You’d be hard-pressed to convince an alien observer that anything demonstrates the success of our species more powerfully than the number of us that are here to represent it.
It took around 300,000 years to populate the planet with 4bn humans — and only 50 years to add another. That 50 years was closely preceded by WWII, the most morbid war in human history, itself barely two decades after an earlier festival of death.
If humanity’s utility function is to maximise total human life, war, it seems, doesn’t get in the way.
Japan lost 3m between 1940 to 1945, to total war, including two nuclear bombs. Yet, from 1940 to 1950, it added 10m to its population. At the height of the longest period of peace in the Pacific, it lost 5m — between 2008 to 2024 — and is predicted to lose a further 20m by 2050.
I recall in early life the forest floor blooming to life with foxgloves after a ravaging fire — its first breath of sunlight after decades in shadow. It seems appropriate, on Good Friday, to ponder the peculiar possibility that we need death to survive. And that those peaceable folks like me that don’t seem to be having babies, might be the ones to fulfil Eliot’s prophecy about the way the world ends.
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