• Fondots@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The book is over half a century old now, so the numbers may be a bit off, but this sort of conversation always reminds me of this quote

      “Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth.”

      -Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey

      • raresbears@iusearchlinux.fyi
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        1 year ago

        Kinda reminds me of this

        Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

    • hrimfaxi_work@midwest.social
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      1 year ago

      We’re even older than that! There is compelling evidence that Homo Sapiens has existed for 400k years, and there’s unprovocative evidence that we’ve been around for 250k years or so.

    • TempleSquare@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      More adults are alive now than adults who died.

      Most of humanity didn’t survive to adulthood.

      • Chainweasel@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Which is why the average life expectancy was in the 30s forever. If you made it past childhood you were likely to make it to old age, but the infant mortality rate was through the roof which brought the average down to less than half of what it is today. People regularly lived into their 70s-80s before, but the average of 30 years makes people think that’s all the longer people normally lived.

        • raresbears@iusearchlinux.fyi
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          1 year ago

          Even if you look at monarchs (with relatively good living standards) who died of natural causes, those who make it to their 70s and certainly their 80s are pretty rare. Doesn’t mean the ‘everyone died in their 30s’ thing is true, but I’d say making it to your 50s and maybe 60s would be a more reasonable expectation