Most People Have Never Been 20

good morning it's Tuesday I recently got to wondering when the median human being was born and in researching that question I learned something interesting and surprising but let's start with that hypothetical median person so obviously we don't have like super firm statistics on how many people have ever lived or when they died or any of that but through a mix of population modeling and genetic research our best current guess is that about 117 billion modern humans as we are known have ever lived so I was trying to figure out when did the person in the middle of that 117 billion live the uh I'm bad at math 58.5 billionth person now I probably would have guessed like 1900 1750 something like that because there are way more humans than there used to be I mean fewer humans lived on earth six thousand years ago than currently live in Mexico City seven percent of the people who've ever lived are currently alive so the median human can't be that far removed from us right except no that's wrong at least according to the population reference Bureau the 58.5 billion person probably was born sometime between 10 and 100 CE so about 2 000 years ago that is to say of all the people who've been born most were born and died before the Roman Emperor Nero or the Malian Emperor Mansa Musa they lived and died before the idea of minutes and seconds before guns before the emergence of Christianity and Islam AS Global forces and before potatoes or pineapples were in afro-eurasia this median person almost certainly could not read or write they probably did not believe in one God and if they survived to adulthood which they probably didn't they were probably farmers and probably had many children some of whom almost definitely died now when I was young I was taught that in the old days the old days were never quite defined life expectancy was 30 which I took to mean that the average adult died at 30 and that's not the case at least in Sweden where we have relatively good data if you live to be 10 in the early 1800s your life expectancy was around 46. and in 1841 England if you to be 20 your life expectancy was around 60. it's just that overall life expectancy was brought down to below 30 because child mortality was so high these days one sometimes hears that the only reason life expectancy has gone up is because child mortality has gone down and that's also not the case in 1865 Italy even if you survived childbirth your life expectancy was under 50 today it's well over 70. like it's worth remembering that 200 years ago about a quarter of all humans died of tuberculosis and most of them died under 40. also girls who survived childhood had a very high chance of dying in childbirth in some communities over 10 percent that said child mortality was very very high like in 1800 about 30 percent of people born in France died before the age of 10 but it used to be even higher like in Iron Age France life expectancy wasn't 28 or 30 it was 10 or 12. our best current guesses is that when the median person was born 2 000 years ago half of all people died before the age of 10. child mortality was so high that birth rates were 5 times greater than they are now but the overall population of humans barely increased and this is why the median human was born two thousand years ago not because there were so many people back then but because there were so many people who died young early death wasn't common the way that dying at say 65 is now it was the norm the way dying at 80 is now I mean even last year more people died before the age of five than died between 65 and 69. so it's likely that even today most of the 110 billion humans who've died never saw the age of 20. we can't do anything about historical rates of premature death of course but we can choose to live in a world where fewer people die early I know we can make that choice because we have made it before that's what we're trying to do at pih.org Hank and John and through silly things like pizza Miss which by the way raised over a hundred thirty thousand dollars toward better maternal and child health care in impoverished communities thank you Hank I'll see you on Friday

Channel: vlogbrothers

Views: 1,489,528

Keywords:

Id: 4es9DbDpPq0

Length: 3min 59sec (239 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 11 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/valtism]

That statistic of children having higher morality rates than 65-year-olds is super scary.

[u/noisymime]

One interesting thing is how quickly that median person time is moving with the current population growth.

Whilst it's somewhere between 1CE and 100CE today, if current population growth continues at the predicted rates, by 2050 it will have jumped all the way to somewhere 500CE and 700CE.

[u/middleupperdog]

This is like a thanatophobia adrenaline shot. "Do you regularly experience fear that life is too short and soon you will be obliterated into nothingness? Well did you know most people WERE ALREADY OBLITERATED BY THIS POINT?"

[u/[deleted]]

Is John Green getting enough sleep?

[u/Pixeleyes]

If heaven exists, it is mostly populated by hunter-gatherer children. I wonder what such a civilization would look like after 50,000 years. Heaven does not exist

[u/Slave35]

Wait, you're from Mesopotamia?? Do you know Bob?

[u/dragoonjefy]

It does put things in perspective of how truly lucky most of us are and take for granted daily