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notified when the videos come out and don't worry there's heaps of Curves gazark videos left so
we'll be here a while the future of humanity seems insecure rapid climate change political division
our greed and failings make it hard to look at our species with a lot of optimism and so many
people think our end is in sight but humans have always thought they lived in the end times every
generation assumes they're important enough to witness the apocalypse and then life just goes on
this is a problem because it leads to short-term thinking and prevents us from creating the best
world for ourselves and our descendants what makes this worse is that we may actually be living at
an extremely critical moment in human history to understand why let's look at the temporal window
of humanity and ask when will the last human be born and how many people will there ever be
these sorts of estimates come with a lot of uncertainties so please take them with a
gigantic grain of salt will do to get a sense of how many people there will be let's see how many
people have already left modern humans arose some 200 000. so I'm speaking of sci-fi I can actually
give you a rough figure because in 2001 Arthur C Clarke's book at the very start he talks about how
there's roughly been about 100 billion humans to have ever lived and I bring this up because
he mentions this fun little thing you should go read the book it's one of my favorite books and
at the start he says it's a bit of a strange coincidence isn't it that you know there's
been roughly 100 billion humans who have ever ever lived and there's roughly about 100 billion stars
in our local you know region of the universe the Milky Way like an odd it's kind of odd that it's
similar right and so he kind of imagines you know maybe when we die we get our own little
world in the heavens it's a nice thought you know especially if you're a fearful being and it kind
of helps you know make it all feel nice but yeah obviously it's probably not modern humans arose
some 200 000 years ago they were uniquely making tools telling stories thinking abstractly planning
and working together in large groups beyond their close family still there were not that many of us
surpluses of food were scarce survival was hard life expectancy was low
it took us 150 000 years to grow to a population of 2 million and eventually led to
the Agricultural Revolution arguably the biggest change in our history this I would probably argue
with that it could be for sure but uh I think if you went further back there's probably bigger
changes in terms of you know just sentience and Consciousness like when we first started panning
on caves I've mentioned this in a few videos but that change is pretty Monumental like why did we
just start panning on caves out of nowhere you know what about writing actually I think
writing 100 not 100 as I just told you nothing I don't know hold on to anything 100 but uh writing
I think was probably the biggest change in the history of our species this was when our numbers
really started growing it took ten thousand more years to get to 300 million but that increase was
dwarfed by the Industrial Revolution in 1800 there were a billion of us the human population doubled
in just 120 years and then again in 50. today we number around 8 billion in total over the
last two hundred thousand years about 117 billion humans were born and lived and 109 billion also
died which means that about seven percent of all humans that ever lived are alive right now as many
as were born in the first 150 000 years of human history every minute 270 babies joined the party
but there aren't just more people never before have we been as healthy and well-off or lived
longer with growing living standards our birth rates collapsed the UN estimates that around the
year 2100 we will hit our computation being into all that stuff elon's been you know going on about
for a while now we'll talk about it and there will be 125 million people born each year it's
pretty unlikely that birth rates will stay stable forever but let's pretend to make our thought
experiment simpler how many people there will be in the future depends on when our species will
die out and here we find a lot of uncertainties we are able to destroy ourselves through our own
inventions but we are also able to find solutions to avert catalysts from watching this you guys
probably seen uh what happened with dart very recently how we shot you know something at an
asteroid to see if we could divert its path how cool is that by the way uh and it actually we made
a bigger impact on the thing than we thought we would uh and you can maybe I'll put the photo up I
could forget but there's a photo photos of uh the actual asteroid what was it called dimorphous or
something and there's a huge chunk missing out of it so awesome it's like that movie Armageddon in
real life I grew up watching that movie I actually went to a re-release the other week to see it
it was it's still just as good there's so many inconsistencies and just incorrect things in that
movie but it's it's so awesome I I think between the ages of like five and ten I probably watched
it about 50 times and I def I forced my younger brother to sit through it with me every time
trophic risk we can change the direction of panic killer asteroids but we've also invented nuclear
weapons we discovered antibiotics but also carry diseases across the globe in a matter of days
our industrial system gives us an incredible standard of living but also changed the
atmosphere in the process I think it's really important to you know also I didn't mention it
before I was going to but I don't want to talk too long every time I pause it uh you know the
invention of things that really changed the world all really do come through physics
