Comments | ekorber: a few fun facts

ekorber

a few fun facts

Mar 11, 2006 01:05

Some interesting facts at the Population Reference Bureau. I was talking to someone about this kind of thing recently (easwaran?) - we were rather far off on our estimate of the percentage of people ever born who are alive now (not that the estimate here is perfect, but it is at least based on something other than a random guess ( Read more... )

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easwaran March 11 2006, 23:12:19 UTC

So that's the Everett these philosophers of physics all like ( ... )

ekorber March 12 2006, 01:07:52 UTC

I guess I have no reason to either doubt or believe their 10-year guess. For me at least, I don't intuitively "count" people unless they live for more than a few months, but they are probably counting everyone who survives birth as contributing to the population. I would imagine that the ubiquity of hard slave labor in early civilizations contributed significantly to the death rate of children and young adults. My totally baseless intuition says that maybe 10 is too little but I'm pretty sure 20 is too much.

And somehow I don't think the world's current religious landscape would be quite the same if only 6 people had been alive in ~0 (BCE/CE) (is the year 0 designated at one or the other?)

ekorber March 12 2006, 01:10:45 UTC

Also, interesting graph from Wikipedia here. The immediate observation is that the world population looks like basically just the population of Asia plus a constant factor that might be slightly perturbed by the rest of the world.

easwaran March 12 2006, 22:12:31 UTC

Well, it's a logarithmic scale, so that's the population of Asia times a constant factor.

That graph surprised me, because I was sure that Africa still had fewer people than Europe, but it suggests that Africa passed Europe a couple years ago.

quale March 14 2006, 06:22:26 UTC

Population growth is going to be pretty different from exponential on long time scales I would think. While at any given time it *may* be exponential (supposing it hasn't maxed out) things like the development of agriculture will have huge impacts.

Also major catastrophes (like the one that supposedly reduced the human population to just a few thousand somepoint back when we were in africa) are going to cause issues.

They should be able to get a rough graph of total population that didn't get wiped out by doing genetic analysis and that would be very interesting.

gustavolacerda April 19 2006, 12:51:35 UTC

This 5-7% estimate considerably weakens the doomsday-like argument saying that humanity will be extinguished within the next 50 years or so.

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