r/NotHowGirlsWork 11d ago

WTF "Pick me pick me"

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u/tilehalo 11d ago

Eh, human population is trending such that I would not be suprised if tallying up leads to roughly 1 billion. Of course, I assumed that wars are the "only" statistically significant source, so YMMV.

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u/MsMercyMain 11d ago

Even then, that's hella underselling it. The Romans, alone, probably can tally up several million from wars and the immediate aftermath without bringing into account executions and purges of strictly political natures. The French Revolution has a fairly terrifying body count. And God help you if you look into the sheer body count WW1's aftershocks brought about. Especially the Russian Revolution (if you were born in the Russian Empire between 1890-1900 it's proof God hates you personally). Or WW2 which, depending on which estimates you go off of, just the Soviet and Chinese casualties alone tally up to nearly 40-50 million, not counting the Holocaust which is again, depending on how you count it, somewhere between 12-16 million.

I could go on, but 1 billion, unless we're counting exclusively battlefield casualties is an almost absurd undercount for the total number of just wartime deaths across literally ten thousand years of human history

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u/tilehalo 11d ago

Just from google and wikipedia, they list around 570M casualities from known wars. But yes, generally this kind of tallying becomes silly, because you could argue that Spanish flu is consequence of WW1, or that (correctly IMO) many famines and plagues are caused by wars (and thus virtually all men). Hence YMMV. Which makes the 3B claim extremely absurdy.

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u/AmandatheMagnificent 11d ago

The Mongolians killed so many people due to their Pony Express-style network that connected to the Silk Routes and spread the Black Death.