uh you can trace everything in our modern world back to an Adventure a discovery in
physics in in fundamental science uh and it's fundamentally true a very easy way
to demonstrate this is you can trace everything back in terms of technology to Faraday or Maxwell
electromagnetism electricity magnetism without an understanding of these things there's no
technology and at the frontier of technology and our understanding it's still in physics you know
you've got quantum computers coming around and you've got Cal now the thing that I've built for
you guys you can use for free that can you know help protect you guys uh but quantum computers
could be on this list one day as you know maybe one of the more important things that happened
to our world uh the computer 100 should be on the list somewhere but quantum computers could provide
another Monumental Jump Ahead you know even maybe even a larger Paradigm Shift you know just normal
computers and that might be hard to believe right now but uh just from thinking about what the what
they could potentially change and have an impact on it could be really big anyway we're deep into
tangent I can't even remember how we started this that's right physics it all comes back to physics
yes so go study Physics not because you know you have to or anything just because you know if if
you feel like there's no magic in this world you should just go study Physics because it'll it'll
reveal to you that everything is actually Magic uh and you might get the sense from listening to
physicists or scientists that science is about sort of like the degrading the magic of the
universe taking away but it does the opposite it actually proves to you that the universe is Magic
so I I've always loved that about physics and it's very contrary to you know what everyone
tends to think which it's it's very hard to understand sometimes but humans are complex
anyway we could conceivably stick around for a long time so every day we don't destroy ourselves
May mean life for an unfathomable number of humans how many people are we talking about
it depends on how far our species is going to expand scenario one humans will never leave Earth
if we stay on our home planet a good metric to look at is the extinction rate of animals that
we get from the fossil record the average life I can talk about this because before physics I
was going to go into Wildlife Conservation I think in protecting biodiversity is extremely
important and I wasn't a huge fan of humanity when I was younger come around don't worry uh
so yeah the background rate of Extinction is what we call it you know that's from looking
at the fossil record and you have to also keep in mind that we can't see everything uh that
ever lived not everything is in the fossil record because not everything you know fossilizes and so
there's a lot of stuff missing from the fossil record uh and so we really don't know what the
background rate of Extinction is but you know it gives us a as like a lower limit at least
um and so from that you can now gauge to present day and we could we can look at how many uh
species are going extinct every 24 hours and it's actually about a thousand times higher than you
know the background rate of Extinction which is what it would be if humans weren't around so that
you know a lot of that could be from the stuff we're missing in the fossil because the fossil
record doesn't show everything but it could just be that humans are really destroying everything
and that's what it kind of seems like because yeah there's a there's a lot there's something like 127
species of Wildlife and animals go extinct every 24 hours that's that sounds significant right
keep in mind a lot of those things are beetles uh it's something like for every
for one in three species of animal and white uh plant on the planet there's it's a beetle
so there's a hell of a lot of beetles around it's Planet Of The Beatles
lifespan of mamadian species is in the region of one million years with some surviving
up to 10 million years our close relative hutters survived for about 1.9 million years
let's be conserved humans will survive for a million years which leaves us 800 000 more years
to dawdle away assuming a stable birth rate of 125 million people each year this means there are
roughly 100 trillion humans waiting to be born 850 times greater than the number of people that so we
should say this has been very optimistic all right also if you can hear the dog barking he's outside
because he's been a bad boy he uh ate one of my airpods little punk so he'll be back have a lift
this would make everybody alive today only 0.008 of all people that will ever live
think about where this leaves you instead of putting you at the end of the chaotic mess
that was our past it would mean you live at the very beginning of something big the
start of the human story rather than the end doesn't it so we should mention here I'm not
sure if he's gonna do it but 100 trillion is a lot so that you know obviously assumes we
reach out beyond our own Planet because Earth has a something called a carrying capacity
the absolute limit uh you know theoretically theoretical limit of uh you know how many
humans you can put on Earth and and it's still sustainable without you know some kind of collapse
whether it's you know runaway greenhouse effect or we just completely run out of resources and that's
you know currently a possibility it's incredibly different and now consider that this may be an
extremely pessimistic estimate if we match the survival time of the most successful mammals then
our future numbers rise to 1.2 quadrillion people that have yet to be born and even this seems far
from our potential as the sun slowly gets hotter and brighter Earth will remain habitable for about
500 million years giving so many more potential people the chance to become actual people
if you're wondering why it won't be habitable anymore is because basically the hot the sun is
