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ErikH2000
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Define an "Earthling" as someone of the human species, born on Earth, grown to the age of 18 or older, and lived on Earth at least 18 years. Its arbitrary, I know, but we have to start somewhere.

Counting Earthlings living today and born at any point in the future, how many could there be? There must be limiting factors like the nearby sun's lifespan and the physical volume a human body occupies.

To reach a theoretical maximum, you must assume that tomorrow the human race will do everything it can to produce the largest count of Earthlings, even though the means to that end (i.e. euthanasia, enforced breeding) may be horrific and go against human nature. No need to wallow in the evil, but you will be forgiven for considering such behavior in your approximation of a maximum count.

So how many Earthlings could there be?

Note that this is not a contest. This is preparation for a contest I'd like to run in January.

-Erik

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11-26-2007 at 08:21 PM
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calamarain
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Well, we've got over 6.5 billion today, expected to reach 9 billion by 2050. Carrying on that projection, the numbers get scary in a thousand years.

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11-26-2007 at 08:32 PM
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jbluestein
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I chose to go for the not particularly optimistic viewpoint that humanity will never actually figure out how to sustain an appreciable population off of the Earth. Otherwise I think you're facing an almost unbounded set of possibilities.

Given that, I think that the Earth could probably support (for some value of the word support) 25 billion. It wouldn't be fun, and it might not last long, but it may be achievable.

Josh

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11-26-2007 at 08:33 PM
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techant
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I can't count that HIGH. :D

Under my expansion method, Earthlings leave the planet and eventually the galaxy. They develop transport abilities not even thought of in the STARTREK(R) series, but maybe the STARGATE(R) series. This gives them the ability to expand into the uncounted worlds. I have insufficient data to calculate how many worlds they will find or how many will be there when and if the universe ends, but the number will be so large that I just can't count that high.

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11-26-2007 at 08:34 PM
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calamarain
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techant wrote:
I can't count that HIGH. :D

Under my expansion method, Earthlings leave the planet and eventually the galaxy. They develop transport abilities not even thought of in the STARTREK(R) series, but maybe the STARGATE(R) series. This gives them the ability to expand into the uncounted worlds. I have insufficient data to calculate how many worlds they will find or how many will be there when and if the universe ends, but the number will be so large that I just can't count that high.
Just as a side note, at the time of Star Trek, the population of Earth is 9 billion. So thus the birth rate has either decreased a lot, or there's a lot of emigration.

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11-26-2007 at 08:36 PM
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ErikH2000
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Hmmm. Still not hearing any maximum numbers for the number of Earthlings living now and in the future.

Is anyone willing to assert a number that is high enough that it definitely couldn't be exceeded? Maybe that would make a nice starting point to whittle down from.

-Erik

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11-26-2007 at 09:26 PM
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jbluestein
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ErikH2000 wrote:
Hmmm. Still not hearing any maximum numbers for the number of Earthlings living now and in the future.

Is anyone willing to assert a number that is high enough that it definitely couldn't be exceeded? Maybe that would make a nice starting point to whittle down from.

Just to be clear, are you looking for a formulation like this:

"The maximum number of humans that can ever possibly exist at one time is X."

Or are you looking for some sort of summation?

As in: "Starting from today, the total number of human beings that could ever possibly exist (not all at the same time) is X."

If it's the former, I will hereby assert that the human population cannot possibly grow past 30 billion. (Go ahead, prove me wrong!)

Josh


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11-26-2007 at 09:43 PM
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Syntax
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ErikH2000 wrote:
Is anyone willing to assert a number that is high enough that it definitely couldn't be exceeded? Maybe that would make a nice starting point to whittle down from.

-Erik
Well... as the saying goes - "For every Earthling there can only exist one more". History, however, has shown that "For every other Earthling, there can be only twice as few".

Bearing that and the planetary surface area in mind, I believe that the maximum number of Earthlings would be 837 billion.
11-26-2007 at 09:45 PM
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Chaco
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I'm assuming that basically, in order to achieve maximum Earthling population, all land must be living quarters. We're ignoring farmland because we can either synthesize food from chemical storage or import it from other planets.

So, basically there need to be little housing units for some set number of people, spread across the surface of the Earth.

This place says the average square footage of a house is 2,000 square feet. Let's add 100 square feet per house for food generation and call it 2,100 square feet for each house.

This place says the surface of the Earth is about 200 million square miles. That's 5.57568 × 10^15 square feet total. Divide this by the 2,100 square feet for each house and we get 2.65508571 × 10^12 people. That's a little more than 2 and a half trillion people.

So I'm shaving off some people due to things like walls, chemical storage, docking bays and such and using the upper bound of 1 trillion Earthlings.

