Earlier this week The Economist published a story on “quantifying history.” Their analysis concluded that 28% of history in the past two thousand years occurred during the 20th century. Their underlying premise is that ”one person's life is just as much a part of mankind's story as another's” and so the ‘amount of history’ is the number of ‘person years’ that have been lived. If there are twice as many people alive today as there were in 1970 then twice as much history is being created. You can debate the exact assumption, but the idea is one that we at 1000memories profoundly agree with: everyone’s story is a part of history.

What if we used the same methodology as The Economist, but applied it not only to the past 2,011 years but to all of human history? Recently we used a combination of total population and average life span estimates to calculate that 56 billion humans have ever lived. This surprising result revealed that even though humans have been around for 200,000 years an incredible 12% of all people who have ever lived are alive today.

If we take the historic population and life span estimates that we used to calculate the total number of people that have ever lived, we can apply the same methodology as The Economist, to all of human history. Simply multiplying through the population in each era and the life spans gives us the ‘total person years.’ This suggests that 17% of all human history was created in the 20th century, and 5% has been created since the year 2000. While it is amazing to think that the current era is creating history faster than ever before, it is also telling that over the time frames involved the vast, vast majority of human history pre-dates us.

It is interesting to contrast this measurement of how much history we are creating with the amount of history we have collected over time - the photos, stories, videos, recordings that we have of people, places and events in the past. Today Facebook and Twitter record many voices but until very recently history wasn’t this democratic: the stories of a few kings and queens were widely recorded and published and most people’s stories were lost. That’s why we are so excited about offering a place for everyone’s history: a place to digitize all the old photos and documents, to write down all the stories about our personal and family histories, and to record the other 95% of history, forever.