A thousand pages of history

Writer/illustrator Tim Urban prompts us to imagine all of human history, written as a 1,000-page book.

Each page represents 250 years.

And mostly, it is the most boring book ever written.

It’s page after page of hunting and gathering and occasional human migration. One would surely stop reading after eight or nine hundred pages of the same basic story.

Then, agriculture is developed. And writing.

But not until page 990 do we read about Buddha. Jesus on 993. Shakespeare on 998.

And then there’s page 1,000. When compared to all the other pages, it seems like it’s from an entirely different book. On page 1,000 we first see things like indoor plumbing. And electricity. And mass production. And vaccines. Cars, planes, and spaceships. Weapons of mass destruction. Computers, the internet, and artificial intelligence.

For 999 pages, there’s less than a billion people on the planet. Turn the page and it’s eight billion.

To say that we live in unprecedented times is not enough. We live in a fractional slice of human history that is unlike any other. And mostly, we’re too close to it to even see it.