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wat10000 3 hours ago

How near is near? With ~100 billion people having ever lived, the odds of a randomly selected life falling within the past couple of centuries are not all that high.

riazrizvi 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Okay step away from the waving hands and read the source material.

wat10000 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Could you be a little more specific? https://www.prb.org/news/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-... puts the halfway point at over 2,000 years ago, so you'd expect less than 50% probability of getting a random year that's not BCE. "A random birth is far more likely to fall near the present" is true in relative terms; the timeline on the web site goes back 300,000 years and you're very likely to get something in the past few thousand years, which is pretty near to the present when compared to a third of a million years. The random years it gives me fit into that pretty well, so I guessed that the person I replied to might be using a narrower definition of "anywhere near modern day" than that. Hence why I asked. If I missed something, could you kindly point out what I missed, instead of whatever this is?

2 hours ago | parent [-]
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