At least 50% of debates on HN are basically: "you said that A is a good analogy for B, but you're wrong because A and B are not literally the exact same thing."
I don't see that one much on HN, but it's rife on Twitter.
E.G. if you want your instances of "people" to be active, we're now capped at roughly 8 billion, since 92% of instances have already been garbage collected in this run.
I would still recommend planning a Long integer, just to get yourself some room for error.