According to the usda there were 5.608 trillion cigarettes manufactured in 2008 and most likely all were smoked that year. Dividing 5.608 trillion by 365 yields approximately 15,364,383,561 cigarettes. Or just over 15 billion in any given 24 hour period. If we divide this number by 24 we get the number per hour: 640,182,648 Just over 64 million per hour. If we further divide that number by 60 we get the number per minute: 10,669,710 Just over 10 million per minute. Since it takes longer than one minute to smoke a cigarette we can only assume that the absolute minumum number of lit cigarettes in the world at any given time is over 10 million.