[EDIT: Previous version of this post had a major error. Thanks for jeff8765 for pinpointing the error and esrogs in the Eukaryote Writes Blog comments for bringing it to my attention as well. This has been fixed. Also, I wrote FHI when I meant FLI.]

The graph of the human population over time is also a map of human experience. Think of each year as being "amount of human lived experience that happened this year." On the left, we see the approximate dawn of the modern human species in 50,000 BC. On the right, the population exploding in the present day.

It turns out that if you add up all these years, 50% of human experience has happened after 1309 AD. 15% of all experience has been experienced by people who are alive right now.

I call this "the funnel of human experience" - the fact that because of a tiny initial population blossoming out into a huge modern population, more of human experience has happened recently than time would suggest.

50,000 years is a long time, but 8,000,000,000 people is a lot of people.

If you want to expand on this, you can start doing some Fermi estimates. We as a species have spent...

1,650,000,000,000 total "human experience years"

See my dataset linked at the bottom of this post.

7,450,000,000 human years spent having sex

Humans spend 0.45% of our lives having sex. 0.45% * [total human experience years] = 7E9 years

52,000,000,000 years spent drinking coffee

500 billion cups of coffee drunk this year x 15 minutes to drink each cup x 100 years* = 5E10 years

*Coffee consumption has likely been much higher recently than historically, but it does have a long history. I’m estimating about a hundred years of current consumption for total global consumption ever.

1,000,000,000 years spent in labor

110,000,000,000 billion humans ever x ½ women x 12 pregnancies* x 15 hours apiece = 1.1E9 years

*Infant mortality, yo. H/t Ellie and Shaw for this estimate.

417,000,000 years spent worshipping the Greek gods

1000 years* x 10,000,000 people** x 365 days a year x 1 hour a day*** = 4E8 years

*Some googling suggested that people worshipped the Greek/Roman Gods in some capacity from roughly 500 BC to 500 AD.
**There were about 10 million people in Ancient Greece. This probably tapered a lot to the beginning and end of that period, but on the other hand worship must have been more widespread than just Greece, and there have been pagans a

Dave Clifton

Dave Clifton