On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 04:18:17PM +1200, LizR wrote: > On 25 August 2014 14:16, Russell Standish <li...@hpcoders.com.au> 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..."
When are you assuming the population crash? If you assume we're about 50% of the way though all the humans who ever will have lived, then there will be a total of 2x10^11 people who ever will live. At a population growth rate of 2% (the value in 1970) it only takes 167 years for another 100 million people to be born. OK - today's growth rate is a little less, its down to about 1.3% now - if we kept on that same exponential growth, then the time till doom extends to 257 years, but still not long. > > > > 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. > That's all the doomsday argument predicts, actually. That population will start to decline soon. The decline may be gradual, or it may be sudden. To call it "doomsday" maybe overlarding it, or course, but the prediction is still surprising. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
