I didn't realise how short human history was. Somewhere around 130,000 years ago we were standing upright as we are today. Somewhere around 50,000 years ago we broadly arrived at:
the fully modern capacity for Culture *
That's roughly when we started, "routine use of bone, ivory, and shell to produce formal (standardized) artifacts". Agriculture and humans staying still to grow plants happened at about 10,000BCE (or 12,000 years ago).
Writing started happening around 6600BCE* (8600 or so years ago).
This year is 5777 in the Hebrew calendar. So someone has been counting for roughly that long.
The pyramids are estimated to have been built at around 2600 BCE (4600 years ago)
Somewhere between then and zero by the christian calendar we sorted out a lot of metals and how to use them.
And somewhere between then and now we finished up all the technological advances that lead to present day.
But it's hard to get a feel for that. Those are just some numbers of years. Instead I want to relate that to our lives. And our generations.
12,000 years ago is a good enough point to start paying attention to.
If a human generation is normally between 12* and 35* years. Considering that further back the generations would have been closer to 12 years apart and today they are shifting to being more like 30 years apart (and up to 35 years apart). That means the bounds are:
12,000/12=1,000
12,000/35 = 342
342-1000 generations. That's all we have. In all of humanity. We are SO YOUNG!
(if you take the 8600 year number as a starting point you get a range of 717-242.)
Let's make it personal
I know my grandparents which means I am a not-negligible chance to also know my grandchildren and maybe even more (depending on medical technology). I already have a living niece so I have already experienced 4 generations. Without being unreasonable I can expect to see 5 and dream to see 6, 7 or infinite.
(5/1000)->(7/342) = between a half a percent and two percent of human history. I will have lived through 1/2% - 2% of human generations (ignoring longevity escape for a moment) to date.
Compared to other life numbers:
Days in a year * 100 year = 36,500 days in a 100 year lifespan.
52 weeks *100 = 5200. Or one week of a 100 year lifespan is equivalent to one generation of humans.
12,000 years / 365 days = 32.8 years. Or when you are 32 years old you have lived more days than humans have been collecting artefacts of worth.
8600 years/365 = 23.5 years. Or when you are 24 years old you have lived one day for every year humans have had written records.
Discrete human lives
If you put an olden day discrete human life at 25 years - maybe more, and a modern day discrete life at 90 years and compare those to the numbers above
12,000/25 = 480 discrete human lifetimes
12,000/90=133 discrete human lifetimes
8600/25=344 discrete human lifetimes
8600/90=95 discrete human lifetimes
That's to say the entire of recorded history is only about 350 independent human lives stacked end on end.
Everything we know in history has been done on somewhere less than 480 discrete lifetime runthroughs.
Humanity is so young. And we forget so easily that 500 lifetimes ago we were nothing.
Meta: Thanks billy for hanging out and thinking about the numbers with me. This idea came up on a whim and took a day of thinking about and about an hour to write up
Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/how-long-has-civilisation-been-going/
I agree that there is often more difficulty, but there is no difference in principle from the fact that you might decide to go to the store, but suddenly be overcome by a wave of laziness so that you end up staying home playing video games.
It is a question of being practical. I agree with thinking of probabilities as formalizing degrees of belief, but it is not practical to be constantly saying "there is an 80% chance of such and such," or even thinking about it in this way. Instead, you prefer to say and think, "this is how it is." Roughly you can analyze "decide to believe this" as "decide to start treating this as a fact." So if you decide to believe the global warming theory, you will say things like "global warming is happening." That will not necessarily prevent you from admitting that the probability is 80%, if someone asks you specifically about the probability.
All humans care at least a little about truth, but also about other things. So you cannot divide people up into people who care about what reality actually is and people who care about other things like society's approval -- everyone cares a bit about both. Consequently, if some people say, "we care only about truth, and nothing else," those people are saying something false. So why are they saying it? Most likely, it is precisely because of one of the things they care about other than truth: namely looking impressive. Since I care more about truth than most people, including the people who want to look impressive, I will tell the truth about this: I care about truth, but I also care about other things, and the other things I care about can affect not only my actions, but also my thoughts and beliefs.
If we believe that global warming of exactly +2 C is going to happen within 100 years with 99.9% probability the most reasonable response is to do geoengineering to counteract those +2 C. One of the primary reasons for choosing a different strategy is that there's a lot of uncertainty involved.
If you grant a 20% chance that global warming isn't happening that geoengineering project would have the potential to mess up a lot.
If people in charge follow the epistemology that you propose I think there's a good chance that humanity won't survive this century ... (read more)