Hacker News Reader

Comment by alanh | Hacker News Reader

If the number active (alive) Facebook users grows at a sufficient exponential rate, e.g. each new generation has at least 2× the users of the last generation, then the answer would be “never”

Edit: Um, humans do grow in population in an exponential pattern… how long do you think the population has been at 6.8 billion?

View on HN

Well, populations are typically modeled as a sigmoid function, they only appear to be growing exponentially. I think it's fair to assume total population will stabilise whilst we are still resource limited to Earth.

It seems that we are at the inflection point of the sigmoid:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/World-Pop...

Reassuring to see that the UN doesn't predict any large discontinuities in that graph

The last estimate I seem to find on the subject said that the population should level off at 10 billion in 2200. Granted, this is from 1999: http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/sixbillion/six...

Last I checked humans are limited in supply. AI users though...

Currently there are many zero AIs, as far as we know.

Humans do not necessarily reproduce exponentially. Hans Rosling's TED talks feature, as a central theme, that the population can stabilize at 9 billion with the right initiatives and social changes. http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_g...

My post starts with "If". (I imagine the possibility of a singularity and the consequent interstellar expansions and/or virtual entities.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com