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Comment by tomohelix | Hacker News Reader

If you are just curious, the number is 117B people who was ever born on Earth. High amount of guesstimates and assumptions involved. Yadda yadda popsci article phrases.

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Now wonder how many people have been born anywhere but Earth

4 17⁄64

Apparently there have been cases of sexual intercourse on the ISS, so we could potentially have a human conceived there.

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 personalities and nearly zero privacy to begin with.

Who would honestly turn down the opportunity to have sex in 0G if given the chance

I mean, these are curious and scientifically minded people. Someone should do it in the name of science.

There was an article in Playboy many years ago that I read (and the search results in that domain are now far too polluted - and yes, I did read the articles) that basically said "either you're going to need a lot of velcro or assistants.

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.

On the other hand, my impression was that they do have a lot of velcro on the ISS, or places to strap yourself to in general.

If the two of you are weightless in the middle of a room shouldn't you remain in the middle of the room so long as you don't throw anything?

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.

You're working on a one body problem there. This is a two body problem where some force applied will cause a transfer of momentum from one body to another. Without something to tether the two bodies together, it is quite likely they'll move apart.

The 3-Body Problem: A new movie adaption by PornHub.

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

Do they still use Skype up there?

No idea. Perhaps someone who's still affiliated can answer.

The original claim seems to have been based on an internet hoax.

> 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...

My money would actually be on sexual intercourse having happened on Mir, if it happened in space at all. Smaller crew size, and being under the supervision of the slowly failing Soviet Union followed by early Russia surely made it much easier to ignore certain orders than it is on the ISS.

But if it ever happened it hasn't been made public. Not that that's saying much.

There was once a married couple, Jan Davis and Mark Lee who both flew on STS-47, a 7 day mission to Spacelab in 1992. Not saying sex did happen, but this would be the incident with the highest probability.

Depends on your definition of "on Earth".

There have been people born on planes, for example.

Anyone in a submarine?

> Anyone in a submarine?

Yes, in WW2, when civilians were being evacuated on the USS Crevalle

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Crevalle#Third_and_fourth_...

An interesting but unanswerable question is how many people will ever live on the Earth.

what are the error bands on this?

Doing some rough back-of-the-envelope calculations, I wouldn't be shocked for any value between 100 and 200 billion.

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.)

"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.

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