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11-26-2007 at 10:02 PM
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TripleM
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This isn't answering Erik's question, but I find it interesting that when my parents were young they were told (and not jokingly; it was actually believed, I think) that when they became old, the population would have grown so much that there would be 'standing room only'.

I.e., I think nobody can ever predict this sort of thing :) Though of course, it must be able to be estimated. Just don't ask me how.
11-26-2007 at 10:44 PM
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ErikH2000
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jbluestein wrote:
Or are you looking for some sort of summation?

As in: "Starting from today, the total number of human beings that could ever possibly exist (not all at the same time) is X."
This is basically what I was asking. I added the additional criteria that the human being must spend a minimum of 18 years alive on the planet.

-Erik

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11-26-2007 at 10:50 PM
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coppro
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It would certainly be high. Many things considered immoral/unethical or otherwise could be used to drastically increase output - cannibalism and euthanasia are onetwo.

However, you could reach an approximate maximum. Take the entire mass of the Earth, divide by the average mass of a human, and there's an upper bound to the number of Earthlings at a given time. Add in the time until the sun would incinerate all that organic matter, and you have a theoretical maximum (assuming each person lives exactly 18 years). There would never be anywhere near that many people who meet the criteria, but that's a number. I ran it using 176kg as the average human mass, and ballparked 5.2 billion years as the time till everyone blows up. This gives an answer of 9.80613636 × 10^30 Earthlings... that's a lot.

[Tip: note the specific criterion of 'born on Earth']

[Last edited by coppro at 11-26-2007 11:43 PM]
11-26-2007 at 11:43 PM
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Jatopian
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It seems to me that this question needs certain other things defined to be properly answerable.
Let us start by working with Chaco's assumption that we are devoting all available area to living space. Naturally we want to assume that a person must have enough space to live decently, which involves getting up and stretching one's legs occasionally. But in fact life could easily be sustained in a tiny room of merely 60 square feet - a New York City apartment, for instance.
But we have made a fallacious assumption here. As such high-rise apartments prove, we are not limited to the surface area of the Earth. Rooms stack. In theory, we can stack the buildings as high as structural integrity will permit. We could surpass even this limitation with light pockets of gas, making homes which float in the air. Not to mention that we can dig a few miles into the Earth's crust, or perhaps even make the core somehow livable (cooling, probably).
And suppose that we find building materials and gases so advanced as to allow us hundreds of miles of vertical construction. At this point, our major limitation becomes whatever we define as the limit of the volume of "Earth".
Yet, we still have not considered one possibility. It becomes possible that in the future, we would be sustained in little closet-size tubes, a la The Matrix. It is also possible, depending upon how we define life, that we may consist solely of disembodied brains, with reproduction done artificially and extraterrestrially. We may even, again with a liberal enough definition, be storable as electrical impulses on hard disks, as conceived by Arthur Clarke. These possibilities drastically decrease the mass, volume, and resources necessary for each human.

I can't really calculate a number with all these unknowns, so I'll pick a scenario. Wikipedia says the volume of Earth, not counting atmosphere, is 1.0832073*10^15 cubic meters. I'll discount the atmosphere to compensate for a teensy bit of the core going unused. The volume of the largest recorded human brain, meanwhile, is around .18 cubic meters. We'll round to .25 for whatever equipment each would support. Therefore, the largest number of Earthling disembodied brains which may be supported at some point is approximately... 4.3 quadrillion.
Multiply that by 5.2 billion years, divide by 18, and it becomes approximately... 1.25 septillion. Plus whoever has already lived, a comparably insignificant figure according to Wikipedia.

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[Last edited by Jatopian at 11-27-2007 12:00 AM : time factor]
11-26-2007 at 11:55 PM
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techant
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calamarain wrote:
techant wrote:
I can't count that HIGH. :D

Under my expansion method, Earthlings leave the planet and eventually the galaxy. They develop transport abilities not even thought of in the STARTREK(R) series, but maybe the STARGATE(R) series. This gives them the ability to expand into the uncounted worlds. I have insufficient data to calculate how many worlds they will find or how many will be there when and if the universe ends, but the number will be so large that I just can't count that high.
Just as a side note, at the time of Star Trek, the population of Earth is 9 billion. So thus the birth rate has either decreased a lot, or there's a lot of emigration.

A lot of emigration! Yes!



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11-26-2007 at 11:59 PM
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Remlin
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Jatopian wrote:...Wikipedia says the volume of Earth, not counting atmosphere, is 1.0832073*10^15 cubic meters...
That's off by a factor of about a million. But hey, what's a few orders of magnitude among friends?
11-27-2007 at 02:28 AM
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Chaco
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Jatopian wrote:
It is also possible, depending upon how we define life, that we may consist solely of disembodied brains, with reproduction done artificially and extraterrestrially.

