I mean, whatever number they pick would have problems. The more planets there are, the easier (more economically viable) it is for spammers/fraudsters/trolls t

I mean, whatever number they pick would have problems. The more planets there are, the easier (more economically viable) it is for spammers/fraudsters/trolls to buy new planets when the old ones get flagged/banned from everywhere. A big part of the professed point of urbit's limited address space is to add an incentive to be polite on social networks through this scarcity, so having more planets than stars in the sky wouldn't make sense. If they had picked e.g. 10 billion, then the population would still eventually (all going well) rise above that. If they had picked some number so large there would never be that many humans (or if there were, we'd need new networking solutions anyway), it would defeat the point of identity scarcity. And the whole 'disincentivizing trolling' idea had better damn work during the early phases of the network, when adoption is most important, or you risk the whole thing burning when it didn't need to. The motivations are, of course, still suspect.