How long will it take for humans to reach the 3000 elo barrier?

Then my explanation is likely to be correct ;)

One difficulty with the question is the following. 2700chess shows Fischer's maximum rating to be 2789, and there are 20 players who achieved, at some point, higher rating. Of course, we can't say that each of these players at the peak of his FIDE rating was better (in terms of strength) than Fischer at the peak of his FIDE rating. If we assume that this is caused by rating inflation, and if your question is only about FIDE rating, with all its flaws, continued rating inflation, etc., then someone might get to 3000 sooner than we would expect simply because of the flaws with rating system. If we somehow managed to adjust the ratings so that they reflect 'true strength' , then that would be a different question. But it is hard to define true strength or compare true strength of modern players with historic players.

3000 FIDE was actually almost reached by GM Magnus Carlsen in december 2017 (with a rating of 2986). Some other players such as MVL (2948), Hikaru Nakamura (2934) and Sergey Karjakin (2906) have already peaked above 2900. Of course it's blitz but it still means that 3000 is achievable for a human.

Carlsen should pay the 2nd highest rated player to throw as many games as is required for Carlsen to reach 3000. Case closed

@TheKingClash said in #11:
> I mentioned FIDE there. 'but no one has achieved 3000 FIDE yet.' However some people have already got 3000 lichess.
But lichess uses a different rating system, it uses the Glicko-2. And there is no direct formula to convert Glicko-2 to Fide, so 3000 Glicko-2 rating is a whole different thing than 3000 elo. Note that here even many FM's who have a rating around 2350 Fide have 2700 lichess Glicko-2 rating.

@kajalmaya yes, I think you have a good point. But the thing is why does rating inflation even happen? Like if you take an example of Kasparov back then in 1985, his rating wasn't even close to 2800, even though he had played so many rated games. But somehow in 1999, he peaked at 2851, although he didn't play that much better after these 14 years. Maybe just increasing of player pool contributed to this huge inflation, but I'm not so sure. I believe a 2800 strength these days would be around 2725-2750 strength back then.

player-pool theory wins it for me... my question is how will it affect the quality of the chess played?

@Kingscoffee Yes, I'm afraid that the quality of players won't increase, but the ratings will, due to inflation and increase of the player pool. But, by increasing the player pool, ratings can also get deflated. The more players participating in a specific rating method/group, the more accurate ratings get. This can result in inflation as well as deflation of the starting value. So possibly, as players get better and better, ratings of higher rated players can get deflated, as other lets say child prodigies defeat Super GM's and lower their ratings. If that happens, ratings will get deflated, but after a specific time ratings might start inflating again, as the child prodigies, who defeated the Super GM's before, get better and better. And the process will continue.