How many people have ever lived on Earth?
prb.org
prb.org
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 lead to bumping into things you'd rather not bump while trying to bump uglies.
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.
Do they still use Skype up there?
> All in all, it now looks pretty much indisputable, eight years on and despite his many protestations to the contrary, that Kohler (and by extension, me, and, by further extension, all those who have read and giggled at this story -- written, I hasten to say, by a person in an office in a country which at the time barely knew what the internet was, let alone having reliable access to it or knowing how to use it) have all fallen victim to a particularly fine hoax. The admirable mythbusting Snopes and Urbanlegends websites certainly reckon so, and to prove it supply the fake Nasa document on which the relevant chapter in Kohler's book is based.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/blog/2007/dec/06/sexinspace...
But if it ever happened it hasn't been made public. Not that that's saying much.
There have been people born on planes, for example.
Yes, in WW2, when civilians were being evacuated on the USS Crevalle
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Crevalle#Third_and_fourth_...
You end up with estimates of high single billions for all humans pre-Neolithic (pre-urban settlement)--the error bars are very high, but it doesn't make a large difference in the grand scheme of things because it's the smallest component. For urban settlement essentially before good, sustained record keeping (think ~10kya to 1kya), you're looking at several tens of billions of people, with several tens of billions more in the era of modern record keeping. Right now, it takes about 6 years or so for a billion babies to be born.
(For my part, I think the estimate they give here is on the low end. I don't know the sources they're using, but I've generally observed that estimates of pre-modern demography have generally trended upwards in more recent scholarship.)
Worth looking into?
* 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.
I just meant to reaffirm that it's not an Abrahamic religion innovation.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-20/the-christian-convert...
whatever that means
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.
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
eg: at least 50k established by genetics for most of the land area:
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.
Maybe I should hold out for "and everyone gets a pony."
You dont treat any other piece of knowledge with the same demand as you do the (lack of) afterlife.
> All empirical evidence from thousands of years of scrutiny
Yes, I'm very curious to see empirical evidence of what happens post-death and someone who lived to tell us.
On other hand, guess since we don't know what is after death, we can't also say with complete 100% certainty that it is nothing. But for there to be something, then that would mean there is something in this physical reality that gets transported, and we should be able to detect it. And since there has been nothing detected after a lot of tries (experiments), at this time there is nothing.
This is just a limitation of science, because we need a conscious mind to test and/or interpret the results.
Where's your evidence?
What if I claimed when you die you are reincarnated as a zebra on omnicrom-5? Why is that more or less reasonable than an explanation some religious leader made up one time when he was high?
Anyone can come up with some ungabunga, but unless you have evidence there's no rational to believe it.
Human exceptionalism -- our nascent ability to reason -- does not exempt us from being animals in the biosphere in which we evolved.
And space (beyond our planet) is observably not a paradise for things that live on Earth. Unless we are all reincarnated as tardigrades.
You'd most likely have been born into society as something between a serf and a slave, with your life strictly by controlled to ensure you never might imperil the perpetuation of those who would almost certainly come to see themselves as Gods. And no, you wouldn't be immortal. That'd be too risky for the Gods. It'd be the absolute worst of humanity, frozen in time, due to the lack of death.
And oh boy, imagine the punishments they could contrive for anybody who might indeed imperil (or even deny) their utter supremacy. How about a million years of torture, if for no other reason than to use you (and the millions of others granted similar accommodation) as warnings to the rest of society? I can say, with at least as much confidence as you express about there being nothing after this life, that this life will end. But the thing I can add to this, is that that's also a very good thing for all of humanity to come.
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.
They were looking to experience all that life could offer, because in the end - what's the worst that happens? Well you die, but you're going to die anyhow. And living a rich life, ended prematurely, seems infinitely more desirable than living a drawn out life, doing everything to minimize risk, where you die all the same but perhaps without having ever given yourself a chance to live.
But imagine those individuals could have reasonably expected they might be able to live forever. I expect there is exactly 0 chance they would have even considered going on that sub, in one of Bezos' rockets, or engaged in basically any activity with any possible risk whatsoever. Because suddenly what you're risking, your life, has literally infinite value unless you happen to be suicidal to begin with. And this would pose a major problem for society doing much of anything.
There's going to be a high rate of mortality for the first colonists on Mars because there's a zillion things that can go wrong, and we aren't going to be able to anticipate even a fraction of them. Who in the world would ever want to risk this if you could live forever?
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.
The knee-jerk response is to imagine there was a literal survivorship bias. Yet these individuals all made their names long before their deaths. Had Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, or whomever else (in general) died at 50 - their names would still have gone down in the annals of history. However, you certainly wouldn't have heard of them had they died at 10. And that's what's really changed.
We're now able to keep infants, even those who are unhealthy, alive at a much higher rate. Something like 40% of children in Ancient Greece did not make it to their 10th birthday. But for those that did, there was a chance pretty comparable to modern times that they'd see many more decades yet. By contrast today, even for unhealthy children, mortality before age 10 is approaching 0.
