Likely a number between 1.8 and 8.7 million (honestly I thought there were more than that). The numbers come from two studies recently published in PLoS Biology (How Many Species Are There on Earth and in the Ocean?) and Systematic Biology (Predicting total global species richness using rates of species description and estimates of taxonomic effort). A post in the iPhylo blog discuss the different approaches used by the authors leading to different estimates. What I also find surprising is that the "The Species 2000 & ITIS Catalogue of Life", the most comprehensive catalogue of all known species of organisms on Earth, already contains more than 1,400,000 species!!!Today "only" a few thousands genomes have been either completely or partially sequenced in Eukaryotes (1215) and Prokaryotes (1865). This means that there is plenty of sequencing work ahead for BGI & Co.
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