Blog attempts to answer when the dead will outnumber the living on Facebook

We're all going to die (hopefully not too soon). And that means that someday, everyone currently on Facebook will be six feet under (metaphorically speaking).

The blog What If? recently attempted to determine when (in ballpark figures) the number of dead people on Facebook will outnumber those who are alive.

It's a morbidly fascinating question, and the unidentified blogger behind What If? is more than up to the challenge.

The conclusion: Depending on whether Facebook stays popular, the answer is either in the 2060s or the 2130s.

The blogger writes, "Based on the site's growth rate, and the age breakdown of their users over time,there are probably 10 to 20 million people who created Facebook profiles who have since died."

Looking down the road, the blogger writes, "About 290,000 US Facebook users will die (or have died) in 2013. The worldwide total for 2013 is likely several million. In just seven years, this death rate will double, and in seven more years it will double again."

The question, the blogger argues, is whether or not Facebook will continue to add more young users "to outrun this tide of death for a while."

If the social network can get young people to keep joining, the blogger estimates that the dead won't outnumber the living on Facebook until around 2130.

On the other hand, if Facebook face-plants and young people abandon the social networking site for something else, the crossover date will come much earlier, around 2065.

For more questions from What If?, check out the archives. There you'll learn how much Force power Yoda can output, the odds of correctly guessing every answer on the SAT, and what would happen if the sun suddenly shut off.