Life expectancy is increasing, but longevity isn't really changing much at all. Even in a world of mortality obsessed billionaires using every technological method known to try to increase their life expectancy, they're not really getting much further than the average man. What little longevity they do gain can probably be more accurately explained from simple things like better exercise habits and lower levels of obesity, than esoteric young blood plasma treatments and the like.
[1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1294277/pdf/jrs...
For me, Bostrom is an egotist of the type that wishes to escape his thanatotic drive and acceptance that life just ends. It’s unfortunate, terrible even, but it seems as natural as birth. Proposing solutions such as “mind uploading” are not only ridiculous but the reality of the idea would be hellish. What’s worse is that he’s a philosopher so actually creating the technology to do it simply is not his problem – someone else will have to do the implementation, regardless of how nightmarishly difficult it could be. He could just as easily be inventing hoverboards or time machines. It’s not his problem to stay within the bounds of possibility, even the accepted bounds of what can realistically be designed and coded and implemented – he just has his graphs and statistics of work that other people have done in the past, and can now order them to fulfil his desires in future, one of the main ones being his egotistic desire for his ego to never die.
>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 decay. This is covered extensively by the work of Dr Aubrey de Grey (yes, that one), in any case, he documents 7 different ways in which the body accrues damage over time, and is actively researching in all these fields to find methods to mitigate, and reverse said damage.
To aid in this regard, feel free to visit the SENS research foundation website at https://www.sens.org/
This approach is very different from the one currently deployed in the field afaik. The idea is that the human body, like a car, can be kept in pristine condition if these 7 sources of deterioration is reversed/addressed.
It is really quite fascinating. I would advise you to go check out the healthspan discord on https://discord.gg/sCwyPXu
There are a number of highly motivated individuals actively researching and following the SOTA as well as excellent news aggregation.
This is the initial reason I got interested in this in the first place: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvWtSUdOWVI
One of Dr de Grey's quotes that I find quite compelling is:
"There is no difference between saving lives and extending lives, because in both cases we are giving people the chance of more life."
That's not a general truth. The Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish is biological immortal.
Entropy guarantees that every system will eventually disintegrate
so it’s not like it was ever not part of the conversation
And if you think owning a home is hard, just wait until every property in your city is owned by a group of immortal British lords who insist on women dressing modestly and "No Irish need apply" signs everywhere. This may not be too far away from what your actual town looks like right now, but at least we currently have the hope that those people will die and be replaced by slightly-saner ones.
First of all, such technology would be usurped by dictators for dictators only. Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Putin and endless stream of other pathetic figures, they all desperately clinged to life and would burn this world to the ashes 1000x over just to stay immortal. I can't imagine how we could avoid global semi-permanent slavery, not with actual real human nature that we see manifested in the news every day. Its fine if you wouldn't use it malevolently, that says nothing about more capable and more sinister individuals who are out there in numbers you probably would have hard time accepting.
Second, where do we put all those folks if we actually achieve some hippie paradise? How do we feed them? Concept of individual ownership goes very much against this. The opposite is communism, which has 100% failure rate, and we tested it already on few hundred millions, no thank you. You have to live through it to see and feel its failures in their many aspects to understand, I did and never ever want that back in any form.
Two, they would all die from a number of things over the course of a thousand year journey
Your brain's capacity to handle memory would still be a blocker for any meaningful extended survival.
Any decent scifi novel would name many of the very simple problems it would cause at an individual and societal level, not to speak of every other biological ramification of the body.
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?
By reading this, you have confirmed your membership in the Five Percenters Club. Welcome.
If this trend continues over the centuries it is conceivable that >=50% of all human beings to ever exist could be extantly alive. Either growth rate exploded or death rate arrested.
It recalls to mind Fyodor the one-time teacher of Tsiolkovsky of the rocket equation, who conceived a kind of akashic immortality project he called the Common Task. So like maybe this Kaneda-Haub statistic asymptotically approaches 100%.
Supposing a starting population of 2 we can call Adam and Eve divided by 0 dead ancestors do note it started at infinity before dropping precipitously near 0 for a 202k year exponential climb to today's ~7%. Fwiw I consider such plot affirmative evidence assuming the demographic inputs are not wildly inaccurate.
Or maybe it was saying that wasn’t based on estimate.
I've read that at the smallest bottleneck our species had fewer than 10,000 individuals, although I don't think that sad state lasted long.
Turns out it's one of those totally wrong "factoids" that nevertheless keeps getting repeated (like the only man-made structure you can see from space being the Great Wall, etc.), and which dates as far back as the 1970's according to Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...
Arthur C Clarke https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/212808-behind-every-man-now... "Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth."
also Snopes (updated 2007) https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/recount-your-dead/
no they don't. Here is the beginning of the Scientific Amercian article:
The human population has swelled so much that people alive today outnumber all those who have ever lived, says a factoid whose roots stretch back to the 1970s. Some versions of this widely circulating rumor claim that 75 percent of all people ever born are currently alive. Yet, despite a quadrupling of the population in the past century, the number of people alive today is still dwarfed by the number of people who have ever lived.
