
You will live for longer than 1% of the entire history of human civilization. - GraffitiTim
The first civilization started in Mesopotamia around 5000 BCE (more or less), which is 7,000 years ago. If you live until age 80, that's more than 1% of the history of civilization.<p>Just throwing it out there for anyone else who'd never thought about it before. Certainly changed my perspective a bit.
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mnemonicsloth
Yes, but there's a catch. The human race has existed for 140,000 years _or so
(edit)_ , but has only been civilized for 7000.

The population of nomadic humans was lower, but there's evidence that they
were much healthier than those who settled down to grow crops full-time.
Agriculture was a win because it allowed for many more people to be born, but
it's not a life for which we're well adapted.

ADDED: If this guy is right, 99% could turn out to be an underestimate or an
overestimate:

[http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_ag...](http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging.html)

~~~
KirinDave
What evidence is that? The average lifespan is on the increase, not the
decrease.

Or are you using some other metric to measure what you call "healthier"?

~~~
mnemonicsloth
There's always wikipedia:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy>

The first subsection is "variation over time". The drop between the
paleolithic and neolithic coincides with the development of agriculture.

This is a pretty contentious issue. The idea that humanity's single most
(evolutionarily) successful technology caused a massive decline in individual
quality of life is pretty disturbing, and some of the evidence is
contradictory. It seems like a debate best left to experts, but I thought it
was worth mentioning.

I still agree with the original post -- we're very lucky to be alive now.

~~~
scw
Check out Jared Diamond's "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human
Race": <http://www.awok.org/worst-mistake/>

~~~
27182818284
I was actually going to point to Jared Diamond as well! In his book The Third
Chimpanzeem Jared writes about the immediate decline of health that followed
the introduction of agriculture. By measuring the health of teeth, and etc we
can see a noticeable drop in the years immediately following agriculture.

Looks like the article you linked to covers the same material.

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patio11
You will also probably outlive three nines of humans historically. A woman at
my church passed away recently, tragically young at 68. (That is about a
decade below the life expectancy of Japanese women of her generation.)

Also, while I generally scoff at scifi, it is entirely possible that we will
make big strides against aging this century. I expect my chilren will grow up
with their grandparents. I expect their grandkids will not even understand the
import of that sentence.

~~~
crcoffey
_My_ grandparents are still alive, and are actually doing quite well.

I'm 19 years old, and I hold a strong hope that they will hold my children in
their time.

I can't explain how much that would mean to me.

~~~
mynameishere
I still have a great-grandmother who is almost 100. It was a very surreal
experience when her daughter died, at about 68 or so, and she hosted the
viewing.

Can you imagine burying your own elderly daughter?

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kingkawn
Longer generations mean we stay mired in the past, and our elders are around
to advocate for the world views of their era in a way that can be good and
bad, my guess that its leans more toward the latter.

Also, considering how much time I waste now, who's to say I won't just take
more resources to complete what I'd have done in a shorter span?

~~~
jodrellblank
The goal of life is to live it, not to go anywhere particular. No matter what
we as a species do or where we go, we're trapped in the universe. There's no
escape, ultimately.

Yet you're arguing that people should hurry up and die so 'we' can move on and
not stay 'mired in the past' and 'wasting time'. What do they matter? Where
are we moving to that's so important?

If we can live until we choose to die or die by accident, feed everyone, keep
the planet in good condition, hit virtually 100% nanomechanical recycling /
construction and have enough resources for people or virtual people to set off
exploring the universe, what else matters? Why do we need everyone to be
young? And we might be able to step usefully close to those things in a
thousand years or so - and if you agree with Kurzweil, 1000 years of progress
will happen in much less than 1000 years. We might even live to see it.

~~~
kingkawn
I didn't say that we should all die young, but instead that aiming
relentlessly to extend the quantity of life misses the qualities that make it
worth living, including hope and the stunning curiosity that comes with youth.

There's beauty that no matter how burdened an individual is by experience,
they will die and the next generation will get to try again, hopefully without
too much of the negative baggage passed on.

~~~
jodrellblank
_instead that aiming relentlessly to extend the quantity of life misses the
qualities that make it worth living, including hope and the stunning curiosity
that comes with youth._

Misses the qualities that make it worth living? Have you checked out what
death is? The only way you can have hope and curiosity is by being alive to
experience them. Prolonging the state of being alive is a much much better way
to address "quality of life" than saying "death is for your own good - you'd
probably be miserable otherwise anyway".

 _There's beauty that no matter how burdened an individual is by experience,
they will die_

I think not, because there is nobody outside "people who are alive" to be
experiencing the alleged beauty. The next generation don't get to try "again",
they get to try ... full stop.

Try what, though? Humanity as a whole isn't trying to do anything. There's no
outsider giving points for space exploration and underwater colonies and
disease eradication. The only point to progress is to progress the lives of
people who _are alive_ , and anything other than that about "the next
generation" is a holdover from the fact that we don't have enough power to
affect big changes in one lifetime but we can argue that they are worth
changing for the next generation. It would be even better, not worse, if we
could be changing things to improve our own lives a hundred years on.

~~~
kingkawn
haha, I'm hardly saying that "you'd be miserable otherwise anyway."

