Back in the 1990s, I maintained a "Population of Space" page which showed exactly this. To my knowledge, nothing like it exists anymore, which is a shame. I occasionally think about recreating it, just as soon as the day job leaves me some time...
[Edit: oh cool, there's something kinda like it in the sibling comment! Mine was different, showing a less granular graph wth the population averaged out on a yearly basis. But it also included a table of all missions and notable events affecting trends in the population of space.]
Most number of humans in space is 13 according the graph in the link. You must be looking at second graph, most numbers of Americans in space at a time is 11.
You have to take births and deaths into account, which is not straightforward. Assuming fast interstellar travel, "loss of simultaneity" causes the number of people in space to depend on your reference frame (your speed and location).
1) Literally infinite permutations of entertainment out there.
2) Birth rates have been falling steadily for decades. I don't think it'll be a problem in space unless you think space Catholicism is a thing.
Would be cool when you're old, transfer your consciousness into a satellite/spacecraft and just fly away into space... then you're like "Oh no...." and get sucked into a black hole.
Well, there may be some speed-of-light issues in getting the latest data. But this problem seems pretty solvable if you link to the right government databases, etc.
900B records leaked and broadcasted from the UniverseFax credit agency; now forming a shell around Earth that's 6 light hours wide, and expands at the rate of 600 000 km/s...
It is currently only possible to be in space on the ISS (or in transit to/from there) right? Does anyone know when the last human space mission farther than Low Earth orbit was? And is any country seriously planning another one?
There are plenty of other programs with "planned" missions to the moon and mars. You can question whether or not they'll happen, but you can do that about SpaceX too.
Wow, whenever I am reminded that a human hasn't been on the moon since 1972 it just blows my mind.
I mean.. I guess it's probably easier and cheaper and safer to send a robot, but I would think that at least one nation would decide to flex their muscles in the "yea that's right, we can afford to do this" way. Oh how I dream of such forms of international posturing!
Space exploration had a lot to do with the development of military icbms. Now it has become almost commodity tech for developed countries so the need to show off is far less.
Well its expensive and there are known deleterious effects associated to staying in orbit at zero g. Space exploration is at minimum budget for a while now.
> There may be privately or secretly "launched" people
It's essentially impossible to covertly put or keep anything in space. Getting into space requires expending a rather obvious amount of energy, which there are fleets of satellites from many different nations continually watching out for. Staying in space requires being in full view of, well, nearly 8 billion people. It's not something that anyone is presently doing in secret.
Once there are a myriad of commercial ships zipping around cislunar space, the potential for covert flights to slip through the cracks becomes significantly greater. But for the present Earth-to-LEO regime -- no.
If you're happy to let them starve, then sure, although that would be a rather pointless thing to do. But if satellites were orbiting and then returning to Earth after a few days or weeks, we'd know. And if they were being resupplied by other satellites, we'd know. It's really not that mysterious up there.
right, it's clear that you meant it as a hypothetical example but what does "since then" refer to? We don't know what you mean by "that missing spacex engineer". If I Google that I get nothing:
