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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

"These days" being the last few decades?

No sign that this is not just a temporary stop, in fact the opposite. There were periods of relative peace in world history for longer than that.

In the last 100 years we had 2 world wars, 100s of millions killed, and tons of peripheral wars during the "Cold War".

Besides for a lot of modern history wars didn't involve much of the citizenry (they had mercenary armies). Now civilians are almost fair game. And where they had arrows, spears and swords for most of history, we now have airforces and atomic bombs.

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The world wars aren’t the top wars for percentage of living humans killed, and may not even be the top in terms of absolute numbers of humans killed. For example, the An Lushan Rebellion may have killed 10-15% of all humans alive at the time.

>For example, the An Lushan Rebellion may have killed 10-15% of all humans alive at the time.

Those numbers are highly discredited.

Historians such as Charles Patrick Fitzgerald argue that a claim of 36 million deaths is incompatible with contemporary accounts of the war. They point out that the numbers recorded on the postwar registers reflect not only population loss, but also a breakdown of the census system as well as the removal from the census figures of various classes of untaxed persons, such as those in religious orders, foreigners and merchants. For these reasons, census numbers for the post-rebellion Tang are considered unreliable. Another consideration is the fact that the territory controlled by Tang central authority was diminished by the equivalent of several of the northern provinces, so that something like a quarter of the surviving population were no longer within the area subject to the imperial revenue system.

So, in all, even less that 5%...

Even the low estimate is gigantic. The high estimate for WWII is something like 3-4% of the world population.

What's actually gigantic and not just perceived as such though, also changes with the scale -- since we're talking about percentages.

If the earth had just 200 people, 20 of them killed is 10%, but it's nothing that a small determined fight between two tribes can't easily achieve, without even weapons.

Whereas the 3-4% of the 3 billion during WWII is a much bigger affair -- took tons of bombs, battles, war-caused famines, an extermination program, and even nuclear bombs...

And despite all that, the proportion was lower and the absolute numbers at least comparable. Deaths on an enormous scale, including lots and lots of civilians, isn't anything new to the 20th century.

> There were periods of relative peace in world history for longer than that

That is definitely not what I have read¹. What era are you thinking of?

¹ One quickly googled up article: https://medium.com/future-crunch/the-decline-of-war-8760f9a5...

> That is definitely not what I have read¹. What era are you thinking of?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Romana

From the article: "As the world becomes more interconnected, the powerful have ever more incentives to avoid the catastrophic economic consequences of going to war too. Conflict isn’t good for your economy in a world of dense trade networks and digital flows."

The exact same argument was put forward just before WWI. Then all hell erupted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion

In historical terms the decline is insignificant in duration. It just marks the point from the end of the Cold War, when there remained one sole global superpower (and most of the wars in the last 20+ years, from the Gulf, to Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc are wars where it fought or helped fuel). The article mistakes a decline in war during the end of the Cold War (when a global player emerged) for some long term trend.

Obviously there are more and more signs that this is not to be so -- with other players emerging like China, tension rising in different areas, even neo-fascists coming back into play in various countries governments.

Yes but in the last 100 years we've also added around 6 BILLION new people. 100 million dead is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount thats been added due to advancing technology and culture.

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