In 2002 Carl Haub, a demographer at the Population Reference Bureau, a nongovernmental organization in Washington, D.C., updated his earlier estimate of the number of people that have ever existed. To calculate this, he studied the available population data to determine the human population growth rates during different historical periods, and used them to determine the number of people who have ever been born.
For most of history, the population grew slowly, if at all. According to the United Nations' Determinants and Consequences of Population Trends, the first Homo sapiens appeared around 50,000 years ago, though this figure is debatable. Little is known about this distant past and how many of us there might have been, but by the time of the agricultural revolution in the Middle East in 9000 B.C., Earth held an estimated five million people.
Between the rise of farming and the height of Roman rule,population growth was sluggish; at less than a tenth of a percent per year, it crawled to about 300 million by A.D. 1. Then the total fell as plagues wiped out large swathes of people. (The "black death" in the 14th century wiped out at least 75 million.) As a result, by 1650 the world population had only increased to about 500 million. By 1800, though, thanks to improved agriculture and sanitation, it doubled to more than one billion. And, in 2002 when Haub last made these calculations, the planet's population had exploded, reaching 6.2 billion.
To calculate how many people have ever lived, Haub followed a minimalist approach, beginning with two people in 50000 B.C.—his Adam and Eve. Then, using his historical growth rates and population benchmarks, he estimated that slightly over 106 billion people had ever been born. Of those, people alive today comprise only 6 percent, nowhere near 75 percent. "[It is] almost surely true people alive today are some small fraction of [all] people," says Joel Cohen, a professor of populations at the Rockefeller and Columbia Universities in New York City.
... more at above link https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...
https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol36/54/36-54....
According to that, it's between 5.5 and 9.5% for age 65, nowhere close to 50+%.
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.
> In other words, one can assume with 95% certainty that any individual human would be within the last 95% of all the humans ever to be born
"any individual human" really means "a human chosen at random" from all humans who will ever live. Then they go on to assume that this is representative of the humans who have already lived. But clearly there's a problem there. They find a statistic that is true of all past-and-future humans and then assumed it must be equally true of all past humans as well. In fact we've exactly chosen the subset (past humans) as those that are least likely for this statistic to apply. It'd be like deriving some statistic about being 95% sure any given human can run a mile within 10 minutes, and then applying that statistic specifically to those humans with no legs. It's that dumb -- clearly past humans are fundamentally different from past-and-future humans in exactly the property they're sampling.
You can easily see this problem by simply going back in time and applying the same argument at any point in history. At some point, the total number of humans who had ever been born was 1 billion. At that point, we would have been 95% sure that the total number of humans would never exceed 20 billion. Oops! In fact, we would have been 99% sure that the total number of humans would never exceed 100 billion. Double oops!
Go back to when the total number of humans who had ever been born was 1 million. We would have been 99.999% sure the total number of humans would never exceed 100 billion. Triple oops!
It's a nonsense argument.
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.
This article starts 190 000 years back. Our species, Homo Sapien, goes back anywhere from then, up to 300 000 years ago. The genus Homo around two million years.
I think it's a very interesting question, what does human mean? It's easy to think early humans were intrinsically different, merely because not much physical evidence survives. But given Neanderthals were doing cave art 64 000 years ago, maybe even they weren't that different.
We might evolve through in-situ genetic editing / body modifications.
Doesn't that sound extremely weird? Like, how does puberty, and 9 months to have a baby, fit in with a 12 year total life expectancy?
Maybe I need more coffee or something...
If there are 10 births, where 9 of the children die in infancy but 1 lives to be 100 years old, their average life expectancy would be about 10.
When you look at pre-modern societies (essentially until around 1900 or so), there are four large causes of low life expectancy that don't really exist anymore. Infant mortality was extremely high (a quarter or so of live births didn't make it more than a few days). Then child mortality itself was high (you had perhaps a 50-50 chance of making it to puberty). For young women, there's an extra hit to life expectancy due to risky childbirth (you have about a 10% lifetime chance of dying in childbirth). For young men, they get extra risk due to endemic warfare--the baseline casualty rate of premodern warfare is basically WW2-levels of total war. Of all these factors, the infant mortality is the heaviest drag on life expectancy, as dying at age 0 really pulls down the average lifespan.
I don't think the logic is too sound though. Or rather that the premises should be taken for granted.
> 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.
> 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? Second, even if I did, not everyone had an equal chance of participating in this hypothetical thought-experiment (or random selection, or whatever you want to call it) -- only those alive at the time of your sampling can participate in it.
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.
Also, is there no phenomenon here where a sufficiently large N becomes increasingly indistinguishable from infinity?
Roman empire with client states probably had population 30M, maybe another 30M for China and 30M for Indian subcontinent. These would absolutely dwarf everything else. No room for 3x of that.
Even then, this link only suggests 250M population by 1 CE and not 300M. Deflate that number by another 50M and it would begin becoming plausible.
I distrust numbers like the ones they use in this analysis. There are so many unknowns and unknowables that the best we can hope for is to SWAG (Scientific Wild-Ass Guess) a few numbers and call it good. I think that is what we have here. It serves a purpose even if it is more likely to be wrong.