this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2025
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What time frame does this represent?
Births in 2025 might be majority subsaharan Africa.
It would be really interesting to see chances of being born across all time. Like what is the probability of being born here and now vs. somewhere else in the past or the future.
You would have to make some predictions based on population growth and maybe model a few different possible apocalypses (average species lifetime/meteor probabilities/nuclear doomsday/climate disaster etc.) but it would be a fun model to play with.
~~If you limit it to births to date, it's going to be mostly Africa again, for a different reason.~~ If you were to stick to a few millenniums back it could be interesting, I guess, because agricultural regions will dominate. I would suspect data for the late Paleolithic isn't known with any certainty.
Past a century into the future, it becomes basically all assumptions. Humans are a very prosperous species and it seems likely we'll have descendants on Earth for hundreds of millions of years. Even if we manage to destroy civilisation, any group of survivors could be back up and building cities in a geological instant.
If things stay progressive and prosperous, the natural birth rates are going to collapse because people just don't bother to reproduce. Are we going to do Brave New World baby factories? If we do, population becomes a matter of policy. Unless people migrate far more than today, which doesn't seem impossible, in which case you have to make assumptions about where they'll want to go.
Yeah, population sizes overall would have been much smaller in the past, so paleolithic times would probably be comparitively insignificant (even 2000 years ago the entire population was less than 200 million and now it's 8 billion more than that).
I wonder if you could get a very rough statistical estimate of humanity's downfall just by assuming that we are somewhere in the middle of history. Like if I was born as a random person, I'm more likely to be born at a time where more people are born than when few people are born. So if you model that and make some assumptions about population growth/decline rates, could you put some numbers on when the last person is likely to be born within a margin of error?
True, but it was also an unfathomably long time, so IIRC it cancels out. Uhh... nope, I remembered wrong. Per OurWorldInData, pre-agricultural people about equal living people in count, meaning about 15% of the total. I'll cross that out.
I feel like I've seen this done. Yep, it looks like it was a guy named Richard Gott that first wrote about it in the 90's with respect to population, while the whole concept is called Lindy's law.