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submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 66 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The world population has quadrupled in my lifetime, so I would be willing to believe the old bit about “more people are alive now than have ever died.” But it’s bunk. Estimated count of all people ever is 100 billion. There weren’t that many people in the past but our species goes back 50,000 years and that makes it up.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-living-outnumber-dead/

[-] [email protected] 25 points 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

[-] [email protected] 5 points 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.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Whole generations lived and died just to find out which mushrooms can be eaten.

[-] [email protected] 13 points 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.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yes. True. I was trying to be conservative.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

More adults are alive now than adults who died.

Most of humanity didn't survive to adulthood.

[-] [email protected] 14 points 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.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 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

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/03/Life-expectancy-by-age-in-the-UK-1700-to-2013-1536x1022.png

Although your general sentiment is right, even adult life expectancy has gone up dramatically. For instance, for 20 year olds he life expectancy was about 60 in 1850, but now is around 82.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

If the population quadrupled in your lifetime you must be over 100 years old?

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah you’re right it’s more like doubled.

[-] [email protected] 49 points 1 year ago

"The days get shorter in the winter."

Actually winter begins on the shortest day of the year so the days are getting longer in the winter.

[-] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

Plus, I'm pretty sure that days are always about 24 hours long 🙃

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Ok you silly pedant

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Depends a lot on your definition of winter. In Scandinavia, winter is defined as starting December first.

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[-] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

In Shrek 2 Pinocchio is trying to avoid lying by using double negatives. He knows where Shrek is. He says "I don't know where he's not." This is actually a lie (though his nose doesn't grow). If he knew where Shrek was he would know everywhere Shrek isn't. You can't just randomly throw negatives into a sentence and expect it to be a double negative.

Edit: It was Shrek the Third, not Shrek 2.

[-] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago

I guess it depends on if the nose grows with untrue information, or lies.

Because if it's lies all he needs to do is THINK it's the truth and his nose won't grow.

If his nose grows because the information is not true, then this is one hell of a power. You could get him to theorise on the meaning of life.

[-] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

The intent of the scene was clear. He's just trying to say a lot of double negatives and be confusing. It's not a moment of world building for the mechanics of Pinocchio's nose lol

[-] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Pinochio the philosophical scholar.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

So I guess in that case part of the trick is confusing himself.

If he's not sure what he said, it's tough to rule it as a lie.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

That would make an interesting story about a superhero with that power.

[-] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago

I'll have it done by the end of the week

[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago
[-] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

Eskimos have a kabrillion words for snow.

Indigenous Alaskan/north Canadian languages have a few more words for snow than English, but it's not that that much more.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Oh this one for sure.

[-] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

If an object isn't pushed by any force, it'll stop moving. (It'll actually keep moving at the same speed).

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[-] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Earth is flat!

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

The pyramids were already hundreds of years old when the last Woolly Mammoth died.

[-] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

looking here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woolly_mammoth and here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza tells me that the last woolly mammoths died around 4000 years ago and the pyramids of Gizeh were built around 4500 years ago.

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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
104 points (96.4% liked)

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