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by lenerdenator 454 days ago
Well, is it a few million, or a billion?

It doesn't really say in the article.

2 comments

If the paper is accurate and not falling prey to false assumptions or some other error we are talking about billions. If we just generalize the deviations claimed by the paper out to the entire world there are about another 3-5 billion humans. If the paper is accurate but doesn't generalize to other countries we are still talking about a billion people.
I had the same question.

I thought reading the paper in Nature would give some more insight, but no.

I was looking for at least an estimate of what they thought world population should be, but that doesn't seem to be included in any of the text...

Because estimating the world population wasn't the point of the paper, and extrapolating their results for the whole world wouldn't be very good science. But discussing something that the paper authors didn't discuss makes a good clickbait title. Especially with the title here on HN, which presents the possibility as a certain fact.