“Lately I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end,” Tony Soprano tells his therapist at their first session, and it’s natural to feel the same about your place in human history: that these are the twilight years. Hundreds of millennia of human activity stretch back behind us – the stone age and the bronze age and the iron age, the ancient world, the middle ages and onwards, culminating in today – whereas our mental image of our species’ future tends either to be hazy or, in the event of an extinction-level catastrophe, terrifyingly short.
But there is another way to see things. Even if the world population were to fall by 90%, and if humans survive no longer than the average mammalian species, a million years in total, then 99.5% of all human experience has yet to be lived. If we can dodge the aforementioned catastrophe – a big “if”, obviously – then a staggeringly huge proportion of humanity’s time on Earth is almost certainly yet to come.
