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The future of humanity seems insecure. Rapid climate change, political division, our greed and failings make it hard to look at our species with a lot of optimism and so many people think our end is in sight.
人类的未来似乎没有保障。快速的气候变化、政治分歧、我们的贪婪和失败让我们很难乐观看待人类这个物种，许多人认为我们的末日就在眼前。
But humans have always thought they lived in the end times. Every generation assumes they're important enough to witness the apocalypse and then life just goes on.
但人类一直认为他们生活在末日时代。每一代人都认为自己足够重要，可以见证世界末日，然后生活就继续下去。
This is a problem because it leads to short term thinking and prevents us from creating the best world for ourselves and our descendents.
这是一个问题，因为它会导致短期思维，阻止我们为自己和后代创造最好的世界。
What makes this worse is that we may actually BE living at an extremely critical moment in human history.
更糟糕的是，我们可能真的生活在人类历史上一个极其关键的时刻。
To understand why, let us look at the temporal window of humanity and ask: When will the last human be born and how many people will there ever be?
为了理解原因，让我们看看人类的时间窗口，并问：最后一个人类什么时候出生，会有多少人？
These sorts of estimates come with a lot of uncertainties, so please take them with a gigantic grain of salt.
这类估计有很多不确定性，所以请谨慎对待。
To get a sense of how many people there will be, let us see how many have already lived. Modern humans arose some 200 thousand years ago.
为了了解会有多少人，让我们看看已经有多少人活过。现代人类大约在20万年前出现。
They were uniquely good at making tools, telling stories, thinking abstractly, planning and working together in large groups beyond their close family.
他们非常擅长制作工具、讲故事、抽象思维、计划和在亲密家庭以外的大型团体中一起工作。
Still there were not that many of us. Surpluses in food were sparse, survival was hard, life expectancy was low. It took us 150,000 years to grow to a population of 2 million.
但那时人类的数量并不多。食物剩余很少，生存艰难，预期寿命很低。我们花了15万年才发展到200万人口。
Improvements were gradual and eventually led to the agricultural revolution, arguably the biggest change in our history.
进步是渐进的，最终导致了农业革命，可以说是人类历史上最大的变革。
This was when our numbers really started growing. It took ten thousand more years to get to 300 million.
这时我们的人数才真正开始增长。又花了一万年才达到3亿。
But that increase was dwarfed by the industrial revolution. In 1800 there were a billion of us. The human population doubled in just 120 years and then again in fifty.
但与工业革命相比，这一增长微不足道。1800年有10亿人。人类人口在短短120年内翻了一番，然后在50年内再次翻了一番。
Today, we number around 8 billion. In total, over the last two hundred thousand years about 117 billion humans were born and lived, and 109 billion also died.
今天地球人数约为80亿。总的来说，在过去的二十万年里，大约有1170亿人出生和生活，1090亿人也死了。
Which means that about 7% of all humans that ever lived are alive right now. As many as were born in the first 150,000 years of human history.
这意味着约有7%的人类现在还活着。与人类历史上前15万年出生的婴儿数量一样多。
Every minute, 270 babies join the party. But there are not just more people, never before have we been as healthy and well off, or lived longer.
每分钟都有270名婴儿加入人类大家庭。但不仅仅是人口更多，我们从未像现在这样健康富裕，寿命也从未如此长。
With growing living standards our birth rates collapsed. The UN estimates that around the year 2100 we will hit our population peak and there will be 125 million people born each year.
随着生活水平的提高，人类出生率下降了。联合国估计，到2100年左右，人口将达到顶峰，每年将有1.25亿人出生。
It is pretty unlikely that birth rates will stay stable forever, but let's pretend to make our thought experiment simpler.
出生率永远保持稳定的可能性很小，但让我们假装让我们的思想实验更简单。
How many people there will be in the future depends on when our species will die out. And here we find a lot of uncertainties.
未来会有多少人取决于人类这个物种何时灭绝。这里有很多不确定性。
We are able to destroy ourselves through our own inventions – but we are also able to find solutions to avert catastrophic risk.
我们能够通过自己的发明毁灭自己——但我们也能够找到避免灾难性风险的解决方案。
We can change the direction of planet killer asteroids but we've also invented nuclear weapons.
我们可以改变行星杀手小行星的方向，但我们也发明了核武器。
We discovered antibiotics but also carry diseases across the globe in a matter of days.
我们发现了抗生素，但也在几天之内将疾病传播到全球。
Our industrial system gave us an incredible standard of living but also changed the atmosphere in the process.
我们的工业体系为我们带来了令人难以置信的生活水平，但同时也改变了环境。
It is very hard to say if human ingenuity will prolong or shorten our species' lifespan. If things go badly our end could come suddenly.
很难说人类的聪明才智会延长还是缩短人类的寿命。如果情况恶化，人类的末日可能会突然到来。
But if we manage to avoid that, we could conceivably stick around for a long time.
但如果我们可以避免这种情况，我们就可以长期生存下去。
So every day we don't destroy ourselves may mean life for an unfathomable number of humans.
因此，我们每一天不毁灭自己，就意味着无数人类的生命得以延续。
How many people are we talking about? It depends on how far our species is going to expand.
我们谈论的是多少人？这取决于人类的物种将扩张到何种程度。
Scenario 1: Humans will never leave Earth. If we stay on our home planet, a good metric to look at is the extinction rate of animals that we get from the fossil record.
情景1：人类永远不会离开地球。如果我们留在自己的星球上，一个很好的衡量标准就是从化石记录中获得的动物灭绝率。
The average lifespan of mammalian species is in the region of 1 million years, with some surviving up to 10 million years. Our close relative homo erectus survived for about 1.9 million years.
哺乳动物物种的平均寿命约为100万年，有些可以存活长达1000万年。我们的近亲直立人存活了大约190万年。
Let us be conservative and assume that humans will survive for a million years, which leaves us 800,000 more years to dawdle away.
保守一点，假设人类将存活100万年，这样我们还有80万年可以磨合。
Assuming a stable birth rate of 125 million people each year, this means there are roughly 100 trillion humans waiting to be born. 850 times greater than the number of people that have ever lived.
假设每年的稳定出生率为1.25亿人，这意味着大约有100万亿人等待出生。比有史以来的人口数量多850倍。
This would make everybody alive today only 0.008% of all people that will ever live. Think about where this leaves you.
这将使今天活着的所有人只占所有将要活着的人的0.008%。想想这会给你带来什么。
Instead of putting you at the end of the chaotic mess that was our past, it would mean you live at the very beginning of something big.
它不是把你放在过去混乱的尽头，而是意味着你生活在一件大事的开端。
The start of the human story rather than the end. Doesn't this feel incredibly different? And now consider that this may be an extremely pessimistic estimate.
这是人类故事的开始，而不是结束。这感觉难道不完全不同吗？现在想想，这可能是一个极其悲观的估计。
If we match the survival time of the most successful mammals, then our future numbers rise to 1.2 quadrillion people that have yet to be born.
如果我们的存活时间与最成功的哺乳动物相匹配，那么未来尚未出生的人数将上升到1.2万亿。