I'm saying that death and birth together, but only together, allow new starts.
Any wild deviations in individuals, be they bad, such as depression, or great,
like genius, end with that individual. We lose some wonderful and some damaged
people, but the steady stream of endings and beginnings permits us to
continuously renew and reassess our values and direction as a society and
species.

Yes, you will not get to live forever, but it also means that human beings are
healthier for having had so much variety of experience.

~~~
jodrellblank
_I'm saying that death and birth together, but only together, allow new
starts_

OK - but why is that desirable?

 _Yes, you will not get to live forever, but it also means that human beings
are healthier for having had so much variety of experience._

What do you mean to say human beings are healthier?

I'd hope the species as a whole is benefitting _a lot_ from the 150,000 people
who die every _day_. How is the species benefitting (in ways that could not
happen without mass unplanned death)?

~~~
kingkawn
I'd hardly say those deaths are unexpected. And planned/unplanned deaths is
another discussion entirely. They're quite normal for the most part, and in
fact significantly lower than the rate of death in most other species.

Human beings benefit because of resource use and culture change. Imagine if we
double the lifespan of the majority of people on earth how insane things would
quickly become.

Or are we only talking about doubling the lifespan of those who can afford it?
In which case wouldn't it be better to focus these research resources into
raising universal quality of life (ie developing malaria drugs), rather than
further raising QoL for the rich in the 1st world?

------
Eliezer
I plan for the entire history of human civilization to be less than 1% of my
lifespan.

~~~
nostrademons
That sounds like an awfully boring existence. What will you do for the
remaining 99% of your uncivilized life?

~~~
sailormoon
Anything he wants? There is a whole universe of things to do. So many books to
read, so much music to listen to, so many things to learn and build and
understand.

I just can't imagine being bored, not in a million lifetimes.

~~~
tybris
Ahum, no civilization: no books, no music, no building.

~~~
iclelland
No, just no new books. Still plenty already written for a few hundred
lifetimes' worth of reading, though.

------
donaldc
And change happened at a much slower pace for most of that 7,000 years. The
21st century is going to be _very_ interesting.

~~~
pbhj
I think we've hit local maximum in civilisation (perhaps we're just beyond the
cusp). If the last century was defined by technological innovation, this one
unfortunately I think will be defined by over-population crises.

If we haven't solved the over-population issues by 2100 then I think the 22nd
Century will be defined by ecological disaster.

I'm not sure if I'm being too pessimistic or not!

~~~
Quarrelsome
Pessimism IMO. Generally brought about through age (older people are generally
more negative about the future) or fears of immigration. I'd bet we can
sustain WAY more people then we have at the moment.

~~~
spoiledtechie
Its not the older people are generally negative about the future.

Its that the more experienced people of ANY organization are generally
negative. The world pop is an organization, but you can put this idea towards
any organization that exists.

------
teeja
More perspective change: according to the 1903 Ladies Home Journal, half of
people then died before they were sixteen. One in a hundred lived to 65.

Something else to mention to people who ignore science.

[http://craigiest.googlepages.com/ThisWonderfulWorldofOurs.pd...](http://craigiest.googlepages.com/ThisWonderfulWorldofOurs.pdf)

------
rjs0
since this is all about the past evolution of the species, let me throw in a
few proposals about the future evolution:

[http://geaugailluminati.wordpress.com/2009/07/01/the-
human-r...](http://geaugailluminati.wordpress.com/2009/07/01/the-human-race-
is-almost-finished/) (and) The Moral Imperative of Our Future Evolution:
<http://www.prometheism.net/moral.html>

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vaksel
more things were invented in the last 100 years, than during the entire world
history combined

note: I'm note sure if that's right or not, but it sounds like it might be

~~~
BearOfNH
There's a most excellent vintage 1980s lecture by Robert Anton Wilson titled
"The Jumping Jesus Phenomenon". The gist of it can be found at the
rawilson.com website as well as elsewhere.

Wilson defines the "jesus" (small j) as the number of scientific facts known
at the time of Jesus. Then he goes on to count how many years it takes to
double that number. By his count, humanity accumulated 2j by about the year
1500. Then 4j by the year 1750, and so on. I forget the exact numbers but the
point of the lecture was that our j-factor was increasing at an ever-
increasing rate. By Wilson's estimation the curve would go vertical sometime
around ... wait for it ... the year 2012.

This reads a lot like Kurzweil's singularity hypothesis (among others) but I'm
not sure who developed the concept first.

~~~
AndrewDucker
It's Terence Mckenna's Timewave theory (from the 1970s).

Kurzweil was following along after a lot of other people.

Vernor Vinge, for instance, came up with the term Technological Singularity in
1993, Teilhard de Chardin had the Omega Point in 1950, etc.

------
Raphael
You're saying this is the end of civilization?

------
quellhorst
I have multiple relatives that are 100+. I wonder what percentage of all
people they have lived longer than.

------
gregwebs
This gets at the root cause of what is wrong in our civilizations today. Most
of our genes were evolved pre-civilization. Civilization itself is just an
experiment. An experiment that hasn't been going all that well if judged by
what has been happening to our planet. There is wisdom from the pre-
civilization days I hope we can tap into while using new technologies to
actually have sustainable civilization.

