Most people are alive right now. The population historically has been much lower, so odds are you would be born around the time high technology would support a high population.
> So what are the figures? There are currently seven billion people alive today and the Population Reference Bureau estimates that about 107 billion people have ever lived.
> This means that we are nowhere near close to having more alive than dead. In fact, there are 15 dead people for every person living.
So it is not wildly impossible that you’d be alive now, but it is fairly unlikely.
Also, hard to say what’s in the future of course, but even if population growth levels off, you’d expect to be born in the future, right? Which brings up another question, why not?
If we are going to go along on the fully ridiculous implications here and reinterpret all probabilities as conditioned on your immortality, why weren’t you born in the far future? I’d expect people born in the future to have easier access to immortality.
Maybe birth rates will go way down if we discover immortality (lowering your odds of being born later). Or maybe pre-immortality minds will be seen as more interesting and worth preserving (increasing your odds of being kept around).
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16870579
> So what are the figures? There are currently seven billion people alive today and the Population Reference Bureau estimates that about 107 billion people have ever lived.
> This means that we are nowhere near close to having more alive than dead. In fact, there are 15 dead people for every person living.
So it is not wildly impossible that you’d be alive now, but it is fairly unlikely.
Also, hard to say what’s in the future of course, but even if population growth levels off, you’d expect to be born in the future, right? Which brings up another question, why not?
If we are going to go along on the fully ridiculous implications here and reinterpret all probabilities as conditioned on your immortality, why weren’t you born in the far future? I’d expect people born in the future to have easier access to immortality.
Maybe birth rates will go way down if we discover immortality (lowering your odds of being born later). Or maybe pre-immortality minds will be seen as more interesting and worth preserving (increasing your odds of being kept around).