The BBC has nailed down something I've vaguely wondered since reading in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 that the dead outnumbered the living 30-to-1. Now, the ratio is more like 12-to-1! Some 83.2 billion have lived since the beginning of the species, and about 7 billion of them (us) are alive now.
Next question: how many people have lived/died in the last 100 years? 10 billion, according to the BBC. 200? 500? A disproportionate slice of human history, viewed in terms of hours lived by human beings, has happened quite recently. And as I've suggested before, it's quite right that kids read less of the classics and spend more of their educational time soaking up what's been written and discovered in recent times than they would have done 50 or 100 years ago -- since the percentage of literate people and those who have added to the permanent store of human knowledge or preserved human expression in the past 150 or 100 or 50 years must be many times that of the percentage of people who have lived within those time frames.
Showing posts with label Arthur C. Clarke. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Arthur C. Clarke. Show all posts
Friday, October 28, 2011
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
The weight of (recent) history
Ryan Avent quantifies a thought that's been kicking around in my head in one form or another for decades:
Some version of this reality first struck me when as a teen I read this dictum from Arthur C. Clarke: "Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living." My response (as I remember it, anyway): is that all? After all these millennia? It jibed with some museum display of human population growth expoding in the last few centuries.
Where this came home to me is in education. The sheer volume of discovery, thinking and writing produced in the last two hundred years -- always accelerating across even that span -- justifies because it necessitates the thinning out of students' exposure to the literature and history of the west from ancient times to the near present.
If people do make history, as this democratic view suggests, then two people make twice as much history as one. Since there are almost 7 billion people alive today, it follows that they are making seven times as much history as the 1 billion alive in 1811. The chart below shows a population-weighted history of the past two millennia. By this reckoning, over 28% of all the history made since the birth of Christ was made in the 20th century. [There's more, and a great chart.]
Some version of this reality first struck me when as a teen I read this dictum from Arthur C. Clarke: "Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living." My response (as I remember it, anyway): is that all? After all these millennia? It jibed with some museum display of human population growth expoding in the last few centuries.
Where this came home to me is in education. The sheer volume of discovery, thinking and writing produced in the last two hundred years -- always accelerating across even that span -- justifies because it necessitates the thinning out of students' exposure to the literature and history of the west from ancient times to the near present.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)