About half of people that have ever lived have died
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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Damn, that's interesting!
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Technically if estimates are accurate we are all a four-point-something billion old unbroken chain of reproduction.
You are here
dang, how does it know, that's crazy
They track your phone idiot
How?
Vaccinations
I leave my devices unvaccinated, thanks
I always wanted to see this visualized.
The visualization is strange for this because the hour glass implies that the is a finite number of humans that can live but at the same time it is refilled from the top continously.
What happens in a billion years will it overflow?
Am I the only one with this problem?
Currently our world wide birthrate is trending towards an average of 1.9-2.1 children per woman, which is basically just enough to maintain a stable population. The main reason we exploded in population in the last couple centuries is that our kids stopped dying so frequently, so as people notice that they no longer need to have 15 kids so that 3 of them make it to puberty, they stop having huge families.
Then God will turn it over and it starts going backwards. All the dead people will be born again in reverse order, it's gonna be real weird.
Phew, luckily religion has all the answers.
What happens in a billion years will it overflow?
They’ll just draw it bigger.
We’ll just add a zero to each of the population counts.
“Each grain of sand represents 100 million people …”
Maybe we die out because we failed to take care of the planet.
More like because we failed to take care of ourselves, by taking care of the biosphere we relied on to stay alive.
Well. Human societies have an upper limit on the amount of population they can sustain, determined by their access to natural resources, technology, and social organization.
Malthus got a lot of shit because he came up with his theories exactly when civilization was entering into a period where the advancements in technology were drastically expanding those limits, and because his ideas were instrumentalized by a lot of unsavory types, but he did find a (very incomplete) segment of truth.
Right now, the biggest danger of it all becoming relevant again is the possibility that sustained ecological disaster might dramatically lower our population upper limit without us having the capacity to react fast enough.
Human societies have an upper limit on the amount of population they can sustain, determined by their access to natural resources, technology, and social organization
But that would be represented in this analogy by a limited size on the top half of the hourglass, not the bottom one.
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i think it won't be long before we just blow up the whole hourglass with strategic nukes
That's a good visual
What is considered Human here? Homo Sapiens Sapiens?
Anyway, cool graph
And Neanderthals
Flipping it right now
Kind of makes me think about comparing the very fucking long period of time before agriculture where humans were just monkeying about compared to the shorter period of time afterward with a lot more people and then even the relatively quite fucking short modern period with even so many more people. When you think about the rate of change of human living, for instance, how fast it is now; is that just because there's so many more of us? I mean there's more of us because of things like the agricultural and industrial revolutions, but is it also a bit of a feedback loop? There are perhaps some frightening connotations to that - but to say my actual point, maybe it's appropriate to think about the "amount" of history in human-years rather than just years.
It’s weird because it means the most common human experience ever will soon include xboxes and doordash.
Homo sapiens?
Huh. Didn't think there'd been that many of us already. Neat.
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