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
Technically it’s possible to estimate just about anything. It just might not always be a good estimate.
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!)
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!)
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!)
there is some wiggle room for error if you go back to pre 50,000 years ago, because there was a big extinction event that knocked out almost all the humans on earth. we dont really have any idea how many there were before that. but after that we can basically trace through dna mutations how many people lived before say 3000 BC, and then we have even more data to calculate after that. and the ultimate answer is that something like 10% of the entire human population over 50,000 years, are alive today. because science increased the ability for humans to survive to such a significant degree that the population annual increase rate has grown exponentially (until now anyway, where capitalism creating mass poverty is starting to reduce the birth rate in developed countries in particular because women have to spend too much time working to be able to have kids at the same rate the previous generation did)
there is some wiggle room for error if you go back to pre 50,000 years ago, because there was a big extinction event that knocked out almost all the humans on earth. we dont really have any idea how many there were before that. but after that we can basically trace through dna mutations how many people lived before say 3000 BC, and then we have even more data to calculate after that. and the ultimate answer is that something like 10% of the entire human population over 50,000 years, are alive today. because science increased the ability for humans to survive to such a significant degree that the population annual increase rate has grown exponentially (until now anyway, where capitalism creating mass poverty is starting to reduce the birth rate in developed countries in particular because women have to spend too much time working to be able to have kids at the same rate the previous generation did)
There are a lot of good, informed, Like you’re five answers here, but a lot of what it really boils down to is when you decide we stopped being neanderthals and *homo erectus*.
The estimates out there range from 10,000 years ago all the way to 400,000 years ago.
There are a lot of good, informed, Like you’re five answers here, but a lot of what it really boils down to is when you decide we stopped being neanderthals and *homo erectus*.
The estimates out there range from 10,000 years ago all the way to 400,000 years ago.
there is some wiggle room for error if you go back to pre 50,000 years ago, because there was a big extinction event that knocked out almost all the humans on earth. we dont really have any idea how many there were before that. but after that we can basically trace through dna mutations how many people lived before say 3000 BC, and then we have even more data to calculate after that. and the ultimate answer is that something like 10% of the entire human population over 50,000 years, are alive today. because science increased the ability for humans to survive to such a significant degree that the population annual increase rate has grown exponentially (until now anyway, where capitalism creating mass poverty is starting to reduce the birth rate in developed countries in particular because women have to spend too much time working to be able to have kids at the same rate the previous generation did)
There are a lot of good, informed, Like you’re five answers here, but a lot of what it really boils down to is when you decide we stopped being neanderthals and *homo erectus*.
The estimates out there range from 10,000 years ago all the way to 400,000 years ago.
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