What will happen to SSN#s when the U.S. population eclipses 1 billion people?

We roll onto 300 million people next year, meaning it'll take around 700 million more to start worrying about this problem, figuratively.

But...

The first three numbers indicate the social security office (i.e. what state it originated in). The rest are serial numbers as means of identification. Because of population growth, some states were issued more numbers (i.e. for example, 540-544 is Oregon). Anyways, in the combination of numbers, there are billions of possibilities, not just one billion, so around next century is when it's time to start sweating.

SSN are reusable. Deceased numbers are recorded. After x number of years these numbers can be re-activiated.

In addition Simply substituting an Alpha charater for first or last number would give you another billion files and so forth.

They would probably start recycling old ones? Or switch to a new system... like adding another number to the existing ssn's....

Considering there's roughly 300 million people in the US now, I don't think they;re worried about it anytime soon =)

There are already multiple people with the same social security number. A random number is attached to your name when you register, but other people may also have that number.

wont happen for a very long time. the population of the united states will hit 300 million in october 2006. every one alive will be dead for a long time when that happens.

to get the actual count go to www.census.gov

Social Security wont be around when there are one billion people in the US anyway.

That issue will have to be resolved by the Chinesse after they

get through buying us up

or

Up to the Mexicans as they will have taken us over physically

or

Up to Iran/N.Korea/Syria/Venezuela, etc. after they have

gotten together and desimated our numbers

Or

we have desimated our own numbers by drug use and

other idiocy.

My guess is that we wont need any more numbers.

I think that the gov't will reassign unused numbers and then figure out something else to do. But I figure that the way SSA is going, it won't matter anyway.

I don't think that's exact. You have to consider all possible aleatory combinations of the 9 figures.

I personally don't think the human race will live long enough to figure it out.