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How many people have ever lived on Earth?

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Re: How many people have ever lived on Earth?

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the people that Jesus was referring to did, in fact, die. So that's not going to help the person you're responding to.

Eyewitnesses wrote that Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, and later rose from the dead himself. If this really happened it makes sense why none of the apostles were afraid to die for what they were certain was true.

So? The followers still all died. Whether or not they may have been happy about dying doesn't change that.

And I'm not sure what Lazarus has to do with this unless your suggesting that his raising means that he couldn't die i.e. he's still alive. That would be a very unusual interpretation.

Re: How many people have ever lived on Earth?

#142
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems redundant given 'pagan' means either * not Christian other religions in the Roman Empire, or (more generally) * not Christian religions. Easier to say most, if not all, religions have an afterlife story.

To the Romans, weren't Christians the Pagans. They were some fringe group from the frontier with some wacky ideas.

If that's a question then no, the Romans did not use the word pagan to refer to Christians.

The early usage (according to the OED) was

    [ad. L. pāgān-us, orig. ‘villager, rustic; civilian, non-militant’, opposed to mīlēs ‘soldier, one of the army’, in Christian L. (Tertullian, Augustine) ‘heathen’ as opposed to Christian or Jewish. The Christians called themselves mīlitēs ‘enrolled soldiers’ of Christ, members of his militant church, and applied to non-Christians the term applied by soldiers to all who were ‘not enrolled in the army’. Cf. Tertullian De Corona Militis xi, ‘Apud hunc [Christum] tam miles est paganus fidelis quam paganus est miles infidelis’. See also Gibbon xxi.

    Cf. payen.

    The explanation of L. pāgānus in the sense ‘non-Christian, heathen’, as arising out of that of ‘villager, rustic’, (supposedly indicating the fact that the ancient idolatry lingered on in the rural villages and hamlets after Christianity had been generally accepted in the towns and cities of the Roman Empire: see Trench Study of Words 102, and cf. Orosius i Præf. ‘Ex locorum agrestium compitis et pagis pagani vocantur’) has been shown to be chronologically and historically untenable, for this use of the word goes back to Tertullian c 202, when paganism was still the public and dominant religion, and even appears, according to Lanciani, in an epitaph of the 2nd cent.] 

    1. One of a nation or community which does not hold the true religion, or does not worship the true God; a heathen. (†In earlier use practically = non-Christian, and so including Muslims and, sometimes, Jews.) 

    2. fig. or allusively. A person of heathenish character or habits, or one who holds a position analogous to that of a heathen in relation to Christian society. 
etc.

Re: How many people have ever lived on Earth?

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I'm one of those people because I read Wikipedia and this seems like a complete non-sequitur to me: > The Copernican principle suggests that any one human is equally likely (along with the other N-1 humans) to find themselves in any position n of the total population N. I feel like I must be misunderstanding the argument because it just doesn't make sense to me. First, why should I even assume N is finite? Se…

> First, why should I even assume N is finite? Our current understanding of physics dictates that the (observable) universe has a finite size and a finite lifespan, from which it logically follows that there can't be an infinite amount of humans.

The entire universe could very well be infinite, with infinite “Earths” and “humans”. In which case the argument doesn’t work since you can’t choose uniformly from an infinite set.

Re: How many people have ever lived on Earth?

#144
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Doomsday Argument[0] relates to this. It says that since the reader is born in the current times with there being X billion humans so far, statisticslly there shouldn't be too many more (not say tens of trillions). I don't think the logic is too sound though. Or rather that the premises should be taken for granted. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument

I like Randall Munroe's summary of the argument ( https://what-if.xkcd.com/65/ ): > Almost everyone who hears this argument immediately sees something wrong with it. The problem is, everyone thinks it's wrong for a different reason. And the more they study it, the more they tend to change their minds about what that reason is.

I don’t think the argument is wrong but it has the same problem as any non-repeatable statistical prediction. Namely that you don’t get to repeat it so it’s easy to make an error and hard to calibrate.

