Everyone Who Ever Lived

Your neighborhood has 18 houses in it, with 9 on each side of the road. All of the people who have ever lived are in this neighborhood, divided evenly into the homes.

The houses are built with the amenities of the era they represent.

Era, you say?

Yes indeed, the concept of time is crucial. Each house holds the same number of people alive today, around 8.1 billion. I’ve used the neighborhood analogy once before—to talk about nations and the nature of privilege, and “winning the uterine lottery.”

This time, we’re in a magical neighborhood that transcends time.

As you walk down your side of the street, you feel a chill down your spine. This isn’t just a journey down a road—it’s a trip back through time.

Every houses represent progressively longer spans of history needed to accumulate that number of people. Each house is a portal to the past, reflecting the lives and innovations of the era it represents.

Our current era, the 21st century, occupies the most recent house on the block—a place where the walls are infused with silicon and the air hums with digital symphonies. This is a house where every surface is a potential screen, and virtual reality is as commonplace as electricity was in the 20th century, marking the digital revolution's zenith. It's the pinnacle of luxury and technology, a jarring contrast to the other 17 houses that represent the past.

In this neighborhood, the disparity is stark. The only house that even comes remotely close—and it’s still a chasm of knowledge and comfort—is 20th Century House, the house next door. This house, a testament to industrial and electronic progress, is wired with the early forms of telecommunications and basic home appliances that laid the groundwork for modern conveniences. This house at least has a primitive version of the internet, and some really slow computers to help them do things. In the 20th century house, walls are lined with the echoes of cultural revolutions, from the roar of the 1920s to the digital dawn of the 1990s, mirroring the century's tumultuous journey.

The further along our side of the road we go, the worse the insides of these houses get. 8.1 billion humans are in each house, and while that’s how many of us are alive today, it took several centuries to add up to so many folks in nearly every previous era, and it took many thousands of years to add up in the earliest ones.

Paleolithic House covers 10,000 years of history. In this abode of early humanity, the rudiments of society took shape amidst the struggle for survival, with the creation of basic tools and the beginnings of communal living. Back when people had it a lot tougher, the infant mortality rate was high, and it took that long to get to 8.1 billion human lives, the same number we have today.

All this is to say that the number of humans alive today is a surprisingly high chunk of all humans who have ever lived, roughly one in 18, and you might even argue that we have compressed thousands of years of lives into mere decades.

What does all this mean?

I used to think about how few humans must be alive today compared to the total number who ever lived. If you had asked me when I was 20 to estimate what percentage were alive today, I might have guessed something like 0.1%.

This conclusion really shaped my worldview, leading to some pretty limited thinking earlier in life. It wasn’t until I had the full scope of anthropological big history in my head that I began to understand how special this time is.

Our house is the only house on the block that is equipped to solve the really big problems the world faces today. It isn’t likely to solve all of them, but it is likely to solve more of them than all of the other houses put together.

Why? Because we have everything we need to innovate, and nobody else does. Consider how much more technological progress came about on the watch of the 8.1 billion humans who lived during the 20th century (give or take). We came up with flight, the automobile, atomic energy and weapons, radios and then televisions in homes, computers capable of beating the best humans alive in chess, and, of course, the internet.

Because of the magical nature of this neighborhood, where time and space are inverted, every house has the benefit of everything they come up with in the older houses. They stand on the shoulders of giant houses.

What this means is that we don’t need to abide by the rules of the past. We don’t need to view the problems of the 20th century as intractable, and we shouldn’t limit our thinking to what we used to think was possible.

This can mean new paradigms in scientific fields like physics or biology, both of which we’re seeing this year, with discoveries made by James Webb Space Telecsope that challenge our understanding of reality, and we’ve already seen the game-changing role that mRNA played in developing a vaccine for a novel virus in hours.

It might also mean a vastly extended lifespan, where 120 years is no longer a “hard stop” for human bodies. We might be able to talk to one another with our minds, and AI might be able to integrate seamlessly into our daily experiences, catching pathogens as they try to enter our bodies, or allowing us to use magic we can’t even envision today.

All I want to get across here is that we should expect the unexpected, and we need to train ourselves to think this way. More is going to change this century than in all previous centuries combined, not only because we have 6.5% of humans who have ever lived alive right now, but because we have access to knowledge and technology that no previous 8.1 billion ever had.

The double-edged nature of these changes means we will need to be on our toes for unthinkable catastrophes we cause, too. This promise and peril is always on my mind.