Not to be a pessimist, and I certainly think there are some positive trends in the world, but I question the accuracy and/or relevancy of some of these.
For example, “We are currently in the midst of the most peaceful era in human history”, which you prove by comparing war deaths today to the 1940s. But, umm, the 1940s is when World War 2 was fought, the most destructive war in human history. Of course anything looks good if you compare it to the absolute worst case, but that hardly proves it’s the best. Communist China has more freedom than North Korea, but that doesn’t make China the freest place in the world. Do you have any statistics on how many people died in wars during, say, the 1700s? The 1500s? In ancient times? I doubt anyone has reliable statistics on this going back more than 200 years tops, so I doubt it’s possible to say whether today is more or less peaceful than 1200 BC.
It’s barely worth pointing out that the statistics you cite are wrong. World population in the 1940s was about 2.3 billion. About 25 million died in World War 2, which is over 1000 per 100,000, not 300. World population today is about 6.9 billion, so 1 in 100,000 would be 69,000. Syria’s civil war alone has killed 200,000 in the last few years. The war in Sudan killed 300,000. Rwanda’s civil war in the 1990s killed 900,000. Your numbers are absurdly low, I don’t know where you get them from.
“Humans will create more information in the next few days …” How do you measure “information”? If you’re counting the number of bytes written to hard drives versus the number of letters written on pieces of paper in the past, then even if the statistic is true, so what? This says nothing about the significance or value of the data. “E=mc2” packs a huge amount of insight and scientific advance into 5 characters. Would you seriously say that if I send my kids a text reading “stopping at the grocery store to buy apples”, that because this is 43 characters and Einstein’s equation was only 5 that I produced 8 times as much “information” in the few seconds it took me to type that message as Einstein produced in decades of work? Umm, no. And by the way, are you counting all the information produced in past centuries, or only what has survived to today? Because of course almost all the information produced yesterday is still available, but almost all the information produced in 1000 BC has long since been lost.
Barnorama All Fun In The Barn
Not to be a pessimist, and I certainly think there are some positive trends in the world, but I question the accuracy and/or relevancy of some of these.
For example, “We are currently in the midst of the most peaceful era in human history”, which you prove by comparing war deaths today to the 1940s. But, umm, the 1940s is when World War 2 was fought, the most destructive war in human history. Of course anything looks good if you compare it to the absolute worst case, but that hardly proves it’s the best. Communist China has more freedom than North Korea, but that doesn’t make China the freest place in the world. Do you have any statistics on how many people died in wars during, say, the 1700s? The 1500s? In ancient times? I doubt anyone has reliable statistics on this going back more than 200 years tops, so I doubt it’s possible to say whether today is more or less peaceful than 1200 BC.
It’s barely worth pointing out that the statistics you cite are wrong. World population in the 1940s was about 2.3 billion. About 25 million died in World War 2, which is over 1000 per 100,000, not 300. World population today is about 6.9 billion, so 1 in 100,000 would be 69,000. Syria’s civil war alone has killed 200,000 in the last few years. The war in Sudan killed 300,000. Rwanda’s civil war in the 1990s killed 900,000. Your numbers are absurdly low, I don’t know where you get them from.
“Humans will create more information in the next few days …” How do you measure “information”? If you’re counting the number of bytes written to hard drives versus the number of letters written on pieces of paper in the past, then even if the statistic is true, so what? This says nothing about the significance or value of the data. “E=mc2” packs a huge amount of insight and scientific advance into 5 characters. Would you seriously say that if I send my kids a text reading “stopping at the grocery store to buy apples”, that because this is 43 characters and Einstein’s equation was only 5 that I produced 8 times as much “information” in the few seconds it took me to type that message as Einstein produced in decades of work? Umm, no. And by the way, are you counting all the information produced in past centuries, or only what has survived to today? Because of course almost all the information produced yesterday is still available, but almost all the information produced in 1000 BC has long since been lost.