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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

I picked the worst time to have a child.

Then again, I think you could reasonably say that at any point in the past hundred years or so, at least if you were living in America.

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Would you rather have had a child in the 19th century, when job options for your potential child would have been limited to a) difficult farm labor, with long days, low pay, and poor working conditions, or b) difficult factory labor, with long days, low pay, and poor working conditions?

I wouldn't. But the problems of those times seemed to be on a much more human scale. Cholera might get her, or she might die in a mine, or be murdered by a nobleman in a drunken rage. Some of those things I can work to protect her against.

But a supervolcano is an inhuman threat. So is war, regular, nuclear or civil. So is climate change, if we're too late to stop its progress.

In this way, lucky for all of us that large wars are getting less frequent, and the amount of non-combatant casualties continues to drop. The amount of people who died in the american civil war and world war 1 & 2 is staggering compared to the loss of life in most modern conflicts.

Right now is probably the safest time in human history wrt to dying in a war, on average. At least if you look at actual deaths, not potential ones from a nuclear war. Putting numbers to that last is difficult. If we assume the war is not between major powers with large numbers of nuclear weapons (i.e. assume North Korea, not Russia), then the potential death toll is in the millions to tens of millions and the probability is likely in the single digits at most, I would guess... But I welcome sources on good estimates for this.

On the other hand, in the 19th century diseases _would_ get about 1/4 to 1/2 (depending on what country you were in) of your kids before they turned 5. Check out http://www.gapminder.org/tools/#_state_time_value=1800;&mark... for example. And diseases were, at the time, very much an inhuman threat that you couldn't protect against; people didn't even have a very clear understanding of why they happened, much less what to do about it until the _end_ of the 19th century.

Dying in a mine or being murdered by noblemen isn't even a blip compared to dying of good old cholera, measles, typhus, etc, etc.

There was no time in history where it was a better time to have a child. You are attempting to draw distinctions, but you would have merely been worried about some other existential threat in the past, with the only exception being a blissful ignorance.

Natural disasters were always here. Wars and regional conflicts were just as plentiful and more deadly.

I know this is a late reply, but after the 2016 election, I told myself that I wish I was born in the 1920s.

I think a timeline similar to the life of Shirley Temple would be perfect. You'd get to see all sorts of societal and technological advances and then pass away at a ripe old age before things get really bad.

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