Have you ever wondered what it would be like to experience every human life in history? To live as every person who has ever walked the Earth? This fascinating thought experiment is explored in a YouTube video by Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell, entitled “What if you experienced every human life in history?”
Starting from the beginning, the video takes you back roughly 300,000 years ago to Africa, near modern-day Morocco, where you live as one of the planet’s first humans. As you make crude tools, hunt and gather food and materials, you eventually perish, only to be reincarnated as the second human ever to live, then the third, the fourth, and so on. You live the lives of every single human that has ever walked the Earth, strung end to end, these lives last almost 4 trillion years.
Impact of Every Life on Your Future Selves
Each of your lifetimes has a profound impact on your future selves. While you only recall the life you’re currently living, your previous actions affect you nonetheless. Your existence consists mostly of ordinary lives, filled with everyday tasks like eating, laughing, working, and worrying. But each of these lives contributes to shaping who you are and who you will become.
Living Different Lives Across Different Eras
Across your lifetimes, you spend a significant amount of time living as a hunter-gatherer, an agriculturalist, and raising children, to whom you impart a variety of cultural values that influence the trajectory of generations. You live through significant events in history, including invasions, imperialism, and wars.
As time progresses, the average lifespan increases, and Earth’s population grows, you start to spend more time reliving the same action-packed years. Technological advancements change the course of human history, and you live through revolutions in science, wars, and dramatic environmental destruction.
Impact of Today’s Actions on Future Lives
After living over 100 billion lives, you’re finally reborn as the youngest person alive today. Despite living through 300,000 years of human history, your actions have more impact today than 99% of your past lives. High-speed air travel allows you to carry contagions and cures across an ocean in hours. And the internet makes your personal sphere of influence global, allowing you to collaborate with anyone, anywhere, without even leaving your home.
Creating a Better Future for All Lives to Come
In recent lives, you’ve invented tools to rewrite the genes of living organisms, permanently altering their future generations. And in this life, you might create even more technologies that make the world safer, kinder, and more equitable for countless future lives. However, one careless invention could just as easily be catastrophic.
Between nuclear weapons, lab leaks, climate change, and other existential threats, humanity’s risk of inducing our own extinction has never been higher. In this fast-paced, interconnected world, it’s frighteningly easy to undo all of humanity’s progress, or potentially, cut short all your possible futures.
In conclusion, the thought experiment of experiencing every human life in history is truly mind-blowing. It shows that each of our lives is connected, and our actions have far-reaching consequences that extend beyond our current existence. We have the potential to create a better future for all lives to come, and it’s up to us to use that potential wisely.