It doesn't seem like these disembodied brains would be "born" or "grow" to the age of 18 or older. Would a human brain in a life-support tank be part of the human species?

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11-27-2007 at 02:33 AM
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RoboBob3000
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You people are just dancing around the problem! We need more actual predictions!

That said, I'm going to go for a solid 70.

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11-27-2007 at 03:41 AM
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coppro wrote:
using 176kg as the average human mass
So you're factoring in widespread and massive obesity from lack of exercise?
11-27-2007 at 10:01 AM
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Let me have a go! We have a lot of time for this task, and assuming disembodied brains don't count, it's still fairly easy to use the shortest humans possible. The shortest pigmeys' height is consistently less than 1.5 meters, the first thing we do is eliminate everyone and repopulate the Earth with pigmeys. Now, the easiest way to store humans is suspended animation, I think boxes of about 1.5m*0.5m*0.5m = 0.375m3 would do nicely.

The volume of the earth is more than 10^21m3, which means you can stack 2.66*10^21 human boxes which will still count as Earthlings. All the support systems can be located on other planets, so that's not a problem. Asumming moving the Earth to another star is cheating, but correcting the orbit as Sun gradually warms up is not, we have about some 5 billion years in the worst-case scenario (which is, failing to survive the red giant phase).

Now, assuming we reprocess out midgets as soon as they reach the age of 18, effectively we have produced 2.66*10^21 new humans every 18 years, maing the total (5 billion / 18) * 2.66*10^21 = 7.39*10^29 humans total.

Give or take.

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11-27-2007 at 11:42 AM
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ErikH2000
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I wonder...

How many of those 5 billion years remaining in the sun's life cycle are years where the sun gives enough heat and energy to allow humans to live on Earth?

Is there some other hard and definite time limit that we would reach before the sun burns out?

-Erik

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11-27-2007 at 09:42 PM
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Dex Stewart
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I don't know much on the subject, but wasn't the sun giving gradually more heat?
11-27-2007 at 10:07 PM
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NiroZ
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Hmmm. Well with suspended animation and importing vital supplies, I'd say until the sun starts frying people, the moon falls out of orbit or the earth falls into the sun.
11-28-2007 at 05:50 AM
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mrimer
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Wasn't there talk in one of the Rama novels (or somesuch) about a planet of aliens with a trillion lives on the planet? In the story, they were able to sustain the planet's heat without a sun due to all the combined living mass giving off body heat.

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11-28-2007 at 05:00 PM
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Dex Stewart
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Such a planet would either have to be a completely closed system, or receive energy from space in another form to compensate for heat escaping the planet.
11-28-2007 at 05:18 PM
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Michael Drosnin, author of "The Bible Code," found a hidden message in the Pentateuch (the first five books in the Bible) that predicts that a comet will crash into the earth in 2012 and annihilate all life.
From here.

The Bureau also predicts that the planet's population will exceed seven billion on Oct. 18, 2012.
From here.

I say 7 billion.

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11-28-2007 at 07:01 PM
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Jatopian
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Dex Stewart wrote:
Such a planet would either have to be a completely closed system, or receive energy from space in another form to compensate for heat escaping the planet.
Heat couldn't escape the planet, except as light. Cover the planet in a big ol mirror, and you're good.

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11-29-2007 at 12:11 AM
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BoyBlue
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The Earth will be habitable for about another 1.1 billion years before the sun gets too bright. With full cooperation and advanced technology, I estimate that the human population on Earth can average a little over 700 billion during that time. Multiply it out, divide by an average lifespan of about 18 years, adjust for a few minor things, and you get the final answer:
43,252,003,274,489,856,000 Earthlings.

11-29-2007 at 01:02 AM
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ErikH2000
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BoyBlue wrote:
With full cooperation and advanced technology, I estimate that the human population on Earth can average a little over 700 billion during that time.
How did you arrive at the 700 billion?

-Erik

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11-29-2007 at 02:31 AM
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BoyBlue
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ErikH2000 wrote:
How did you arrive at the 700 billion?

Scientists have estimated the limit at 200 billion, but that's an old figure from 1971. So I made some adjustments based on Moore's Law and the Fridrich Method, to get a plausible modern estimate. Simple, really.

11-29-2007 at 02:57 AM
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ErikH2000
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BoyBlue wrote:
Scientists have estimated the limit at 200 billion, but that's an old figure from 1971. So I made some adjustments based on Moore's Law and the Fridrich Method, to get a plausible modern estimate. Simple, really.
Well, that all makes sense, of course. I think you must have the final answer to the question. Beautiful work!

-Erik

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11-29-2007 at 03:15 AM
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