OK, now that is significant. There are clear almost-linear regimes in that graph, but there are different regimes, with different slopes, and we can start to talk about what caused those changes of slope.
This isn’t the coolest thread I have seen in a long time. Lots of new things to study.
Haven’t read the Nature paper yet but I wonder if the third inflection, just before the plague label is the Justinian Plague and 536/540 volcanic events?
I think it’s pretty clear:
#1: Agriculture spreads
#2: Industrial/scientific revolution (including sanitation, medicine, etc)
You might even divide #2 into 2a (industrial revolution) and 2b (era of modern medicine)
That accounts for two of the places where the slope changes. By my count, there are still five more.
Such as between 600 and 400 BC? That is very steep compared to what went before. A timeline of the empires that were expanding:
I know. It’s not about doing the math, really. It’s just… all that time. All those stories. All the wars, and all the blood spilt. All the misery. And all the happiness! All the love and all the victories. All those empires coming and going. It seems to go on and on. Oh, the humanity! But then there’s just fifteen ghosts standing behind each of us?
That makes my head hurt, and as I said, it’s not because of the math. There’s either too many of us, or too few of them. It’s like watching an enormous battle scene, then pulling away the curtain, and there’s only five dudes with puppets and some CGI trickery. I need a drink. Although I probably shouldn’t have one, because I feel like I have vertigo now. This screws with my sense of balance. I think I’ll go hide under the bed or something.
Sorry. I’ll be fine, just give me a moment. Carry on.
So if there are 15 ghosts behind me as noted just above, when was the most recent one formed. How far back does the current 7 billion alive need to stretch to outnumber the most recent 7 billion dead? And the next previous 7 billion was?
I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations based on the numbers here:
Very approximately, blocks of 7 billion deaths takes us back to:
1920
1750
1300
500
1000 BCE
5000 BCE
After that, we’re going way back, tens of thousands of years for the next one; and then we’re down to population levels where it would take hundreds of thousands of years for 7 billion deaths to occur.
BTW, on this, lest anyone get any ideas: I should note that this rather wonderful phrasing and evocative image didn’t come from me, it was Arthur C Clarke by way of the BBC article linked above. I thought it had been quoted directly in the thread already, but it hadn’t.
I’m not suddenly a poet, I’m still just a random schlub. In case anyone was wondering.