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Zer0D0wn83 t1_ja2qzfa wrote

Reply to comment by -emanresUesoohC- in The 2030s are going to be wild by UnionPacifik

The same chance as being born at any other time in history

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3_Thumbs_Up t1_ja31x94 wrote

If you are equally likely to be any one human throughout history, then you're most likely to be born in the time period that supports the most humans.

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EndTimer t1_ja3q78e wrote

This doesn't seem to add up to me.

First, the future doesn't appear to be set in stone, and treating statistics like it's a spawn chance against every slot that might exist doesn't work. There may be a quadrillion people in 5000 years, or there may be zero. You can't roll dice against schroedinger's humans, at least not with this kind of intuitive math.

Second, demographers estimate 109 billion people have lived and died in the past 192,000 years. While you have a higher chance of being born in this period over any singular, specific period prior, the vast majority of human lives exist in the bulk who are already gone.

Put another way, there's more people than ever right now, but if you had even odds of being born at any time in human history up till now, there's a 92.7% chance you'd already be dead in 2023.

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Zer0D0wn83 t1_ja3yg2s wrote

And for 92.7% of all the people who ever lived, that's what happened.

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dmit0820 t1_ja6yy93 wrote

The only thing worrying about that is that the time period that supports the most humans isn't in the future, when we expand into the stars.

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-emanresUesoohC- t1_ja3vipc wrote

Lol. Touché. I’m not a statistician but if there’s been 120 billion or so humans up to this point across history, then is it more likely to have been born in the past?

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Zer0D0wn83 t1_ja3y1gu wrote

Well no, it doesn't work like that. There may be hundreds of trillions of humans born in the future, in which case you could say isn't it more likely you would be born then. You were born when you were born, there is no special significance to the time - it just had to happen at some point to be able to have this conversation.

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