3 ms·
On the other hand, there were far fewer people who lived through it. From 3000 BC to 500 BC the global population went from 14 million to 100 million. Today the
by _dain_ 4y ago
On the other hand, there were far fewer people who lived through it. From 3000 BC to 500 BC the global population went from 14 million to 100 million. Today there are just short of 8,000 million people, i.e. 80-570x as many. On the day Ur was founded, there were fewer people living on the entire planet than there are living in some modern cities. So in terms of the number of human stories being told, we are racing past the ancients at hundreds of times the rate. We have far more history per second than they do.
- layer8 4y agoYeah, from a back-of-the-envelope calculation less that 10 million people lived in Ur over those 3300 years, possibly less than 1 million. More people than that live in a single city like New York today, and they arguably have access to a wider variety of experiences than the citizens of Ur had over all of the 3300 years taken together.
- s3000 4y agoThe strange thing is that many backwater towns have more inhabitants than Ur and the sibling cities. And yet, nobody expects significant cultural innovation to be made in those places.