In 2014 Randall Munroe of XKCD predicted that there would be more minifigures than people by 2019.
Was he correct? Have we reached the crossing point, and if so, when? If not, when will we?
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I do not know the answer but the growth of the human population is definitely not linear.– BalazsTothDec 16, 2018 at 17:15
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1From skeptics Will Lego people outnumber people by 2017?– Ankit SharmaDec 16, 2018 at 18:44
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1@BalazsToth since 1970 it has been– TimDec 16, 2018 at 18:44
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Someone told me that in 2012 we already had reached the crossing point. However, I was not able to find the source yet. Maybe it is not that obvious.– MetalbeardDec 16, 2018 at 19:30
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@Tim Checked it, you’re right. I was pretty sure it’s rather exponential. Good to know!– BalazsTothDec 17, 2018 at 0:09
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2 Answers
To get the official info, I have asked LEGO about this topic:
Dear LEGO, in 2003 you have reported that there are (were) 4.000.000.000 LEGO minifigures produced by that time. I was wondering if there are more recent numbers available, especially since the popularity of the collectible minifigures, which could indicate an increase in the production rate.
Could you please provide some official information? Even estimates would be welcome.
Thank you!
And received the following reply:
Thanks for getting in touch with us.
Thank you for your interest in LEGO® Trivia, that is an interesting question.
You are certainly right that the number should have increased drasticly since then but I can't give you any new numbers. I am sorry but you will have to wait till our marketing department decides it is time to release more fun facts like this.
So in the absence of official numbers, we can only guess.
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Haha, they don't know. Right now some LEGO agent is consulting the Bricklink catalog to come up with a number :) Jan 3, 2019 at 13:21
Although it is impossible to be sure without more information from the LEGO Group, it seems likely the answer is yes (both now, and when the question was asked)—at least when you consider all minifigures ever produced, ignoring whatever minifigures have somehow been destroyed.
In early 2015, Lego reported that "Over the years more than 5 billion minifigures have been produced". This is in the 2015 company profile which I found on the Internet Archive. This was published on February 25, 2015, together with their 2014 Annual Report, so I think we can assume it reflects the state at the end of 2014/beginning of 2015.
In their 2015 report (also available on the Internet Archive), they said "In 2015, we made more than 725 million LEGO® minifigures globally."
Assuming that they've produced at least that many minifigures annually since then (and if anything, I would expect the annual production to have increased), then over the course of 2018, the number of minifigures ever produced would grow from 5,000,000,000 + 725,000,000×3 = 7,175,000,000 to 5,000,000,000 + 725,000,000×4 = 7,900,000,000.
At some point during the year the number would have been equal to the human population, which estimates place somewhere between 7.44 billion up to 7.63 billion in 2018.
