How Many People Will There Be?

October 24th, 2011
ea, future
There are about 7 billion people alive right now [1], which is quite a lot. How many people [2] are there likely to be in the future? At the low end, something really bad could happen, and everyone could die. Or maybe there would be a collapse from which people would never recover. At the high end, we could colonize the galaxy. [3]

Just as I don't think it makes sense to value the happiness of people far away less than that of people close by, I can't see why I should value the happiness of future people less. If there might be a very large number of people in the future, it's possible that the most good I could be doing would be in making sure we don't wipe ourselves out before expanding off the earth.


[1] I need to update my internal stat from 6.5 billion.

[2] In don't strictly mean 'humans' here. A person who's mind had been uploaded to a computer and running there would count. As would, I think, and fully artificial intelligence.

[3] Or at the even higher end: tiny self replicating machines of human origin could colonize the universe.

Comment via: google plus, facebook

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Development RCTs Are Good Actually

In defense of trying things out

via Thing of Things March 25, 2024

Clarendon Postmortem

I posted a postmortem of a community I worked to help build, Clarendon, in Cambridge MA, over at Supernuclear.

via Home March 19, 2024

How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

In 2017, we looked at how web bloat affects users with slow connections. Even in the U.S., many users didn't have broadband speeds, making much of the web difficult to use. It's still the case that many users don't have broadband speeds, both …

via Posts on March 16, 2024

more     (via openring)