest" have died. The population curve is an exponential n=2^(t/33) for time t in years -  but I don't know where in time we'd start to fit it to get a good regression, so instead my guess is that  "all the rest" is probably on the order of the prior generation, about 1.7E9.

The tricky part is to ask how many cycles through the cosmic knothole each soul makes. If every soul makes 10 trips through life between the initial entry as as new soul and final passage as an enlightened being not required to do it again, then only one tenth of those presently alive are newcomers, and the rest are just the milling crowd. So how to count them? They live and die, but they do it numerous times.

The next question is whether or not we just keep on recycling, with only a very few able to drop out of the circle. In that case, nobody has really died, because they're just off stage, but are already in the return loop. Then the question would be the number who have managed to escape, which comes down to a few percent. Except they have escaped into life, while the rest of us still rotate from death to death.

In fact, as we start to think of it in this manner the next question is whether this life into which we are born and which ends in death is really life, or is the afterlife that starts in death and ends in birth actually life, or is there a third option involving purple smoke and mirrors?

dave

My calculator doesnt go that high..uuuuuuug  

So whats the number totaling from 33% of 6,671,226,000?