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Something seems fishy about applying this math here. The human population is vastly bigger today than at any point in history. We don't know how big it will be
by mattnewport 9y ago
Something seems fishy about applying this math here. The human population is vastly bigger today than at any point in history. We don't know how big it will be in future. As an individual human trying to estimate your chances of being alive today this would seem to throw off the statistics. I'm much more likely to be alive today as one of 7 billion than 200,000 years ago as one of probably much less than a million. On the other hand it we go on to colonize the galaxy for a billion years I'm much less likely to be alive now than at the peak of our galactic empire.
- tgb 9y agoThe argument here is basically the "Doomsday argument" seen elsewhere except applied to to time instead of population. If you do this argument but say that we're likely in the middle 95% of the total human population, then your complaint will go away. However, that doesn't give you time estimates, so it's maybe not as intuitive a result as the one in this article.
- draaglom 9y agoThat's a good point - the distribution over time should affect the answer. I've heard this rule of thumb applied before to the same problem in a different way - rather than assuming you're somewhere in the middle of the time period humans exist for, assume you're somewhere in the middle of the list of all humans in order of birth. (This version probably makes a much more pessimistic prediction than the article does?) Edit: tgb got there first :)