Re: How many people have ever lived on Earth?

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eyewitnesses wrote that Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, and later rose from the dead himself. If this really happened it makes sense why none of the apostles were afraid to die for what they were certain was true.

So? The followers still all died. Whether or not they may have been happy about dying doesn't change that. And I'm not sure what Lazarus has to do with this unless your suggesting that his raising means that he couldn't die i.e. he's still alive. That would be a very unusual interpretation.

It shows that this death is like a temporary sleep which God will wake us from. None who believe in Jesus will perish (experience the permanent second death after the judgment). John 5:28-29

Re: How many people have ever lived on Earth?

#147
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who would honestly turn down the opportunity to have sex in 0G if given the chance

There was an article in Playboy many years ago that I read (and the search results in that domain are now far too polluted - and yes, I did read the articles) that basically said "either you're going to need a lot of velcro or assistants. The problem being that every action has an equal and opposite reaction makes certain activities more likely to result in new force vectors which in turn results in velocity that may…

If the two of you are weightless in the middle of a room shouldn't you remain in the middle of the room so long as you don't throw anything?

Like if you wiggle your arms you won't start to swim through space so as long as your bodies are wiggling then you also shouldn't start to swim? As long as you kick your shoes after before not during it seems to me that there shouldn't be an issue.

Re: How many people have ever lived on Earth?

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's part of life that it ends, it seems. No way of getting around that no matter how many sci-fi solutions Bostrom proposes as realistic. That's not a general truth. The Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish is biological immortal.

Nothing is immortal Entropy guarantees that every system will eventually disintegrate

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with this, but I would suggest reading this: https://www.sidis.net/animate.pdf

Re: How many people have ever lived on Earth?

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the Romans, weren't Christians the Pagans. They were some fringe group from the frontier with some wacky ideas.

If that's a question then no, the Romans did not use the word pagan to refer to Christians. The early usage (according to the OED) was [ad. L. pāgān-us, orig. ‘villager, rustic; civilian, non-militant’, opposed to mīlēs ‘soldier, one of the army’, in Christian L. (Tertullian, Augustine) ‘heathen’ as opposed to Christian or Jewish. The Christians called themselves mīlitēs ‘enrolled soldiers’ of Christ, members of his…

Guess I wasn't implying that Romans literally used the word "Pagan" as we use it today, but they had their own religion before Christianity, and also had a word for other religions. So just like Christians call others pagans, The Romans had a word to call out others. (thus my main point, everyone thinks they are the 'one', and have a word to disparage others).

So maybe they didn't use Pagan, but Figuratively, they thought of Christians as the weird/low class/savage, "A person of heathenish character or habits, or one who holds a position analogous to that of a heathen".

If you are disputing this because by definition "Pagan" means non-Christian, thus by definition Christians can't be "Pagan".

Fine, how about "Superstitio"?

Suetonius and Tacitus used the terms "superstitio"

"On the other hand, Romans believed Christians, who were thought to take part in strange rituals and nocturnal rites, cultivated a dangerous and superstitious" sect.[60]: 125

Re: How many people have ever lived on Earth?

#150
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was an article in Playboy many years ago that I read (and the search results in that domain are now far too polluted - and yes, I did read the articles) that basically said "either you're going to need a lot of velcro or assistants. The problem being that every action has an equal and opposite reaction makes certain activities more likely to result in new force vectors which in turn results in velocity that may…

If the two of you are weightless in the middle of a room shouldn't you remain in the middle of the room so long as you don't throw anything? Like if you wiggle your arms you won't start to swim through space so as long as your bodies are wiggling then you also shouldn't start to swim? As long as you kick your shoes after before not during it seems to me that there shouldn't be an issue.

You're working on a one body problem there. This is a two body problem where some force applied will cause a transfer of momentum from one body to another. Without something to tether the two bodies together, it is quite likely they'll move apart.
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