Most People Have Never Been Adults

Source: Most People Have Never Been Adults, Pursuit of Wonder, 12:39, uploaded 2024-08-14, Watch Later position 791.

Reaching the age of twenty already puts a person beyond the life span of most humans who have ever lived. Pursuit of Wonder opens with this claim and then asks what it means to inherit a world that most of the dead never had time to see.

The population of the dead

The video starts from an estimate of 117 billion modern humans across history. Around 8 billion are alive in 2024, which means that roughly 7% of all humans who have ever existed are alive now. The population grew slowly for most of human history and then rose sharply. Around 1 billion people lived in 1800, about 300 million lived around the year 1 CE, and around 5 million lived in 8,000 BCE. The last figure is close to the present population of Saint Petersburg, Russia.

That scale makes a simple assumption feel reasonable: most humans should have lived in the last two centuries, when the population reached its current size. The video attributes a different estimate to the Population Reference Bureau. More than half of all humans who have ever existed, around 60 billion people, lived before 100 CE. The apparent contradiction comes from counting births across time rather than people alive at one moment. Earlier societies produced many children, yet most of those children died before they could become adults.

Early death and the meaning of life expectancy

The video defines life expectancy as the average number of years a population can expect to live, based on the people alive and the deaths recorded at each age. A low average therefore says little about the age reached by those who survive childhood. A society can have adults who live for decades whilst a large share of children die in their first years.

The source gives two contemporary American examples. In 2020, the mortality rate for American males aged 25 to 34 was 0.221%, which means that around 221 out of 100,000 died in that year. For newborn American males under one year old, the rate was 0.57%. The comparison shows why infant deaths pull a population’s average life expectancy down so sharply.

The historical figures are much harsher. The video draws on Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens for an account of agricultural settlements, where disease, cereal-based diets, and competition between siblings helped push child mortality upwards. It then cites the Human Mortality Database for two examples. In Bavaria in 1750, about half of all children died before reaching fifteen. In Roman Egypt around the year 1 CE, nearly 60% died before that age. Early death formed the ordinary structure of life in these societies.

Birth rates were high under those conditions. The video gives five to seven children per woman in Bavaria in 1750 and one to two in present-day Germany. It places the pre-modern norm at roughly 4.5 to 7 children per woman. High birth rates still produced little population growth because the deaths kept pace with the births. Billions of people therefore lived in the distant past for a short time, leaving behind a large count of human lives that never reached adulthood.

The source puts the current child mortality rate for people aged fifteen and under at around 4% globally and repeats an average life expectancy of about 73 years. Most newborns now survive infancy and childhood, and many people reach their seventies. The video treats the fifty or sixty additional years that this gives most people as a historically rare condition. Adulthood feels like a standard part of life because it surrounds us. Across human history, early death was far more common.

Adulthood as a historical exception

The video uses this history to measure the strangeness of ordinary modern life. Half of all humans who have ever existed probably never knew mechanical clocks, toilet paper, eyeglasses, the printing press, electricity, cars, planes, or touch screens. Many probably could not read or write. Most had little choice about where they lived or what work they did, since farming usually followed the place of birth. The largest absence remains the experience of age itself: most people who ever lived never felt what it meant to be twenty, let alone thirty or fifty.

The point carries a moral pressure. A person alive now receives access to a long chain of inventions that earlier people could not have imagined. The video calls this a wonder beyond comprehension, though it keeps the achievement tied to human labour rather than divine intervention. Humanity made the world that now seems ordinary, and people living inside it can criticise or waste what they inherited without noticing how unusual their position is.

The source makes the point through a thirty-something traveller on a plane. This person can watch a film or read a book whilst understanding something about gravity, the sun, and the places below the aircraft. A credit card and a health insurance card in the same pocket can pay for treatment for a serious but manageable illness. The example gathers together modern transport, mass knowledge, finance, and medicine in one unremarkable scene. Its force comes from the fact that the scene feels unremarkable.

Human invention and its costs

The video returns to the objects that make this life possible: minute-by-minute clocks, soft toilet paper, glasses, playing cards, mass-produced books, pianos, lights, fizzy drinks, cars, planes, rockets, and a shared understanding of space. People made these things from the material of the Earth and from accumulated knowledge. The source describes human beings waking into given conditions and deciding to build different ones.

That account includes its own limit. Human invention produces destruction alongside comfort. Humanity can damage the world and itself with the same capacity that produced longer lives, wider knowledge, and better treatment for disease. The video therefore wishes for a future in which innovation brings the wisdom to sustain the lives it has extended. Long life alone does not answer the question of what a good life should contain.

The closing movement borrows another claim from Harari. After reducing death from starvation, disease, and violence, humanity may aim at immortality, happiness, and divinity. These ambitions follow a sequence in which survival gives way to the attempt to overcome ageing, remove misery, and raise human beings above the limits of animal life. The video presents that future as a direction of travel rather than a settled achievement. Its own measure remains the present: reaching adulthood, living into old age, and seeing the work of many earlier lives are already rare historical privileges.

Evidence limits

This note follows the complete authored English caption track and the video’s description. The video names the Population Reference Bureau, the Human Mortality Database, and Harari’s Sapiens, yet it gives no direct links, tables, editions, or methods for checking the reported figures. The estimates for the number of humans ever born, historical population sizes, mortality rates, and the relationship between those figures therefore remain claims made by the source here.

The video’s description contains an Opera sponsorship, links to the creator’s books, newsletter, social accounts, and Patreon. It offers no further academic references. The sponsorship and closing call to action are excluded from this reconstruction.

Further reading / references

• Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens, named in the video’s discussion of agricultural societies and humanity’s future ambitions. The video gives no edition or link.
• Population Reference Bureau, named for the estimate of humans who lived before 100 CE. The video gives no report or link.
• Human Mortality Database, named for the historical child-mortality figures from Bavaria and Roman Egypt. The video gives no table or link.