EA - The sense of a start by Gavin

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The sense of a start, published by Gavin on September 28, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Some attempts to feel the size of the future: ChronoZoom: [woosh] Will Macaskill: Imagine living, in order of birth, through the life of every human being who has ever lived... Your life lasts for almost four trillion years in total. For a tenth of that time, you’re a hunter-gatherer, and for 60 percent you’re an agriculturalist. You spend a full 20 percent of your life raising children, a further 20 percent farming, and almost 2 percent taking part in religious rituals. For over 1 percent of your life you are afflicted with malaria or smallpox. You spend 1.5 billion years having sex and 250 million giving birth. You drink forty-four trillion cups of coffee. As a colonizer, you invade new lands; as the colonized, you suffer your lands taken from you. You feel the rage of the abuser and the pain of the abused. For about 10 percent of your life you are a slaveholder; for about the same length of time, you are enslaved. But now imagine that you live all future lives, too. Your life, we hope, would be just beginning. Even if humanity lasts only as long as the typical mammalian species (one million years), and even if the world population falls to a tenth of its current size, 99.5 percent of your life would still be ahead of you. On the scale of a typical human life, you in the present would be just five months old. And if humanity survived longer than a typical mammalian species—for the hundreds of millions of years remaining until the earth is no longer habitable, or the tens of trillions remaining until the last stars burn out — your four trillion years of life would be like the first blinking seconds out of the womb. Carl Sagan: If history were a football field, all of human history would occupy an area the size of my hand. Bryan Magee: There are always some human beings who live to be a hundred. More do so today than ever before, but there have always been some... It comes as a shock to realise that the whole of civilisation has occurred within the successive lifetimes of sixty people -- which is the number of friends I squeeze into my living room when I have a drinks party. Twenty people take us back to Jesus, twenty-one to Julius Caesar. Samuel Arbesman: "Me (b. 1981) Harold C. Urey, American chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1893) Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, U.S. Supreme Court justice (b. 1825) William Waldegrave, 1st Baron Radstock, Governor of Newfoundland (b. 1753) George Berkeley, Irish philosopher (b. 1685) King Charles II of England, Scotland and Ireland (b. 1630) Johannes Kepler, German astronomer (b. 1571) Shimazu Takahisa, Japanese samurai and warlord (b. 1514) Donato Bramante, Italian architect (b. 1444) Leonardo Bruni, Italian humanist (b. 1374) Petrarch, Italian poet (b. 1304) Emperor Go-Fukakusa of Japan (b. 1243) Hubert de Burgh, 1st Earl of Kent (b. circa 1160) Eric Jedvardsson, king of Sweden since 1156 (b. c. 1120) Gerard Thom (The Blessed Gerard), founder of the Knights Hospitaller (b. c. 1040) King Duncan I of Scotland (b. 1001)" Andri Snær Magnason: 262 years. That’s the length of time you connect across. You’ll know the people who span this time. Your time is the time of the people you know and love, the time that molds you, and your time is the time of the people you will know and love, the time that you will shape. You can touch 262 years with your bare hands. Your great grandma taught you, you will teach your great granddaughter, you can have a direct impact on the future right up to the year 2186. Sydney Trent: The whipping post. The lynching tree. The wagon wheel. They were the stories of slavery, an inheritance of fear and dread, passed down from father to son. The boy, barely 5, would listen, awed, as his father spoke of life in Virgini...