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Comment by Daishiman | Hacker News Reader

The entirety of human civilization existed for all but the last 200 years without combustion engines.

But most humans by far have existed in the last 200 years. The current mean birth age of all humans ever (50% humans born before & 50% born after) is probably only like 1950 at the oldest.

Why is that a good thing? Humans, their livestock, and their crops have grown to dominate much of the land. That reduces biodiversity and makes for a less resilient ecosystem overall.

At the risk of sounding like a movie villain... anyone who's tried to go to Yosemite on a weekend must agree with this on some level

That's not really relevant but also not true. A reasonable estimate is that ~105 billion modern homo sapiens have ever lived[1], the inflection point you're talking about (50% humans born before & 50% born after) probably happened closer to 200-300CE[2]

[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12288594/ [2]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-are-the-demographi...

Hmm interesting. Would the number of human-years or human-hours lived be different? Perhaps looking at population/exponential graphs is giving me a false intuition because the birth & growth rates were much higher in the past but the overall growth rate stayed the same.

It is relevant if you think that the individual unit of human civilization is a single person.

And? I think human civilization is a lot more impressive now than 200 years ago.

Yeah, early humans were only capable of extincting megafauna. Today, we're doing dozens of species per day! We'd be much more impressive as a species if we didn't limit the use of DDT, CFCs, etc

Crazy to think that in the life span of this planet is ??? Before christ? After christ? A million years or two?

Exactly, no one knows the answer....

We can't agree as a civilization when this planet started, but everyone knows when it's going to end.... irony is thick around these parts...

"One thing I know, I know nothing."

Weird troll. You don't need to know what day a person was born, to recognize that they've got a dangerously high fever.

The world will keep turning, regardless of fitness for human life.

That's a pretty bad metric for success.

Agreed, I'm playing with the neutrality of the word "impressive." A tsunami is certainly impressive...

Modern humans are more impressive than our ancestors, according to you. Is that good, or are we a tsunami?

Well, in the very least our language AI bots can probably create better wordplay than this train wreck. Not especially impressive though.

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