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?
The stat I keep in my back pocket is that you can roughly divide the total time lived by humans (the integral of population over time) into three tranches, with one third of human experience being before the dawn of agriculture, and one third being after 1600. (Related fun fact: WWII was about 1% of human experience, based on the back of the envelope that ~50% of the world experienced "being at war" for nearly a decade.)
The distribution of human lives versus years lived by humans will skew earlier, because infant mortality was absurd for the first two tranches, with something like 50% of people dying before the age of five, so it will be more like 40-40-20 over those time periods.
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?
The stat I keep in my back pocket is that you can roughly divide the total time lived by humans (the integral of population over time) into three tranches, with one third of human experience being before the dawn of agriculture, and one third being after 1600. (Related fun fact: WWII was about 1% of human experience, based on the back of the envelope that ~50% of the world experienced "being at war" for nearly a decade.)
The distribution of human lives versus years lived by humans will skew earlier, because infant mortality was absurd for the first two tranches, with something like 50% of people dying before the age of five, so it will be more like 40-40-20 over those time periods.
Something seems off. This source says: https://www.prb.org/news/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-...
before 8000 BCE: ~9.0 billion births, 8% 8000 BCE–1650 CE: ~85.4 billion, 73% after 1650: ~22.6 billion, 19%
Looks also different to OPs website