They still non-trivially define/demarcate what the population actually is. That is kind of a belief because it is a choice not given by nature, and there are infinitely many choices one could choose.
If you read the article you'll see that they made that assumption because they wanted a conservative estimate of the population and that's the minimum possible number for a successful species.
Surely in that case the ideal number of humans is zero, because then there wouldn't be any human suffering. This is the logic of a mad artificial intelligence from a science fiction movie.
Do some math. According to Wikipedia the population of the USA is 316,856,000. The 0.0001% of the population is 31685 after removing partial human beings caused by mathematical division. If the Forbes 400 list is used as a sample space for the rest of the 0.0001% then the numbers seem plausible. Note that I'm just playing "mathematician" and I haven't analyzed the 400 people in the list or did anything deeply scientific.
Isaac Arthur mentions this several times. But the counter argument is that with advanced civilisations having gigantic populations, it is hard to imagine that a “small” group counting in quadrillions wouldn’t prefer to live in the real world.
Not that I am a mathematician, but I am pretty sure that you can't actually calculate how many 40+ people there are just from these values since you can't assume the distribution is normal.
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