Statistical Death

If you consider it rude to reduce human suffering to cold statistics, you don't have to. Turn away now.

That's how historian/librarian Matthew White introduces his "Source List and Detailed Death Tolls for the Man-made Megadeaths of the Twentieth Century." It's a shocking, scrupulously researched, indispensable information source.

Blogger Sean Carroll, a physicist at the University of Chicago, summarizes White's list in an entry titled "A million is a statistic." He says:

Our emotions simply lack the dynamic range to really appreciate what it means to have over a million people -- the population of Detroit, Michigan -- be killed by their fellow humans.

Here is a list of the human-initiated events of the twentieth century that left over one million people dead. Wars, genocides, and famines are all lumped together, for what it's worth. . . Talking about such a subject is difficult, because it immediately veers off into quibbling about the numbers and pointless comparisons about whose tragedy is worse or more shamefully neglected. All of these events are unique and horrible, and the reason they are worth remembering is to prevent their like from ever happening again.

After listing 24 man-made million-death events, Carroll adds, "I suppose there is some comfort in the fact that the total number of deaths was lower in the second half of the century than in the first. Not much."

We agree. It's not insignificant that we have avoided world war for the last sixty years. Good for us.

But this is no time for feeling complacent. Factors are emerging -- and merging -- that potentially could lead to a new level of geopolitical instability, global war, and many more millions of dead human beings.

Molecular manufacturing, made possible by advanced nanotechnology, is a leading cause for worry in addition to being a source of many potential benefits. How we manage this transformative technology will determine whether the 21st century claims even more lives than the 20th.

By the way, White's "Megadeaths" list is part of his amazing Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century, an online compendium in which it's easy to lose oneself for hours.

Mike Treder

Comments

[Hal Finney]

We've got a ways to go before we catch up to Nature. According to http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat8.htm#Total megascale deaths due to human action account for only 4.5% of total deaths during the 20th century. In other words, Nature is 20 times better than Man at killing humans.

And of course the other side of the coin is that one reason we've been able to kill so many is because there are so many to kill. Not clear whether Nature or Man gets the credit on this one, but the 20th century was by far the most populous in history.

If human deaths are bad, perhaps we will accept that human lives are good. By any scale, the increase in lives is far greater than the increase in deaths. Therefore, human culture, for all its faults, is actually the greatest force for good that exists in the world. We should be proud to be human beings, and members of the current world culture.

[Mike Treder, CRN]

Thanks for making those points, Hal.

It's easy to find fault with the human race for all the harm we have done to ourselves and the biosphere. On the other hand, there are hopeful signs that as a species we are growing and maturing.

Currently I'm reading Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States, 1492-Present." It's unsettling, but also enlightening, to learn more about how cruelly people treated each other in the past, *as a rule, not as an exception.* I see progress in the fact that cruel treatment of others is far less acceptable today: though certainly still practiced, it seems to have become *the exception and not the rule.*

[cdnprodigy]

Made me sick to my stomach to learn of some of the recent massacres I was not previously aware of. I guess that's a good thing... I don't know if the down-trend in mass killings is the result of moral growth. Large pockets of 21st century populations no longer need to kill for sustenance, but this "progress" has occured on the backs of others who still have this need. Modern communications and precision weaponry is undoubtably responsible for some of this trend. But I think the biggie has been the cold-war. Skirmishes have been somewhat avoided for fear of triggering a nuclear holocaust. This is a horrible price to pay in terms of MM. There have been 3 or more events since WWII where the likelyhood of large scale amounts of nukes actually being used has been reliably assessed at over 10%. Combined, all of these events place the odds of a nuclear holocaust at well over 50%. With MM, such a battle would be an extinction level event. All of the risks in 5 decades of large nuke stockpiles would likely occur in 5 months in a MM timeframe. A Hitler, Stalin or Mao with MM, would not see the reach of their tyranny limited by national borders. With MM, we might be able to end nature's tyranny until some large-scale physical boundaries are encountered, but MM presents an enxtinction risk of its own, and enables a whole bunch of analogously dangerous product technologies. (BTW Mike: one of the best books I've read, and I always knew landlords were evil Machavellian beings ;)