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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?

#151

Post by soligern »

somenameforme wrote: post #78
soligern wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I love life and there’s nothing after this?

What do you think would happen if perpetual longevity were achieved? I mean realistically, not ideally? I think it's almost certain we'd see those at the top become [even more] vainly obsessed with their own mortality to the point of doing absolutely every single thing they could, with no norms of behavior, to ensure no other human could ever, under any circumstance - no matter how remote, pose a possible threat to t…

Since we’re doing hypotheticals how about this. We colonize mars and have large habitation modules flotations in space. Humanity has a large new space to expand into and doesn’t have to curtail growth rates.

Re: How many people have ever lived on Earth?

#152

Post by AndrewKemendo »

kordlessagain wrote: post #148
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I mean if you want to get real crazy speculative, my personal philosophy assumes that the universe is on a loop and at some point in every loop, some version of that universes intelligent system figures out how to build the Daemon and that kicks off the next loop.

Re: How many people have ever lived on Earth?

#153

Post by nonameiguess »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #138
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Error bands" aren't really calculable for something like this, because a lot of it is as much definitions as anything else. As the article points out, there is a lot of uncertainty just when we say the first "modern home sapien" "counts" as a person.

If I wanted to include some weird little subspecies though, or even expanded it out to H. erectus... surely they don't add much to the total. Prior to the invention of agriculture, they could never achieve high population densities, so "success" would mean what, hundreds of thousands of individuals across the globe?

Homo erectus existed for almost 2 million years, somewhere around five times as long as homo sapiens so far. So there may have been more than you think overall, even if there were never many living at the same time.

Re: How many people have ever lived on Earth?

#154

Post by nonameiguess »

pizzapill wrote: post #132
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing is immortal Entropy guarantees that every system will eventually disintegrate

Can't argue with that tbh. only that we then start to talk about unimaginable timeframes.

Something like proton decay resulting in the permanent non-existence of baryonic matter is unimaginable timeframes, but the Earth will lose all of its carbon dioxide, and hence all eurkaryotic life, within around 1.3 billion years of now. So that's the longest any multicellular creature inhabiting the ocean can still be around, unless far future tool-users figure out how to migrate to a new planet with chemically similar oceans and give them an assist by taking some.

Re: How many people have ever lived on Earth?

#155

Post by AbrahamParangi »

cgh wrote: post #26
tjpnz wrote: post #3

Why do I keep (mis)remembering a fact that most members of the human race are alive right now?

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument This is worth a read for those unfamiliar with this argument. Essentially, it’s a way to make a probabilistic guess for when humans will go extinct based on the number of humans that have been born. There are several variants and as far as I know, the argument’s premise has never been conclusively refuted.

There are a number of counter arguments that I don’t see represented in this article. For instance:

1) this argument makes the implicit assumption that the “number of years before a species goes extinct” is anti-correlated with “the present population of the species” meaning that the greater the present population in comparison to the historical population, the less time we should expect the species to survive for. This is already a contradiction because in reality it is the opposite. Species abundance is directly correlated with species longevity. Necessarily so! In order for a species to go extinct all members must die!

2) there’s no particular reason you should take the emergence of anatomically modern humans as the start point. We represent a continuous lineage of related animals going back to the last universal common ancestor of all life. By naive copernican principal, you may expect our lineage to go on for another 4 billion years! This is not to say that this is likely, just that the copernican principal is entirely subject to what you consider the starting point to be. If you say you care about “homo sapiens and their direct descendants” rather than “homo sapiens” you get a very different answer.

Re: How many people have ever lived on Earth?

#156

Post by gizajob »

hanselot wrote: post #94
gizajob wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do put huge amounts of effort into ending it, which so far has only served to delay it by decades. 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.

I don't like to comment much anymore, but I feel like I have spent a substantial portion of my life on this topic, and consequently can direct people to some resources that can bridge the knowledge gap a bit in this regard. >delay it by decades Yes, but we aren't solving the problems, we are dealing with symptoms. The entire industry is currently treating old age diseases as diseases, and not as symptoms of bodily de…

I find it funny how Aubrey de Grey is so focussed on life extension while making himself look about as ancient as he possibly can...

Re: How many people have ever lived on Earth?

#157

Post by adolph »

lyu07282 wrote: post #33

Makes me wonder how many more billions will have to die before we bother to put some actual effort into ending death, but I know that's a very obscure opinion. https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon

Death has its advantages: for the living, it is clarifying and for the future it is clearing.

That said it’s a loonshot that will undoubtedly have spinoff benefits for increased life quality.

If death becomes a choice, then the character of prevailing culture will likely match the characteristics of those who choose not to die. What would that look like? Would that be a culture worth living in?

Re: How many people have ever lived on Earth?

#158

Post by ianburrell »

kal_lamar wrote: post #8
tjpnz wrote: post #3

Why do I keep (mis)remembering a fact that most members of the human race are alive right now?

i have the same (mis)memory.. where is this from?

I wonder if there were old estimates based on religious teaching that Earth is only 6000 years old. We have only recently known the age of humanity and prehistoric population.

Or maybe it was saying that wasn’t based on estimate.

Re: How many people have ever lived on Earth?

#159

Post by N19PEDL2 »

nunuvit wrote: post #98
KSPAtlas wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they happened (which is unlikely considering how professional and monitored the ISS is), it would have not been in a way that can conceive a child

I know people who work in mission operations, where they're basically on a Skype call with the ISS all day. Several years ago, there was one astronaut in particular who had to be frequently reminded to cover up. Once they're up there, no one can prevent them from doing what they want, especially if it's their last flight. They're professional in the sense of completing the mission, but they're humans with pilot perso…

> they're basically on a Skype call with the ISS all day.

Do they still use Skype up there?

Re: How many people have ever lived on Earth?

#160

Post by inkcapmushroom »

soligern wrote: post #151
somenameforme wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think would happen if perpetual longevity were achieved? I mean realistically, not ideally? I think it's almost certain we'd see those at the top become [even more] vainly obsessed with their own mortality to the point of doing absolutely every single thing they could, with no norms of behavior, to ensure no other human could ever, under any circumstance - no matter how remote, pose a possible threat to t…

Since we’re doing hypotheticals how about this. We colonize mars and have large habitation modules flotations in space. Humanity has a large new space to expand into and doesn’t have to curtail growth rates.

>doesn’t have to curtail growth rates.

Eh, you can't slow an exponential growth with a linear gain in living space. There might be a lot of space out there but not nearly enough of the stuff we need to live in order to consider physical space the limiting factor. You might buy time but you'll run up against the familiar discomfort of too little living space again, and will have to downsize or expand out again before very long. Same as it ever was.

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