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Time is one way to look at it. Another is the number of people that have ever lived. About 7% of the total number of human beings that have ever lived are alive today - and half of the world's total population was born in the last 2,000 years.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/how-many-humans-have-ever-lived/
Then it wasn't history.
History refers to the recording. That's why we have the term prehistoric, which refers to the period before events were recorded.
Bonus: historiography is the study of the record itself
Somewhat related maybe, but I enjoy reading old history books. What did we see as history over history?
And both are important, or you start taking Caesar or Plutarch, worse, the Historia Augusta at face value.
Commander Sikes log: statedate 43742.5; as I woke this morning I thought it would be daring to grab a cup of freshly brewed coffee before I gave my cats their morning feast. I should have known their hunger, they were expressing it like a Klingon chanting for blood wine. I took a sip of coffee and then was greeted by a though head boops and became surrounded. I gave in into these beasts demands and I later was able to escape with my life but my coffee became too cold. I now have learned that serving others before yourself was the lesson at hand.
I hope fulfilling my log will increase the history percentage
And as also said in the article, until massive public education developed during the 19th century, the vast majority of writings come from a tiny elite and its biases.
I guess the short internet era were everyone was writing about everything, before the bots took over, will have been a truly exceptionally wide coverage of people thoughts in writing form that may never happen again.
Most of the internet will disappear as hard drives fail and websites become defunct. Honestly, YouTube is one of the biggest collections of data online and is used as an archive, but it is still a company with servers that can fail and go bankrupt and all that knowledge will just be lost. Maybe a few people will have saved videos, but those too will collect dust unless reuploaded somewhere else, and even then, all tge metadata surrounding the video will be lost.
Most of the internet will disappear as hard drives fail and websites become defunct.
If they are not destroyed, I think future archaeology could be able to recover it. We are also lucky to have some of the ancient texts we have, considering quality writing material was rare, recycled and lost in all kinds of fires, wars, and other disasters.
To not be entirely pessimistic, before the internet there were still plenty of writers who “made it” despite being middle or lower class. Plus with mass media like newspapers and magazines, you definitely got a broader perspective than in literature from centuries prior. But as you say, once bots take over, then the elite control the narrative again.
before the internet there were still plenty of writers who “made it” despite being middle or lower class.
Are you sure this is statistically relevant? I would bet most of those writers had some kind of privilege, rich or/and educated parents.
The bot problem is only going to get worse.
It's written in our DNA.
Museum exhibitions always show these sad stories about how difficult it was for hunters and gatherers to survive, and a lot is based on graves of either rich people or those who were sacrificed and so on, but always dramatically tough and sad.
Our DNA tells a different story. Our abilities to laugh, love, being bored and inventing stuff are not abilities that suddenly occured after we started writing about it.
I'd like to think that their lives were a lot better than what we can imagine from seeing their graves.
Yeah, hobbs was a bullshitter.
Life was grand before agriculture, organized religion, and fossil fuels.
Nice article! So, looks like he's talking about sapiens only, but when you consider that Homo goes back ~2.5Myrs, it's of course far, far less than 3%, and includes a number of human species (all but one extinct, now).
Good catch.
Half of if probably in the past 70 years in the form of digital records that will soon be lost to media rot.
Soon to be replaced by purely made-up AI nonsense no doubt...
Hard drives last like 2-5 years, SSDs can like 6-8, and well stored archive tape lasts about 30
We lose everything digital as soon as we stop spreading it. I used to think future generations would be able to pick through our lives, but no. History is still actively being lost
The Internet isn't going to be a good record, but book repositories are more fireproof at least
I doubt much of the slop will last long, but there is a whole lot of it
I was watching 404 Media's video about AI companies scanning and destroying books, and there were people in the comments saying, "at least the information has been digitized.".
My brother in Christ it's gone. Just cuz it's in the cloud or regurgitated poorly by Claude does not mean it'll exist forever.
How long for a gold record in space?
We will never know of the great peoples of pre-history.
What can drive a person crazy is, think about all that just could be made up.
People could invent entire religions and then fight wars over them.
Uh oh, about that...
Everything is made up, but some do their best with the tools they have to try and make sense of it all. Or at least record their version of what they heard, saw, or experienced.
I’m surprised it’s 3%, that seems like a lot
The title is very misleading. What it means is "for the first 97% of Homo Sapiens' existence, there was no writing", which just states something everyone more or less knows or has a feeling about. It says nothing about how much of what has happened in history has actually been recorded. I mean how would you even measure that? What is 100%? That would mean "all information", so at least the atomic configuration of the whole earth. Even for a single instant, that would need more memory capacity than is available to all data centers combined (and its not a close call, you would need a data center 100+ times the size of earth to store that information)
Unfortunately, I don't document every one of my poop's turds
Naw, just get better compression algorithm bro /s
Even for a single instant, that would need more memory capacity than is available to all data centers combined
Sure, but we only need to know the exact state of all of the mass and energy in the universe at that one point in time and we can extrapolate from there in both directions.
I know this is a joke, but: no you can't. Chaotic dynamics become unpredictable very quickly with minor noise/errors, and quantum effects like e.g. hawking radiation are plenty enough noise to screw up your projections.
Yeah well you know that's just like uhh your opinion, man.
Just imagine how many different ways of being human and ways of organizing communities have existed in that time. The oldest civilizations we know of are just barely detectable anymore. There's no reason why there couldn't be more that have simply been lost to time entirely.
Yeah, well, learning how to write was a big part of that. Also, figuring out how to store archival data in a way that would last/survive the eons has also taken us a very long time
Just drawn pictures on ancient walls can tell a story too.
Don't worry, it was nothing to write home about