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Comment by clueless | Hacker News Reader

how are "trillions of humans living in the far distant future" improbable, or poor information or has a lack of information? seems pretty obvious

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Regardless, it is an extremely uncertain proposition that we can do anything in the present that would have a reliably positive impact on their lives in the far future. It's hard enough to figure something out for the billions of people who actually exist right now.

It seems obvious to you that there will be trillions of people alive in the far distant future? Please explain how you know this.

They claim isn't that there will be trillions of people alive at the same time; they are integrating over the course of tens and hundreds of thousands of years.

Although we are at a peak population of a bit over 8B people at the moment, it is estimated that more than 100B people we would classify as humans have ever lived. The population long ago was much smaller than 1B, but thousands of generations have lived and died.

What is something specific that an individual should have done or should not have done, say, 2000 years ago, that would have made a positive impact on your life?

Certainly there are individuals who have had that kind of impact, but I don't think one could have foreseen the consequences at the time, e.g., Jesus and Mohamed.

Likewise, the guy who invented the Segway probably thought he was going to revolutionize personal transportation, but that didn't pan out (yet, at least).

1. Suppose you have a chart of the total past and future history of human population.

2. Cover up the chart so only the data from the past to present day is visible.

3. Note that most humans in that subset exist near or at the present. You are one of these people today, it should make sense for you to be born in one of the densest parts of the graph.

4. Now uncover the graph. If there are trillions of humans in the future, it seems almost impossibly unlikely that you would born in a part of the graph with "so few" humans as today, and not in the far future.

Therefore, you must conclude that the actual graph rapidly drops to zero in the near future. QED.

This "doomsday argument" is a pretty shit one, but not worse than others I've seen arguing the opposite.

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