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Comment by mattchamb | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully some day this number will be so large that it will be impossible to track accurately.

By then it may be quite easy to track accurately!

You have to take births and deaths into account, which is not straightforward. Assuming fast interstellar travel, "loss of simultaneity" causes the number of people in space to depend on your reference frame (your speed and location).

That is only if we still die which I hope we have moved past then. Perhaps we simply make new humans when we have the need.

Would eternal life not be boring? And ever growing population also leads to issues, even when populating infinite space ...

I don't understand this argument.

1) Literally infinite permutations of entertainment out there. 2) Birth rates have been falling steadily for decades. I don't think it'll be a problem in space unless you think space Catholicism is a thing.

Would be cool when you're old, transfer your consciousness into a satellite/spacecraft and just fly away into space... then you're like "Oh no...." and get sucked into a black hole.

When you get injected with your FaceazonHappinessChip (TM) at birth, it's not hard to track.

Most likely.

"Any civilization advanced enough to leave its own plant will be advanced enough to track accurately those leaving"

-- Civilized Tracking Corollary (2017)

...until people start dying and babies start getting born in space.

Well, there may be some speed-of-light issues in getting the latest data. But this problem seems pretty solvable if you link to the right government databases, etc.

900B records leaked and broadcasted from the UniverseFax credit agency; now forming a shell around Earth that's 6 light hours wide, and expands at the rate of 600 000 km/s...

Just use MongoDB and shard it for every galaxy. Problem solved.

exactly my though, hope this goes totally hyperbolic

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