When was the most history made? A quantified view. | Hacker News Reader

When was the most history made? A quantified view.

1000memories.com

That graph is bizarre. The variable x-axis causes the peak to appear in the AD 1-1800 section, whereas the rest of the article explains that "the current era is creating history faster than ever before".

A more suitable graph would just be the population of the world.

This is not nearly as interesting as I hoped. Allow me to sum it up for you:

"History" is defined as "person-years lived." Therefore, the more people there are alive (and the longer they live), the more history is being made. There are currently more people alive than ever before at a given time. Therefore, we are currently making the most history.

Mind-blowing, right?

Man, where's the more fine-grained analysis? So disappointing!

by the way, there are theories that everything ancient really occurred not that long ago. if true, the graph may be less steep.

if curious: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_%28Fomenko%29

(i think its bullshit but who knows? :))

Amazing. I was familiar with Fomenko as a mathematician, but I had no idea he was into this stuff. Thanks for the link.

BTW, much of Fomenko's mathematical work is quite accessible -- lots of pretty pictures. Also, whatever one might say about this history stuff, his math is not at all crackpot-ish.

I agree that it reeks of BS, but I had never heard of this. Thanks for the link.

And how do they define "to make history"?

The article defines "making history" as simply existing. That's why they can conclude that disproportionate chunks of history were formed during more recent time periods: human population growth, like that of any other bacteria, is exponential.

It's an interesting perspective. Even if your definition of who "makes history" is more narrow, their results are still accurate if you assume that the history-makers have made up a consistent percentage of the human population throughout history.

Yeah, but then they aren't really saying anything more than was already said with the "12% of the population of mankind is alive today".

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