Re:How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?
by Denvercoder9 on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @05:07AM
(#36597733)
> First, why should I even assume N is finite?
Our current understanding of physics dictates that the (observable) universe has a finite size and a finite lifespan, from which it logically follows that there can't be an infinite amount of humans.
Re:How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?
by dataflow on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @05:18AM
(#36597807)
If that's genuinely the basis for this reasoning, it only makes the argument seem even more dubious to me. If the statistical argument is really so sound, it shouldn't have to rely on our understanding of cosmology.
Also, is there no phenomenon here where a sufficiently large N becomes increasingly indistinguishable from infinity?
Re:How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?
by zeroonetwothree on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @10:01AM
(#36600627)
The entire universe could very well be infinite, with infinite “Earths” and “humans”. In which case the argument doesn’t work since you can’t choose uniformly from an infinite set.
> The Copernican principle suggests that any one human is equally likely (along with the other N-1 humans) to find themselves in any position n of the total population N.
I feel like I must be misunderstanding the argument because it just doesn't make sense to me. First, why should I even assume N is finite? Second, even if I did, not everyone had an equal chance of participating in this hypothetical thought-experiment (or random selection or sampling, or whatever you want to call it) -- only those alive right now do. How is this different from saying: every dollar you make is equally privileged to every other one, therefore I can just fish out a $1 bill from your pocket and use that single dollar bill to estimate your expected lifetime income?