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Comment by atleastoptimal | Hacker News Reader

Something weird to think about is that it's literally impossible to fully know about every human on earth. 8 billion seconds is 253 years. Even staying 24/7 with a rapid information stream on every single person would only get through less than half in a person's lifetime.

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I'd say it would be impossible to fully know about every human on earth even if there were like 10,000 people total. The human brain has a certain capacity for maintaining relations, and once you cross the size of a small community/village it's basically all the same.

Are you really any more isolated from 8 billion people than you were from 7 billion?

If people keep funneling data into Meta Platforms Inc, they'll soon get there.

For some value of "know".

Maybe we can get ChatGPT to summarize them all into bullet points.

you won the internet today sir

Who wants to read ‘mostly harmless’ 8 billion times though?

Weird? I dunno, I kinda think that's pretty neat.

Weird and neat are not mutually exclusive. In fact, I'd argue they often go hand-in-hand.

Absolutely true, I suppose I just think that in this particular instance I don't identify with seeing or feeling anything "weird" about it.

Another crazy way to think about it: every two years, humanity experiences more time (in terms of “total hours of existence”) than the entire age of the universe, from the Big Bang to now. A universes lifetime of collective experience, every two years.

Which means the sum of all human experience every two years is the equivalent to what some immortal entity born at the dawn of time would have ever experienced. And we can all share it and it’s so cool!

Until the government-mandated microchips at birth, anyway.

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