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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

The majority of humans have very few natural predators, and to even be exposed to animals like bears, mountain lions and sharks usually requires a bit of effort. (What's going to eat me in a city? Maybe my cat, if I die in my apartment.)

And while there are more people that starve to death that should, and more people who cannot get affordable health care, I would still much rather live in the modern world than head out into the forest and try to survive by myself, or as a subsistence farmer on a manor lord's land.

What animal would you trade places with? For that matter, would you be willing to roll the dice and change places with a random "free" human being living 5,000 years ago?

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How about rolling the dice now and ending up in a backwater of SE Asia or the DRC?

I don't disagree that this is probably the best time to be alive on average, but the standard deviation is pretty enormous, and I would argue that it might not be the best time to be alive in all places.

> How about rolling the dice now and ending up in a backwater of SE Asia or the DRC?

Still statistically better than a random human being in 3,000 BC.

And of course, we don't live in the best possible universe; but on average, a random human's odds of being eaten by a figurative grue monotonically increase as you go backwards in time.

>> ...a random human's odds of being eaten by a figurative grue monotonically increase as you go backwards in time.

Humans don't live alone in the woods--not now, not 5,000 years ago (nor 45,000 years before that). They band together to modify, control, and tame their environment.

Now, you might miss your devices, pastimes, and widespread sanitation...however, from my understanding, humans don't typically worry about malevolent grues.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomically_modern_human#Mode...

A grue doesn't have to be malevolent to kill you. A bobcat that bites your neck is hungry, a mis-step that breaks a knee is careless, a tooth infection that spreads into the blood is indifferent, the blood that pours out of a woman giving birth is just following the laws of pressure and gravity.

> For that matter, would you be willing to roll the dice and change places with a random "free" human being living 5,000 years ago?

We're all priviledged for being literate and having access to the internet.

A more representative what-if would be to choose between trading places with a random person 5000 years ago, or with a random modern person anywhere in the world.

I would rather trade within the modern world, but it's nowhere nearly as sure a thing.

There are more ways to be predated on that do not involve being eaten.

We prey on eachother.

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