I loved the graph of cumulative human lives in this post, and I think it should probably be a much more common way of displaying historical data (it strikes me as closer to what we often want than the common practice of just putting everything on a log scale).
It’s interesting that there were about the same total number of foragers (40 billion people from 3 million years ago to 10,000 BC) as farmers (40 billion from 10,000 BC to the 1800s), and that there have already been almost 20 billion industrials/moderns since 1960. At current birth rates (about 140 million people each year), we will hit 40 billion industrials/moderns by 2160. Maybe that is a good estimate for how long we should imagine the current industrial/modern era to last, before it is superseded by some fundamentally new mode of civilization—perhaps AI, digital people, dystopian collapse, or one of the other scenarios Holden mentions.
I often think of the past as “countless people slaving away for centuries in misery”, and then think “wow, thank god I live in a brief window of technology and prosperity”. But when you weight by cumulative population instead of by time, you can see there is already 1 happy industrial (and more on the way) for every 2 miserable farmers, which makes the whole project of civilization seem a lot more worthwhile than “100 centuries of misery, then 2 centuries of happiness”.
I loved the graph of cumulative human lives in this post, and I think it should probably be a much more common way of displaying historical data (it strikes me as closer to what we often want than the common practice of just putting everything on a log scale).
It’s interesting that there were about the same total number of foragers (40 billion people from 3 million years ago to 10,000 BC) as farmers (40 billion from 10,000 BC to the 1800s), and that there have already been almost 20 billion industrials/moderns since 1960. At current birth rates (about 140 million people each year), we will hit 40 billion industrials/moderns by 2160. Maybe that is a good estimate for how long we should imagine the current industrial/modern era to last, before it is superseded by some fundamentally new mode of civilization—perhaps AI, digital people, dystopian collapse, or one of the other scenarios Holden mentions.
I often think of the past as “countless people slaving away for centuries in misery”, and then think “wow, thank god I live in a brief window of technology and prosperity”. But when you weight by cumulative population instead of by time, you can see there is already 1 happy industrial (and more on the way) for every 2 miserable farmers, which makes the whole project of civilization seem a lot more worthwhile than “100 centuries of misery, then 2 centuries of happiness”.