Modern demographic compilations put total humans ever born at roughly double the FIC preprint's informal "k≈5×10^10 for people alive today" figure

doomsday-argumentdemographyanthropic-reasoningfull-indexical-conditioningsource-corroboration

The Population Reference Bureau's most recent published update of its long-running "how many people have ever lived" estimate — authored by demographers Toshiko Kaneda and Carl Haub, dated 2022-11-15 — states: "About 117 billion members of our species have ever been born on Earth." PRB's own benchmark table backs this with intermediate figures of 113,966,170,055 by the year 2000 and 115,330,173,460 by 2010, plus a 2050 projection of roughly 120.8 billion. None of these benchmarks is close to 5×10^10 (50 billion); the 2022 figure alone is more than double it, and even the year-2000 benchmark is already more than double.

This bears on Brewer, Lewis & Goodman (2026)'s Full Indexical Conditioning preprint, whose worked Doomsday argument example gives "k ≈ 5×10^10" as the birth-rank of a person alive today. Whatever that figure is meant to represent, it sits well below both this current demographic estimate and Gott's own 1993 "order of 70 billion" snapshot from 33 years earlier (see claim-gott-1993-states-order-of-70-billion-humans-born-not-5e10). This note does not trace the preprint's figure to any specific source — the preprint's own text attaches no citation to that particular clause — so no claim is made here about where "5×10^10" originated, only that it undershoots every demographic estimate checked.