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Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

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carapace·

> history shows that every single global conflict

Er, not to be pissy, but isn't that a sample size of two?

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It's your right to be pissy. Let's drop the "global" then.

I counted 18 wars with upper deaths range above 1M between 500BC and 1800AC. There were 29 of them after 1800. I didn't bother to sum the casualties. Full list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

There are a lot more people today, too. Of course war death tolls will be larger.

this got me curious as I wasn't sure how much is "a lot more". Turns out the population in the year 0 was 190M so there are 40x more people now [0].

Anyway, according to the previously cited wikipedia article, the Three Kingdoms War, the deadliest ancient conflict, took toll of 40M people. but that happened over 96 years. That's 416k per year and 0.2% of global population at that time.

WW2 caused 14M deaths per year which was "just" 0.07% of global population.

Not sure how accurate these numbers are.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth

Fair enough. It also adds to your point that the earlier wars tended to be a lot longer than the later ones, meaning the intensity of the killing has been increasing, eh?

FWIW I'm usually on the doom-and-gloom side of the argument (benefit vs. hazard of tech).

I think it's the opposite. Though the casualties in earlier large conflicts are numerically smaller than compared to WW1/WW2 etc, as a percentage of the population involved, they're higher, no?

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