When to have been born?
July 2009 (index)
A newspaper regularly asks celebrities "If you could have been born in a different century, which would it be?".
All the answers I have seen are in the past, generally talking romantically about being alive in the age of the Romans, Egyptians, the great explorers, Shakespeare, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution or the like.
My answer is a bit different. If you opted for the 19th century or earlier then you'd probably end up with levels of disease and poverty that seem intolerable to anyone in the developed world today.
Health in the past
In 1900 even in Britain, then a leading world power, 1 in 6 infants died before their first birthday. Now it's 1 in 200. In 1900 only 1 in 4 people lived beyond age 70. Now only 1 in 4 die before age 70.
Medicine changed beyond recognition during the 20th century. Aspirin was only developed in 1899, penicillin discovered in 1928. The biggest causes of death in 1900 were pneumonia, influenza and tuberculosis. We got vaccines for all three between 1927 and 1977.
In the UK there's been a lot of misguided panic in the past decade over a doctor's misguided criticism of the combined MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccination. How soon these things are taken for granted: in 1960 none of the three existed. Today blood types and the existence of vitamins are part of a school science course. Yet they were only discoverd in the 20th century.
Only two (modern) lifespans ago the Great Famine in Ireland caused the death of 10% of the population. Nowadays that's inconceivable in the West as food is cheap and plentiful.
Of course there are still parts of the world with poverty and disease. But it affects a much smaller proportion of the world nowadays. Global life expectancy is 66, far higher than Western life expectancy a century ago.
Technology
Go back a century and you'd have to do without television, computers, aeroplanes, the internet, mobile phones, GPS and many things we take for granted.
Even the humble pop-up electric toaster is less than a century old. Nowadays you can buy one for under £5 despite its complexity. The toaster project looks at how hard it would be for one person to carry out all the manufacturing processes involved in making one. Modern communications, technology and specialisation have turned something that didn't exist a century ago into a basic commodity.
Penguins
But here's the clincher for me. People who lived in the 19th century were unlikely to see a penguin. There were no penguins in British zoos before 1913, and no air travel to go and see them.
How far forward?
In answer to the original question, I can't pick the 20th century (it's not a different century), and I wouldn't want to pick the 19th or earlier (for reasons of poverty, disease, lack of access to penguins etc). So for me it has to be the 21st century or later.
It would be easy to pick the 21st as now seems a pretty good time to be alive. Concerns in the popular press about recession and swine flu seem like pretty small beer compared to years gone by.
But what about the 22nd, 23rd, or later centuries? I'd be tempted to back human ingenuity and bet on things continuing to get better, but it's hard to know how things will turn out and prediction is hard (especially about the future). So risk aversion means I plump for the 21st.
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