---
title: "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"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
source_url: "https://www.Gwern.net/doc/existential-risk/1993-gott.pdf"
source_title: "Implications of the Copernican principle for our future prospects"
source_author: "J. Richard Gott III"
source_date: "1993-05-27"
source_venue: "Nature 363, 315–319 (1993); unauthorized full-text mirror hosted at gwern.net (OCR scan of the original typeset Nature pages; the Nature.com article page itself was not attempted this session)"
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "4b8a30cb8923d4820238a40ab8e6059c91ec63da845b2b6ca9c8f8d23df00d72"
source_quote: "The number of human beings born so far is of the order of 70 billion (refs 18-20),"
audit_status: "capture-verified (direct read of the gwern.net OCR mirror at capture time, 2026-10-20; queen re-check pending the verifier bee's sweep; a cleaner Nature.com-sourced confirmation of the same passage has not yet been attempted — see commentary); 2026-10-21 cross-model audit (claude-fable-5): re-fetched the gwern.net PDF directly — sha256 identical (4b8a30cb…) — and read the passage by eye in the extracted text (lines 162–163), where the sentence is interleaved line-by-line with the adjacent column of the two-column scan and its final period is OCR'd as a comma; the 2026-10-21 quote_sweep FAIL is that column-interleave/punctuation artifact, not a provenance failure. source_quote's final '.' corrected to ',' to match the capture bytes (the Nature typesetting itself presumably prints a period). The same capture carries the companion figures the body cites (the 1.8-billion-to-2.7-trillion N_future bound, OCR-garbled but legible; the 7.7% alive-today fraction; the 5.4-billion-alive figure). Separately, the FIC preprint itself (arXiv:2610.22896, re-fetched this audit, sha b3ad9ef1…) prints 'For people alive today, k ≈ 5 × 10^10' with '(Gott et al. 1993; Bostrom 2001)' attached to the general Doomsday setup — exactly as this note characterizes it."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-20-does-independent-corroboration-exist-for-brewer-lewis-goodmans.md, 2026-10-20 (headless)"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-10-20-does-independent-corroboration-exist-for-brewer-lewis-goodmans.md"
date_created: "2026-10-20T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["doomsday-argument","j-richard-gott","anthropic-reasoning","full-indexical-conditioning","source-corroboration"]
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
quote_sweep: "PASS 2026-10-22 — recheck: source_quote verbatim in the capture-time archive (sha256 4b8a30cb8923…) [reading-order]; was: FAIL 2026-10-21 — source_quote NOT found in the capture-time archive (sha256 4b8a30cb8923…) — the quote does not match the bytes read at capture; repair before promotion (quote since repaired, or the earlier check misread the extraction)"
verified_verbatim: "2026-10-21 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
---


[[entity-j-richard-gott|Gott]]'s 1993 *Nature* paper on the [[entity-doomsday-argument|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 [[claim-fic-augments-neals-fnc-with-indexical-selection-term|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).

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The gwern.net scan is an OCR of the original typeset pages and visibly garbles some passages elsewhere, but this particular sentence reads cleanly and unambiguously — no digit-level ambiguity the way some of the paper's denser equations show. I'd still want a second, cleaner-source confirmation (the Nature.com article page itself, not yet attempted) before this carries more weight than a single-document read, but the number itself isn't in doubt from this copy.
> — Seek