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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

Most people have not killed anyone.

(This is probably more true for people alive today than it is for all humans that have ever lived)

It's true that as society progresses it off loads the killing work onto fewer people - executioners, soldiers, drones, etc. These killings are presumably justified by the will of the larger society otherwise these men wouldn't be paid to do this. So a smaller part of the population does an increasing porportion of the killing, but does the overall number of people killed decrease?

Currently, the drones are only supersized RC planes with weapons. Someone still has to pull the trigger.

We are certainly living in the most peaceful period since the start of the 20th century. For example, look what was happening exactly 100 years ago today: http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/firstworldwar/index...

When was the last time there was a battle with thousands of causalities anywhere on earth? War hasn't gone away, but it has definitely declined. Surely it would be better if it were gone completely, but things are moving in the right direction.

> We are certainly living in the most peaceful period since the start of the 20th century.

Well, no. We're living in a period with less frequent very-high-casualty battles than WWI, WWII, and the Chinese Civil War, to be sure, but that's true of all the parts of the 20th century before, between, and after those wars, as well.

Some research shows that we live in an unusually non-violent time period.

"Violence has been in decline over long stretches of time", says Harvard professor Steven Pinker, "and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence"

There are a bunch of nice graphs showing this here:

http://ourworldindata.org/VisualHistoryOf/Violence.html#/tit...

If that's true, I'd mark the start date for such a period at the end of the Cultural Revolution.

List of conflicts with over 1 million deaths:

        1850-1864 Taiping Rebellion: 20 million deaths.
        1914-1918 World War 1: 37 million deaths.
        1917-1922 Russian Civil war: 9 million deaths.
        1928-1936 Chinese Civil War: 2 million deaths
        1937-1945 Second Sino-Japanese War: ~25 million deaths.
        1939-1945 World War 2: 60 million deaths.
        1945-1949 Chinese Civil War: 6 million deaths.
        1950-1953 Korean War: 4 million deaths.
        1966-1971 Chinese Cultural Revolution: 30 million deaths.
        1955-1975 Vietnam War: 3 million deaths.
        1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War: 1 million deaths.
        1998-2003 Second Congo War 1-5 million deaths.

Defining a non-violent period as "a period in which there are no conflicts with more than 1 million deaths",

The previous violent period lasted from 1914 to 1971. The current non-violent period has lasted 54 years since 1971. The previous non-violent period close to this long lasted from 1864 to 1914, which is 50 years.

Sure, as the world population grew, the size of conflicts haven't been growing to match, but in absolute terms I think there is good chance there will be at least several million+ deaths conflicts upcoming in the current century.

Looking at those numbers, I hadn't realised that from the Chinese civil war [1928] to the Korean War [1953], which is nearly a historical continuum, adds up to nearly 100 million deaths.

Your 54 year period since 1971 would account for Japan's lost decade of productivity.

Though I suspect an arithmetic error.

When was the last time there was a battle with thousands of causalities anywhere on earth?

2400 killed, 600 wounded.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Battle_of_Fallujah

Which occurred over roughly two months. Literally millions of soldiers died over the same time span in the world wars, nevermind civilians. That's just in the last century, and it's not even in the same ballpark.

I strongly agree that things are better.

But I think you are underestimating the violence that still exists. Others have mentioned the thousands killed in single battles in the Iraq war, but only slightly less recent is the Second Congo War[1], with over 350,000 direct deaths, and 5.4 million dead from disease and starvation directly caused by the war.

That war officially finished in 2003, but there are still spill-over conflicts (battles started this week to disarm one of the still-active militia).

In terms of proportion of the world population this is (of course) much lower than WW1 or WW2. But it's still a huge number of deaths, and we are mostly unaware of how large it is.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Congo_War

The difference between 1915 and 2015 is that we've improved the industrial scale machinery of killing to a point that it is too powerful. No two top 10 states can really fight each other, because nuclear exchange will ensue and the consequences of that are too unpredictable and high risk to engage in.

So we engage in proxy conflicts in the periphery and kill the hapless inhabitants there. There's no "battles", but lots of death... Mostly of people that are inconsequential to whomever is writing the history.

When was the last time there was a battle with thousands of causalities anywhere on earth?

A few weeks ago, inflicted by Boko Haram, according to Amnesty International:

http://watch.ooduapathfinder.com/watch/?p=10555

Not to mention the thousands of children raped, tortured, sold as sex slaves, crucified, and buried alive in the past few weeks by Islamic State:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/04/isis-crucified-chil...

Someone didn't get the memo about the scheduled peaceful period.

Not directly.

Indirectly, we all kill, all the time.

It's an inevitability of life.

> Indirectly, we all kill, all the time.

How?

Resource deprivation. Competition. For a number of major nations, foreign wars.

For those in any of the member states of the "Coalition of the Willing", the illegal and unjustified war of aggression against Iraq has resulted in as many as 600,000 deaths (Lancet). That's one for every 512 Americans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#Ove...

And that's merely human deaths. If you include animals slaughtered or killed in the name of humans (for food or as a consequence of human activity) it's tremendous.

It's about 35 million cattle.

116 millon pigs.

9 billion chickens.

271 million turkeys.

http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Practical/FactoryFarm/U...

And that's for food production.

If you look at wild birds, the numbers are pretty crazy.

100 - 120 million by hunters.

175 million by power transmission lines.

365 million to 1 billion by windows and buildings.

Again: hundreds of millions to a billion creatures killed by what is effectively static structures.

200 million to 3.7 billion by domestic cats.

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

I'm not condemning this, actually. As I said, it's a fact of life.

But yes, we kill. All the time.

If we are going to discard the contextual meaning from above (people killing people) we should include the billions of yeast I baked alive the other day. And all the microorganisms I'm digesting incidentally.

Yes, I'd include those.

Life inevitably kills and destroys. Eventually itself.

Under the umbrella of "anyone"?

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