h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

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if you think heaven is an actual place up in the sky overseen by some old white guy with a long beard, then i would probably agree - reductio ad absurdem.


there are lots of other ways of understanding heaven though. for instance the concise oxford gives one definition as - coll. something delightful. in which case, in terms of human occupancy, i would have to say woefully underinhabited.

It was just a thought.
Since many sects do not believe in reincarnation...
that would mean that those who are heaven bound might truly need a reservation.

the other reductio ad absurdem i've heard is about reincarnation now compared to when the population was much smaller....where are all the new souls coming from?

actually for me its not absurd, cos we don't know how the whole thing works.

...maybe people are lining up to get a place on earth . are they asking for their money back i wonder?

actually, contrary to popular myth, the worlds population is getting smaller... yes, we are dying out. A fact that is being kept from us (probably by those 12 foot lizards that secretly rule the world...)

The evidence...

How many parents do you have... and how many grandparents... and how many great grandparents... as you can see, the population increases exponentially by a factor of two with each generation you go back... and this applies to everyone... until we get to yourself... on your own...

I tell you, we are doomed... and sooner than you think!!!!!!!!!

i wondered what those 12 foot lizards were doing at the city council the other day...


but it doesn't explain why the cemeteries are not getting any bigger. or does it?

in reply to post 4,

nice one, been going on about this for ages with no avail, as far as I know, half the people that have ever, ever lived on Earth, are alive now..

so work it out for yourselves

There are far less people alive now than have died in the past. It's hard to work out, because you don't know when people started being people, but even with conservative estimates, more than 10 times as many people have died in the past as are still alive now.

To get back to the title of this thread, what is the arguement about heaven being crowded? Nobody has said. All I can see in the first posting is a couple of mice.

Sorry mate your maths just don't hold water...

Ah... but mine do (see post 5), and it is obvious that we're dying out

On the issue of heaven being overvrowded, this does of course presume that heaven has a finite amount of space...

It is your maths that doesn't work out. You're just repeating something you've heard, which is often repeated but is completely untrue.

FieldersFizzle, what it actually proves is that we're all inbred, as it doesn't take all that many generations back before the number of nth-grandparents exceeds the population of the world at that time...

Basically, the chances are that by the time you go back 12 generations several of the "grandparent" lines converge to the same person.

well I guess that explains a lot regarding the state of the human race

Dear Gnomon...

this may be true, but how the population goes from 150 million in 1 ad ( which still seems very high )to over 60 billion in your hypothesis is truly beyond belief

Acording to the Bible, Heaven's ocupants at present comprise of only God and the angels.
Because the rapture has not hapened yet, no-one has been judged and no-one has yet been granted entry.

In reply to ourmanflint's comments, the figures are discussed in a different thread. 60 billion is the total number of people who have already died, not the number of people alive. By 1 AD, the number of people already dead was already 17 billion.

Actually Gnomon those figures are conservative estimates. If your unbelieving friend surf`s the net he will see much larger figures for the number of people who have died since homo sapiens have walked the Earth. I`ve seen figures of 2 thousand billion! Compared with just six billion alive now.

Who Said "...lies, damned lies and statistics"?

If you listen to some on this site, heaven is not crowded because we are all damned to rot in Hell. Ergo, if anywhere is crowded it's Hell.

On the other hand heaven does not exist other than in the minds/collective psyche of those followers of various religions who all exclude each other for not believing in the one true faith.

If St. Peter has any sense he will have the gates welded shut and guard towers manned (angelled?) around the perimeter.

Malus

Here's a nice quote from Terry Pratchett's 'The Last Hero'

'Few religions are definate about the size of Heaven, but on the planet Earth the Book of Revelation (ch. XXI, v.16) gives it as a cube 12 000 furlongs on a side. This is somewhat less than 500 000 000 000 000 000 000 cubic feet. Even allowing that the Heavenly Host and other such essential services take up at least two thirds of this space, this leaves about one million cubic feet of space for every human occupant - assuming that every creature that could be called 'human' is allowed in, and that the human race eventually totals a thousand time the number of humans alive up til now. This is such a generous amount of space that it suggests that room has also been provided for some alien races, or, a happy thought, that pets are allowed.'

That estimate also only accounts for one floor.

*Wondering if there are apartments or condominiums in heaven?*