this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2025
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What time frame does this represent?
Births in 2025 might be majority subsaharan Africa.
It would be really interesting to see chances of being born across all time. Like what is the probability of being born here and now vs. somewhere else in the past or the future.
You would have to make some predictions based on population growth and maybe model a few different possible apocalypses (average species lifetime/meteor probabilities/nuclear doomsday/climate disaster etc.) but it would be a fun model to play with.
~~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.
As longs as climate doesn't change faster than we and our food systems can adapt, scorching heat, unbreathable air and raging storms can end our prosperity in a geological instant too.
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.