Question from an actual kid, though she was eight, not five. Hopefully there’s an explanation more detailed than just “no” I can pass on to her.
In: 509
Fun fact, in the book The Doomsday Calculation the author uses this number (a 1993 estimate of 70 billion) — along with the fact that you, as an individual, are learning this fact at a random enough time — to guess that the total number of people that remain to be born, for the remainder of human history, to be about another 70 billion. (1.8 billion – 2.7 trillion for a 95% confidence interval).
Then, given this, along with the population explosion recent human history, he estimates that this confidence interval will be hit in approximately 12 to 18,000 years. In other words, that the end of biological human history could arrive in anywhere from 12 years, to 18,000 years! A whimsical thought, but potentially practical… especially given the deadly empirical and mathematical accuracy of this principle. (Look up Gott’s Copernican principle if you’re curious!)
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