Yeah, population sizes overall would have been much smaller in the past, so paleolithic times would probably be comparitively insignificant (even 2000 years ago the entire population was less than 200 million and now it’s 8 billion more than that).

True, but it was also an unfathomably long time, so IIRC it cancels out. Uhh… nope, I remembered wrong. Per OurWorldInData, pre-agricultural people about equal living people in count, meaning about 15% of the total. I’ll cross that out.

I wonder if you could get a very rough statistical estimate of humanity’s downfall just by assuming that we are somewhere in the middle of history

I feel like I’ve seen this done. Yep, it looks like it was a guy named Richard Gott that first wrote about it in the 90’s with respect to population, while the whole concept is called Lindy’s law.

That’s true, I’d expect they’d go to our old ruins and scrapyards for ore rather than natural deposits. It’s way higher grade anyway. And, they’d have aluminum right off the bat!

They probably couldn’t use fossil fuels the same way, which would slow them down, but obviously renewables can work for power. I’d estimate a century or two of additional time to industrialise. For the refining, where they still need to refine, they’d have to slum it with biomass. I wonder if they’d figure out hydrogen refining faster with the different economics.

It’s so, so far between where we are now and dying.

The Inuit survived with primitive tools, no land prey or edible plants and almost no wood in an environment that’s lethal within minutes without protection. We’d have to somehow be in tougher conditions than that even with our technology. Basically, if there’s still flies or earthworms, there will still be some of us clinging to life somewhere.

At worst, fossil fuel-induced climate change might cause large-scale migration away from the equator, maybe mostly in poor regions. In no scenario is the air unbreathable (and if it were, there are ways to adapt to that as well). It’s not even sure to cause a decline in harvests, because many agricultural regions will benefit from hotter temperatures and CO2 fertilisation.

Other animals and whole biomes will probably be fucked. Our quality of life will be degraded. But, there will still be future generations to judge us.

Shoot. Maybe someone’s card is in the right order.

Destroys well-paying jobs has been a major public issue since the mechanical loom was invented in 17whatever. I like mechanical looms. I think there’s varying opinion even on here about which squares are actually bad and which are just whining.

Dating apps and similar with insufficient moderation come to mind, or even ones that effectively paywall dickpics and harassment instead of removing it.

For gender nonconforming people, lots of forms.

Are they making elevators without mechanical fail-safes now?

I will assume that somewhere out there a city council is making this kind of law because they care about human beings.

I have trouble believing anyone in that position hasn’t had it pointed out to them that homeless people don’t choose sleeping on the street because it’s awesome, but because there’s no real option in their specific case.

Maybe in a small town council, I guess.

That’s extra dope. Shit, I should look for safety-rated sunglasses that don’t make people think I’m too homophobic to touch my own ass. They must exist, right?

I stand corrected. It’s less clear which ones definitely need it, exactly. Wikipedia mentions that even Tc-99m generator designs can use low-enriched uranium. You don’t need large quantities in that case, either, since a little radioisotope goes a long way and there’s only so many people that need treatment.

I mean, it is cringe. There’s strong norms about modesty when it comes to intelligence for a reason.

So that comes out to 0.7% of eligible people. Honestly that’s pitiful if it comes with discounts like other people are suggesting. Those meetings must be really obnoxious.

Ha, I just got it. She has no ears. I guess maybe that should have been obvious…

So why is Mata’s capital city called meta?

If you limit it to births to date, it’s going to be mostly Africa again, for a different reason. If you were to stick to a few millenniums back it could be interesting, I guess, because agricultural regions will dominate. I would suspect data for the late Paleolithic isn’t known with any certainty.

Past a century into the future, it becomes basically all assumptions. Humans are a very prosperous species and it seems likely we’ll have descendants on Earth for hundreds of millions of years. Even if we manage to destroy civilisation, any group of survivors could be back up and building cities in a geological instant.

If things stay progressive and prosperous, the natural birth rates are going to collapse because people just don’t bother to reproduce. Are we going to do Brave New World baby factories? If we do, population becomes a matter of policy. Unless people migrate far more than today, which doesn’t seem impossible, in which case you have to make assumptions about where they’ll want to go.

It might be just a map of present population. So, births in the last 85 years, roughly, although migration would noticeable source of error without adjustment for regions like North America.

I’m actually not sure about the “one big touchscreen” idea - it’s seems likely some designer considered it, but even Star Trek TNG PADDs had more than one touch display segment.

Portable radio-type devices have been all over, portable computers as well, and networking radios autonomously together made appearances. Ditto for adding a camera to standard communications devices. I’m not really sure how much of it you need going at once to consider it a smartphone.

Like the guy in the link mentions, what people would choose to do with them and just how often was the hard thing to predict. When someone pops open a version of the internet in Heinlein it’s always to do research. It’s never cat pictures or porn or to post a random picture of themselves and what they’re doing. Usually the computer is part of your spaceship or whatever, not in your pocket, just for that reason.

And then there after things that nobody can even imagine today. Like nobody could imagine a smartphone thirty years ago.

I mean, there’s people who did, going back pretty far. Just not the exact societal impact they would have. The laws of physics have been nearly complete for many decades, so don’t expect a life of true surprises like a person born in 1870 would have experienced.

If you actually read this, OP says there’s little point going anywhere in the solar system other than Earth. There’s barren rocks right here if that’s your thing, and they even come with free oxygen, gravity and radiation shielding. The rest is about interstellar travel.

Lol, isn’t that symbolic.

Funny you asked, because Google just stopped releasing Pixel Device-Specific Code that allows Custom ROMs to be more easily built, requiring Custom ROM developers to reverse-engineer the source code, which takes a lot of time.

Crap. It was inevitable, I guess.

Its like a FPTP Election system, it’s a Duoply. You need a mainstream device for apps to work, either iOS or Android, as long as Google is just slightly more free than Apple, you still would want Android.

It’s a good description description, it’s why I’d definitely choose Android if I had to. The nice thing is that AOSP needs far less support than any third party to function, and isn’t going away overnight.

Yeah, I’m reconsidering now that someone mentioned that. I’m not going to the meets, though, they get bad reviews for exactly this reason.

Edit: Uhh, looks like it’s only the US Mensa? Maybe some of the other Mensa-like things have benefits beyond the “pleasure” of their company, I don’t know.

It’s entirely possible. Actually I suspect Elon might get to Mars and realise it sucks, because he’s nearly alone on a barren planet and Twitter has massive lag.

After the moon, Titan is the only place here that seems worth bothering with a colony on. Hopefully we do (some variant on) sleeper ships at some point, because our sun will only last so long, but if there’s no dumb billionaires to fund it in the future we might just not bother.

Edit: That said, I wish OP made more of a distinction between cost, feasability and present mature technology. We can feasibly live without an atmosphere, but it might not be worth the cost. We can feasibly reach a few percent of lightspeed, but not with conventional rockets. (Other technologies are mentioned in the footnotes, but OP’s grasp of the alternatives seems to be lacking. Fission-electric has working prototypes, we could theoretically make ourselves smaller or more space-hardy, magnetic parachutes to slow down…)

I think the conclusion is justifiable, but the whole thing is a bit sophomoric.

I mean, we already did the moon, and probably will get back before shit gets too crazy to fund it.