Because of news and headlines and whatnot, you all may not be aware that the numbers of wars and the numbers of deaths per person from wars is WAY off from the previous 5 CENTURIES.
And that there hasn't been any war between major world powers in over 60 years and this is an extremely unlikely turn of events. Major world powers in a state of war has been normal up until recently.
Kristof / NY Times:
Quote:
“Today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence,” [Steven] Pinker writes, and he describes this decline in violence as possibly “the most important thing that has ever happened in human history.”
He acknowledges: “In a century that began with 9/11, Iraq, and Darfur, the claim that we are living in an unusually peaceful time may strike you as somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene.”
Still, even in a 20th century notorious for world war and genocide, only around 3 percent of humans died from such man-made catastrophes. In contrast, a study of Native-American skeletons from hunter-gather societies found that some 13 percent had died of trauma. And in the 17th century, the Thirty Years’ War reduced Germany’s population by as much as one-third.
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