Are there more people alive today than lived from creation to the time of Noah?

Les teaches this while discussing the coming wrath of God. He says the Flood was not a gradual rise to the ankles, knees, waist, and head, but an instantaneous destruction. In the near term, though the timing is unknown, God will pour out His wrath on Christ-rejecting mankind, and He will do it in absolute fairness and justness. Les points out that there are more people living on the planet right now than probably lived all the way back to the time of Noah. He notes we are over 5 billion and rushing toward 5.5 and 6 billion. At Christ’s first advent, there were probably fewer than 500 million in the then-known world—only half a billion—after 4,000 years of human history and 2,400–2,600 years after the Flood. That 500 million did not double to a billion until about 1860. The context does not provide a separate creation-to-Noah count; it uses Noah’s time as the backward reference.