[obastani]

One thing to keep in mind is that there are way more people alive today than ever before. According to Google, there have been about 108 billion humans alive, and 7.7 of those are alive today. So, your chances of living during the "most exciting period" is better than 7%! In any case, much more likely than any other period in human history.

[cbozeman]

I would like to skip the clock ahead about 500 years, but I'm afraid of arriving in a desolate tomb world.

I feel like it wouldn't be that hard for a person from today, especially someone who keeps up with scientific and technological progress, to quickly get up to speed with the world of 500 years from now... but I might be wrong.

[gryn]

In case of time travel to the future (or the past) what you should be worried about are all the other aspects: the social landscape, language, ...

[cbozeman]

If Michael Crichton's Timeline is to be believed, I should be worried about disease, at least for the past... although there's no reason I couldn't contract COVID-2519 and die...

[maxeonyx]

However, if you expect that in the future the population will keep growing by orders of magnitude, what does that imply?

A) you're just in an unlikely position

B) the population will rapidly shrink and never recover

C) this is the most "interesting" time in history, and there are so many simulations of it by the people of the far future that we are more likely to exist in this time.

[jodrellblank]

B; the argument that if humans are going to take over the galaxy and become a multi-trillion population species and you throw a dart anywhere in the population of all humans who ever lived, chances are the dart would land in the region of most population, and therefore where you live is probably the time of highest population, so we never do become a galaxy-spanning species we only dwindle from here.

And it's a daft argument because if you don't have a soul, you are the product of your environment. You couldn't be born as someone else, or somewhere else, or somewhen else, just like the River Amazon couldn't be on Mars or in Pangaea, because it's defined as "the thing in Brazil, currently". You couldn't be born in the Wild West because you are defined as "the child of your parents" and they weren't there, then. You didn't end up /in/ that meat body, you /are/ that meat body.

(And if you do have a soul, and they are randomly assigned to meat bodies, this argument is still like saying "roll two dice, the most likely combined outcome is a 7, I got two dots and one dot so that must be what 7 is")

[sellyme]

D) This is the most interesting time in history so far, and the correlation with population will hold as population grows.

Although echoing the opinions of many other commenters, I believe the early 20th century probably takes that crown.