getting bigger and hotter uh and it's going to boil our oceans away they will literally
evaporate so you know that's not going to be a very fun place to be without beaches think big
scenario two humans will leave Earth we went from humans worshiping the moon to humans
walking on it so who knows how much further we can go if we don't die out within the next few
hunt ideas that seem outlandish right now become serious considerations if we believe that we have
a chance of survival maybe millions of years then we could expand onto the other planets or
into our own artificial worlds life needs three things a surface resources and energy Imperial
floating in the asteroid and Kuiper belt that we could sustain many times our current population
instead of living on planets We could decide to construct our own artificial worlds and habitats
with resources and energy so abundant we could try out different types of society and ways of
life an interconnected civilization spanning the solar system would create the basis of existence
for an absurd number of individuals orders of magnitude more than if we stick to Earth even
if we only existed for a few million years this future doesn't have to be grim and dark as science
fiction likes to paint it with quadrillions of people waiting to be born we will have billions
of doctors work that was horrific it was like full horror uh but let's not talk about that
we'll get to that in other videos I'm sure but working on curing cancer we're just going to
stick with optimism today optimism billions of problem solvers working on ending poverty and
billions of video game developers making life fun More Humans may actually mean more progress
another upside of leaving Earth and spreading out is that it becomes much
harder for us to become extinct as you need a solar system-wide catastrophe to catch everybody
so aside from nearby supernovae or gamma-ray bursts Humanity would be relatively safe yeah
there's actually far more common things that could happen rather than your garage or a nearby
hypernova or something and we've done this you know that video what what would happen if a star
came near our star system it would be very bad and yeah it could wreak havoc and eject you know
some of the outer planets or Mercury I mean uh so yeah you know that would that would be pretty bad
Extinction maybe for billions at all could fly into our you know our solar system unknowingly
they're pretty hard to see yes if we manage to survive for that long slow Evolution or genetic
engineering might split us into multiple species or we might intentionally keep ourselves the same
as we are now so to account for that we'll just talk about people from now on instead of humans
okay now let's think really big scenario three people leave the solar system
as enormous as the solar system is it is just one star system among billions in the Milky Way
if future people can colonize say 100 billion stars and live there for 10 billion years with
each generating 100 million births per year then we can expect something like a hundred
octillion lives to be lived in the future this is a one with 29 zeros a hundred thousand trillion
trillion we can spend this up as much as we like the Andromeda galaxy will merge with the
Milky Way adding another trillion stars for us to settle red dwarfs stay active for up to a trillion
years at this point we're really contributing to the heat death of the universe that is a lot of
with a lot of future civilizations might even find energy for their habitats around black holes
a sufficiently advanced civilization of our descendants might even try to reach other Galaxy
groups while these numbers are mind-blowing they may underestimate the number of unborn people by
many or videos like this don't they just want to make you live forever like look at all this
stuff we're gonna miss I don't know about you guys but bloody sucks orders of magnitude if we divide
the total energy available in a galaxy by the average energy needs of a single person then we
get a tree decillion potential lives a million trillion trillion trillion potential people
conclusion hopefully what's become evident he's never heard that number we don't kill
ourselves in the next few centuries or Millennia almost all humans that will ever exist will live
in the future which brings us back to us in the present We Exist at a high point in human
history with Incredible possibilities at our grasp technological environmental and societal
what we do matters for all the people who do not exist yet so one it's not on Vogue
to think about humanis's long-term future with optimism or to think about it at all maybe this
has given you a better perspective if we screw up the present so many people may never come to exist
quadrillions of unborn humans are at our Mercy even if we go with fatty conservative estimates
The Unborn are by far the largest group of people and the most disenfranchised somebody who might be
born in a thousand or even a million years deeply depends on us today for their existence this is
why it's important to think about the distant future and why our presence is so crucial why
it matters what we do today one day the last human will be born we don't know when but if we change
our perspective from us living at the end of the human story to us living at the very beginning we
can not only build a wonderful world for us and for them but also for countless numbers of others
Q and A Beautiful video by cozy because that and if if you're feeling sad about
you know not getting to see all of this future that's why you should go read sci-fi or watch
Sci-Fi it allows you to live out you know the future of what could happen but anyway
that'll do for today's video guys I hope you enjoyed make sure you subscribe come
check out calvpn you can use it for free I'll catch you in the next one