3/13/2023 0 Comments Imagine the world after 100 years![]() The poor dinosaurs had no defense against the asteroid that wiped them out. Since the development of nuclear weapons, it is in our power to kill all of us who are alive and cause the end of human history.īut we are also different from all other animals in that we have the possibility to protect ourselves, even against the most extreme risks. One thing that sets us apart is that we now – and this is a recent development – have the power to destroy ourselves. The chart shows how many children might be born in the next 800,000 years, a future in which humans survive for as long as a typical mammalian species.īut, of course, humanity is anything but “a typical mammalian species.” If you think the world population will have a size of just one billion people, then the chart would be only an eleventh as wide and would show 9.1 trillion births.It would show the births of 150 trillion children. If you think the world population will stabilize at a level that’s 50% higher than in my calculation, then the number of future births will be 50% higher.If you disagree with the numbers I use in my scenario it is easy for you to see how different numbers would lead to different futures. For 100 trillion births there are 200 rows. Each triangle represents 7.95 billion people – it is the green triangle shape from the hourglass above and corresponds to the number of us alive today.Įach row represents the birth of half a trillion children. In such a future, there would be 100 trillion people alive over the next 800,000 years. ![]() Let’s consider a scenario in which the population stabilizes at 11 billion people (based on the UN projections for the end of this century) and in which the average life length rises to 88 years. ![]() 6 Let’s think about a future in which humanity exists for 1 million years: 200,000 years are already behind us, so there would be 800,000 years still ahead. It turns out that the lifespan of a typical mammalian species is about 1 million years. One way to think about how long we might survive is to ask how long other mammals survive. But the most important factor will be how long humanity will exist.īefore we look at a range of very different potential futures, let’s start with a simple baseline. The number of future people depends on the size of the population at any point in time and how long each of them will live. We can use this fact to get a sense of how many descendants we might have in that vast future ahead. How many people will be born in the future?īut we know one thing: The future is immense, and the universe will exist for trillions of years. The houses we live in, the infrastructure we rely on, the grand achievements of architecture – much of what we see around us was built by them. The languages we speak, the food we cook, the music we enjoy, the tools we use – what we know we learned from them. It is these 109 billion people we have to thank for the civilization that we live in. The demographers estimate that in these 200,000 years about 109 billion people have lived and died. The two demographers used 200,000 years before today as this cutoff. But if one wants to count all humans one has to make a decision about when the first humans lived. There isn’t a particular moment in which humanity came into existence, as the transition from species to species is gradual. It is not possible to answer this question precisely, but demographers Toshiko Kaneda and Carl Haub have tackled the question using the historical knowledge that we do have. How many came before us? How many humans have ever lived? Longtermism is the ethical view that we should act in ways that reduce the risks that endanger our future, and in ways that make the long-term future go well. Those who ask themselves what they can do to act responsibly towards those who will live in the future call themselves ‘longtermists’. The fact that our actions have an impact on the large number of people who will live after us should matter for how we think about our own lives.
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