On 25 August 2014 14:16, Russell Standish <[email protected]> wrote:
> > You have to include all the people who will live in the future, as > well as all those who have lived in the past. Of course, which is why I added "assuming a population crash, as per..." > With exponential growth > rates (business-as-usual), more people rapidly end up living in the > future as the time until doom increases. > > That looks increasingly unsustainable - in fact, population growth has already gone into a bit of a decline as more women are educated and realise they don't actually *have* to keep popping sprogs. As health, education and general freedom spread around the world, as I hope they will, we should see a levelling off and possibly a decline in numbers of people without a doomsday scenario. Although unfortunately, other factors indicate there may well be one anyway. > I did do such a calculation, and came up with a 50% figure for a > population crash by 2100 CE. I was about to question to 100 billion > people figure you quoted above. If you look at figure 5.2 of my book, > you'll see that most people have lived since 1000 CE. But if you > integrate the area under the curve by eye, and multiply by 0.04 per > year (approximate pre-industrial birth rate), you get a figure of > around 40 billion people as having lived since 1000 CE, so your 100 > billion can't be too far off the mark. > I nicked it from the opening lines of Arthur C Clarke's introduction to 2001: 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. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
