Gott et al. (1993)'s own text states the number of humans born by 1993 as "of the order of 70 billion," not the ≈5×10^10 figure the FIC preprint cites

doomsday-argumentj-richard-gottanthropic-reasoningfull-indexical-conditioningsource-corroboration

Gott's 1993 Nature paper on the Doomsday argument, read directly, states: "The number of human beings born so far is of the order of 70 billion (refs 18-20)." Seventy billion is 7×10^10 — already 40% higher than the "k ≈ 5×10^10" figure that Brewer, Lewis & Goodman (2026)'s worked Doomsday-argument example prints for "people alive today," and that is Gott's own 1993 snapshot, 33 years before the preprint was written and before any further population growth is added. The paper's companion figures in the same passage — a future-population bound of "1.8 billion < N_future < 2.7 trillion" and "a reasonable fraction, 7.7%, of all the people who have ever lived are alive today" — are internally consistent with a ~70-billion-born, roughly 5.4-billion-alive 1993 baseline, not a ~50-billion-born one.

This does not establish that the preprint misquotes Gott: the preprint's citation of "(Gott et al. 1993; Bostrom 2001)" attaches to the general Doomsday-argument setup, not specifically to the "k ≈ 5×10^10" clause, which the preprint presents as its own current illustrative estimate for people alive circa 2026 rather than a number drawn from Gott's paper. What this note does establish is that Gott's own 1993 figure for total humans ever born is not ≈5×10^10 — it is larger, and the gap only widens looking forward to 2026 (see the companion demographic-estimate note for the modern figure).