![]() In 1790, approximately 18 percent of the American population was enslaved (Bradley 2011 Campbell 2004, 163 Campbell 2010 D. Probably around a third of people in ancient Athens were enslaved. The enslaved population of the city of Rome during the Roman Empire was estimated to be between 25 and 40 percent of the total population. A quarter to a third of the population of some areas of Thailand and Burma were enslaved in the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, respectively. For example, in the second millennium AD, as much as one-third of the population of Korea was enslaved. But the evidence that exists suggests that in many agricultural societies, around 10 to 20 percent of the population was enslaved. Any estimate of the fraction of the population enslaved since then necessarily involves some guesswork. Slavery likely only became widespread after the emergence of sedentary societies following the agricultural revolution. (0.6) Slavery is absent today among what are (erroneously) known in the literature as socially “simple,” highly egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, who are probably most similar to preagricultural human societies (Kelly 2013, Chapter 9). Another fun fact that didn’t make it into the book: You would have spent 6 days and 16 hours on the Moon. For more detail on the numbers given in the initial thought experiment (living through the life of every human being who has ever lived), see the report The scope of human experience, available on here. The true figures, if we had them, would probably be slightly different from what I’ve used here. (0.5) These numbers, which I’ve based on back-of-the-envelope calculations, are meant to be merely illustrative. They should be treated as ballpark estimates. (0.4) These and similar claims are based on combining estimates of the total human population (Kaneda and Haub 2021) and life expectancy at different times (Finch 2010 Galor and Moav 2005 H. (0.3) The best available estimate is 117 billion (Kaneda and Haub 2021). ![]() 2017 personal communication with Marlize Lombard, Chris Stringer, and Mattias Jakobsson, April 26, 2021). While the timing of Homo sapiens’s speciation is sometimes cited as two hundred thousand years ago, expert consensus is now that it occurred three hundred thousand years ago (Galway- Witham and Stringer 2018 Hublin et al. These issues do not alter the upshot of this thought experiment. Moreover, it’s not even clear that “we” should refer only to Homo sapiens: early humans mated with Neanderthals and Denisovans (L. (0.2) The idea of the “first human being” is a bit of poetic license: there is no strict dividing line between Homo sapiens and our forebears. ![]() ![]() A number of commentators have also pointed me to the popular short story “The Egg” by Andy Weir (2009), which has a similar premise. (0.1) This thought experiment comes from Georgia Ray’s “The Funnel of Human Experience” (G. For instance, there is an endnote number 2 in both chapters 1 and 2 – references in this document as (1.2) and (2.2), respectively.
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